There was a brouhaha over a funding decision by the Democratic Attorneys General Association, and I commented on it at New York:

A major part of the vast ideological “sorting out” of the two major parties that’s been underway since the 1960s has been about abortion. Democrats have become the party of abortion rights while Republicans have become the party that wants to re-criminalize abortion (or at least let states do so). There has always been a rump faction of anti-abortion Democratic and pro-choice Republican politicians, supported by a significant percentage of the rank and file, but both numbers have been shrinking for decades.

While there is occasional agonizing in both parties over steps taken, or not taken, to accommodate the abortion policy minority, Republicans seem to worry less about it less than Democrats, who are constantly being accused, or are accusing themselves, of betraying “big tent” principles by being intolerant toward those who would deny women reproductive rights. There’s been a new explosion of fretting this week as a fundraising committee for Democratic attorney general candidates has announced it will only contribute to those who commit to a pro-choice position. The New York Times wrote this up as yet another sign of Democratic “extremism”:

“An association of Democratic state attorneys general will become the first national party committee to impose an explicit abortion litmus test on its candidates, announcing on Monday that it will refuse to endorse anyone who does not support reproductive rights and expanding access to abortion services.

“To win financial and strategic backing from the group, candidates will be required to make a public statement declaring their support of abortion rights. The group, the Democratic Attorneys General Association, recruits candidates and helps their campaigns with financial support, data analysis, messaging and policy positions …

“[O]fficials believe it could have a ripple effect through the Democratic ecosystem, reflecting the changing mores of a national party that has moved sharply to the left in the Trump era and embraced a set of purity tests on divisive social issues.”

That characterization, which pairs the heavily loaded term “purity test” with a claim that the party has shifted in the “Trump era” is at best very misleading. The National Democratic Party has been committed to reproductive rights for at least a quarter-century, and if there’s been any “move,” it would be the deletion of the old Clintonian formula of making abortion “safe, legal and rare” from the party platform. That happened in 2012, well before anyone on the planet imagined Donald Trump might become president. And even that change in messaging had no real impact on Democratic policy.

So why is the Democratic Attorneys General Association making this move? Perhaps they expect that taking a more forthright position will help them raise money from abortion-rights advocates, as it should. But there are two changes in context that indicated a change in positioning.

The huge wave of Republican-generated state legislation restricting access to abortion that has been building since the 2010 GOP landslide, and that has accelerated since Trump’s election and his efforts to reshape the federal courts, has placed state attorneys general on the front lines of the fight for reproductive rights. And while states vary in how much leeway AGs have to resist or at least refuse to defend legislative abortion restrictions, having sympathetic figures in these positions can make a big difference on the margins, as the DAGA indicated:

“The group’s communications director, Lizzie Ulmer, said that the policy change had been in the works for some time, but had become a more serious focus since May, when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the state’s six-week abortion ban.

“’It ended up being that this was the right timing,’ she told CNN. ‘The AGs really wanted this to happen, and they were really excited that this was something the committee would be able to do.’”

The other thing that happened very recently is that the only sitting Democratic AG who would flunk the litmus test, Mississippi’s Jim Hood, is leaving office. He ran for governor this year, and lost. So the Times and others can talk about purity tests all they want, but it’s not likely the new position will lead to any “purges,” to use the usual terminology. And any Democratic candidate for one of the 12 attorney general gigs up in 2020 who wants to compete on a “principled” platform of denying women control over their bodies is perfectly free to do so without DAGA’s money.

One reason for all the anxiety about litmus tests is coincidental: One of the rare statewide Democratic anti-abortion pols in captivity, Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards, was just reelected, giving his party some much-needed southern comfort and frustrating Trump’s many efforts on behalf of Republican Eddie Rispone. Aside from being deep-red, Louisiana is one of those states with a critical mass of both conservative Evangelicals and Catholics. It is unsurprisingly an anti-abortion hotbed. In contrast to DAGA’s position, the Democratic Governors’ Association strongly backed Edwards’s campaign, though you have to wonder if DGA might have been pickier had this not been one of just three contested gubernatorial races in the country this year. It’s not likely that any 2020 Democratic gubernatorial nominees will have a similar position.

Looking at the bigger picture, the idea that Democrats are mostly responsible for abortion-policy polarization is just wrong; it’s been an entirely two-way phenomenon. According to a 2017 Pew survey of partisans, there are significantly more pro-choice Republicans (34 percent saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases) than anti-abortion Democrats (22 percent saying abortion should be illegal in most or all cases). Yet in 2019, the last of the pro-choice Republican House members went the way of the dodo bird. The anti-abortion Democrats for Life of America endorsed two winning House members (Dan Lipinski of Illinois and Collin Peterson of Minnesota), and three winning Democratic Senate candidates (Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia). Just two Senate Republicans (Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) self-identify as pro-choice, and Collins’s bona fides on the topic took a big hit when she put Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS confirmation over the finish line last year.

So Democrats have no special responsibility for the sorting-out of the two parties into one that favors reproductive rights and one that doesn’t. And despite all the “big tent” talk of those who oppose Democrats taking a stand, any opportunity costs for alienating the small group of swing voters who themselves make opposition to legal abortion a personal litmus test are surely offset by the college-educated women and younger voters with whom Democrats have been making their biggest recent gains.

An anniversary creeped up on me that I decided to mark at New York:

In November of 1994, California voters approved Proposition 187, a Republican-backed ballot measure restricting rights and benefits available to undocumented immigrants. Originally sponsored by GOP assemblyman Richard Mountjoy, the initiative was quickly adopted by GOP governor (and former U.S. senator) Pete Wilson, who was running for reelection. Prop 187 passed by a comfortable 59/41 margin, and Wilson, who had been running well behind Democrat Kathleen Brown (sister of once and future governor Jerry Brown) in early polls, won by an equally comfortable 55/41 margin. It was arguably the high tide of Republican strength in California.

But it was also the beginning of the end of GOP hegemony in California as well, as Libby Denkmann recalls at LAist:

“It was the fall of 1994. On TV, popping up between episodes of Murphy Brown and The X-Files, ads for Governor Pete Wilson’s reelection showed grainy video of people running into the U.S. from Mexico.

“’They keep coming,’ a narrator intoned. ‘Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them …’

“[W]ith 25 years’ worth of hindsight, many argue the short-term ballot victories came at a massive long-term cost for the GOP.

“Prop 187 awakened the political power of Latinos in the Golden state …

“Pete Wilson is remembered by some as the Republican governor who launched a thousand California Democrats’ careers.”

The initiative was never really implemented:

“Several anti-Prop 187 groups challenged the measure with lawsuits immediately, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. On Nov. 16, U.S. District Court Judge W. Mathew Byrne issued a temporary restraining order against the initiative’s implementation.

“Altogether, five lawsuits would be filed challenging the measure. On Dec. 14, 1994, U.S. District Court Judge Mariana Pfaelzer issued a preliminary injunction, blocking implementation on a majority of the measure’s provisions.”

When Democrat Gray Davis succeeded Wilson in 1999, the state stopped appealing adverse judicial rulings against Prop 187, and it became a dead letter — except for the fact that it positioned the Republican Party as hostile to immigrants in a state rapidly being reshaped by immigration.

Veteran Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton suggests that Prop 187 was just one of the factors in the decline and fall of the Golden State GOP, but it was a very important one:

“Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who has been highly critical of the GOP for several years, notes that when the Cold War ended, the aerospace industry collapsed in California. The manufacturing base also deteriorated. That sent Republican middle-class engineers and blue-collar workers fleeing to other states looking for jobs.

“Meanwhile, he says, the burgeoning tech industry attracted many left-leaning ‘progressives’ into California.

“’All three of them’ — 187, loss of middle-class jobs and the tech explosion — ‘happened at the same time,’ Madrid says. ‘Any one of them would have upset the Republican Party.'”

You could say the same thing, of course, about the national Republican Party that has bent the knee to the demagogic leadership of Donald J. Trump. One of its most notable features is an updated version of the anti-immigrant revolt first exemplified by Prop 187. But you could argue that the MAGA movement generally reflects a refusal to adjust to irreversible demographic, cultural, and economic trends (Ron Brownstein calls the Trump base the Coalition of Restoration as opposed to the anti-Trump Coalition of Transformation). Like the 1994 Republican campaign in California, it worked temporarily. But it’s not a good prescription for long-term success:

“Dan Schnur, who was Wilson’s spokesman in 1994 and is now a political communications professor at USC and UC Berkeley, says: ‘What killed the Republican Party in California wasn’t Prop. 187. It was their refusal to adjust. California changed. And California Republicans refused to change with it.'”

They’re still trying to dig out of the rubble.

 

My efforts to understand and explain the murky process for impeachment trials led me to this realization which I shared at New York:

[F]or six particular Democratic presidential candidates and their campaigns (Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren), the possibility of a Senate impeachment trial occurring during the early stages of the caucus/primary season represents a potential calamity. And as the Washington Post reports, that’s a real possibility, particularly if the House drags its feet for reasons ranging from administration obstruction to the desire not to spoil the festive holiday spirit:

“House Democrats increasingly expect their impeachment effort against President Trump to stretch well past Thanksgiving, possibly forcing a Senate trial into January or later — a timeline that could disrupt the final weeks of campaigning before the party starts to choose its nominee.

“House leaders had initially hoped to hold a floor vote before the Nov. 28 holiday so the Senate could hold trial before Christmas. But the surprising number of witnesses agreeing to testify behind closed doors in the Capitol over the past few weeks has extended the timeline and sparked a debate over whether prolonged impeachment proceedings are politically prudent.”

More recently House Democrats have been talking about Xmas as a practical deadline for concluding their part of the impeachment process, which means the beginning of any Senate trial will extend well into 2020.

The standing Senate rules do require a fairly expeditious beginning for impeachment trials after the House has passed articles of impeachment, so it’s not like Mitch McConnell can deviously get it rolling the night of the Iowa Caucuses (February 3). But if the House really doesn’t get its part done until near the end of the year, you could easily see a trial running through the critical pre-Iowa stretch of frenzied activity. The Clinton trial, which was about as cut-and-dried as any presidential impeachment trial could be, lasted from January 7 until February 12, 1999. Let’s say for the sake of argument a Trump trial begins and ends precisely on those dates in 2020. It would encompass both the Iowa caucuses (February 3) and the New Hampshire primary (February 11). If it started later or ran longer, it could directly interfere with the Nevada caucuses (February 22), the South Carolina primary (February 29), or — worst-case scenario — the 12 states (including California and Texas) holding primaries or caucuses on Super Tuesday (March 3).

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, who is presumably privy to Mitch McConnell’s thinking, said on November 12 that he anticipated a six-to-eight week trial. That would be longer than the Clinton trial.

An impeachment trial doesn’t allow for time off to do campaign events: The Senate rules require that once the trial begins, it must stay in session six days a week (Burr suggested a daily schedule running from 12:30 to 6:30). Perhaps some senators think they could make more hay at an impeachment trial than they could hitting the potluck circuit in Iowa or working street corners in New Hampshire, as the Post suggests:

“Several senators running for president, including Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), a former state prosecutor, are likely to try to use a trial of Trump as a showcase for their candidacy.”

Unfortunately, the current Senate rules compel virtual silence from senators during the trial itself, though they are free to run their mouths before it begins and after it ends. During the trial, unless precedents are ignored, all senators get to do is to send written questions to be posed by the House managers or the president’s attorneys, and then stand up and vote “guilty” or “not guilty” when the deal goes down. Not much room for showboating there.

Now I suppose it’s possible the rules could be interpreted in a way that would allow Kamala Harris and her senatorial rivals to leave the Capitol building each night of the trial, go two blocks away, and make brilliant presentations on the case against Trump or anything else that popped into their heads. But that’s likely going to be subject to ad hoc impeachment trial rules that a majority of the Senate — e.g., the Republican majority — will impose. It’s doubtful GOP senators will feel inclined to accommodate the political needs of their Democratic colleagues. In talking about the precedents dictating silence, McConnell said earlier this month:

“McConnell … warned that senators won’t be allowed to speak because they are jurors. McConnell said such silence ‘would be good therapy for a number of them.’”

If an impeachment trial is a headache for those six senators (or however many of them are still in the race, if any, when this all happens), it could be a boon to non-senators — particularly Joe Biden, who can bloviate to his heart’s desire about the lessons he learned on impeachment and all the issues involving Trump during his 44 years as a member or presiding officer of the Upper Chamber.

For candidates and their staff, all these contingencies make the already difficult task of planning and executing a campaign in the hothouse atmosphere of this cycle impossibly tricky. And for senators who want to be president, knowing that Mitch McConnell and his troops will get the final say on some of the most crucial questions of timing and procedure is like knowing that Satan gets one final shot at your soul right there at the Pearly Gates.

As the timetable for the impeachment process becomes clearer, I’m trying to keep a close eye on it at New York:

[I]mpeaching a president is a job with a lot of moving parts and vast elements of uncertainty. It’s even more complicated when it could overlap with an extremely intense election in which the president being impeached is seeking another term. But there’s a new sense of purpose among House Democrats about getting their part of the process done by Christmas, as CNN reports:

“[I]n a series of moves this week, Democrats have shown they are rapidly moving to complete the proceedings by Christmas, something that could result in Trump being just the third president to be impeached in history.

“The schedule became apparent in recent days after House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, announced that public hearings would begin next week and also suggested Thursday there’s a limit to the witnesses they would call for the public hearings.

“Plus Democrats also withdrew a subpoena of a former White House official to ensure their proceedings were not delayed by a court battle. Schiff also decided Thursday not to subpoena someone who could have been a star witness – former national security adviser John Bolton, who privately raised concerns about the Ukraine scandal at the heart of the impeachment probe. Schiff’s decision came after the former Trump aide’s counsel warned they would sue over any subpoena.”

In other words, House leaders, convinced they have enough to impeach Trump already, will take what they can get within the next few weeks but aren’t going to slow things down to cross any t’s or dot any i’s.

“Schiff has announced that three witnesses would testify next week, and Democratic lawmakers expect at least one more week of public hearings before his panel likely to follow on the week of November 18.

“The House is then scheduled to take a recess for Thanksgiving week, giving time for Schiff’s committee — along with House Oversight and House Foreign Affairs — to finish a report detailing their findings and recommendations of their investigation.

“At that point, the House Judiciary Committee would take the lead on the impeachment push — potentially in the first week of December. Democratic sources expect that committee to have a public hearing, possibly in that week, before it votes on articles of impeachment. That vote could occur in committee in the first or second week of December, the sources said.”

Presumably this timetable would accommodate a non-Ukraine-related article of impeachment or two if House Democrats decide it’s wise to include one. After all, other committees were instructed by Pelosi back in September to consider such possible articles. If, say, the obstruction of justice suggested in the Mueller Report seems actionable, most of the evidentiary work has already been done. One possible complication involves unresolved differences over federal spending that could in theory lead to another holiday partial government shutdown like the one that occurred last year just before Christmas. But it’s now looking like a stopgap spending bill will likely extend through December.

Clearly House members in both parties would like to get the impeachment monkey off their backs by year’s end, and onto the agenda of the Senate, which is contemplating a January trial of the president. Beyond that, Nancy Pelosi and her troops would love to give the vast majority of Democrats who want to see Trump removed from office the Christmas gift of getting halfway there via articles of impeachment.

Amid the mostly-good offyear election results from earlier this week, Virginia’s stood out for me, as I wrote about at New York:

On Tuesday, Virginia Democrats regained control of both the House of Delegates and the State Senate. From one perspective, this Democratic victory seemed inevitable and uneventful. The Donkey Party made big gains in the lower House in 2017 (though a lottery drawing in a tied election went to the GOP and denied Democrats control) and performed very well in federal elections in 2018, flipping three U.S. House seats. Republicans don’t hold any statewide office, haven’t carried the state in a presidential election since 2004, haven’t won a U.S. Senate race since 2002, and have lost the last two gubernatorial contests as well.

But the results could have significant implications beyond the fact that Democrats now hold their first governing “trifecta” in the Commonwealth since 1993 and will control decennial redistricting for both the U.S. House and the state legislature.

Lest we forget, Virginia was on the short list of targets for a Trump reelection campaign determined to expand the map of battleground states beyond Florida, North Carolina, and the three Rust Belt states Trump won by an eyelash in 2016 (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). That’s not looking very likely right now.

More broadly, the suburban base of the Democratic victory in Virginia means GOP losses in areas with well-educated former Republican voters we saw in 2018 may not be self-correcting via some reversion to the mean. Democrats now hold all of the state legislative seats in Northern Virginia. If such voters are about to trend back in Donald Trump’s direction — in Virginia and elsewhere — the evidence is so far lacking. And that could be a very big deal in 2020, as Roll Call’s Nathan Gonzales observes:

“Tuesday’s results continued to demonstrate GOP problems in the suburbs since Trump took office. The latest was in northern Kentucky in the Cincinnati suburbs, where Bevin won in 2015 and Beshear won in 2019. Or in northern Mississippi, in the Memphis suburbs where the GOP margin in DeSoto County dropped from 61 points to 20 points, according to Ryan Matsumoto, a contributing analyst to Inside Elections. These are just the latest pieces of evidence after Democrat Dan McCready’s overperformance in the Charlotte suburbs from 2018 to the 2019 special election in North Carolina’s 9th District. It should be particularly concerning for President Trump in his efforts to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas in 2020.”

[T]he inability of Virginia’s Republicans to make the off-year elections revolve around Democratic scandals in Richmond — where the Democratic governor and attorney general were found to have appeared in blackface photos back in the day, and the Democratic lieutenant governor was accused of sexual assault by two women — is significant, too. If there was ever a circumstance in which changing the subject from Donald Trump’s issues was available, it was in the Old Dominion. It didn’t happen, and may not happen nationally despite the efforts of Republicans to refocus attention on Joe or Hunter Biden or alleged deep state conspiracies against Trump. This president may just blot out the sky with his bizarre personality and egregious misdeeds. If that’s true in 2019, it will likely still be true when he’s on the ballot next year.