The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: nHow Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
This week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee takes up a bill sponsored by Senators Corker and Menendez that would give the GOP-controlled Congress veto power over recently-concluded Framework Agreement that would prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
The bill sounds reasonable enough. Its backers say it is only intended to give Congress the ability to sign off on the final agreement.
In fact, it represents a last-ditch effort by the same Neo-Con crowd that brought us the disastrous Iraq War to delay and then kill the deal.
The reason is simple — and some Neo-Cons like former Bush U.N. Ambassador John Bolton don’t try to hide it. They want the U.S. to take military action against Iran. They want another war in the Middle East.
Experts in arms control throughout the World have hailed the deal — which was negotiated between the United States, the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Germany and Iran — as a major breakthrough.
Most military experts familiar with the details of the framework — including the former head of the Israeli Intelligence Service Mossad — believe that the agreement is the best alternative for preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The agreement requires extensive and intrusive monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program–including daily access by international inspectors–to make sure that Iran is living up to its commitments.
Experts say that without an agreement, Iran could produce enough highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon within two or three months if they chose to do so. This agreement increases that time to at least twelve months. If Iran made any attempt to break the agreement, it would give the United States and its allies time to take action.
And it is clear as day that if the diplomatic process fails, the U.S. will be left with two terrible options: a nuclear Iran or another Middle East War.
Most military experts agree that simply bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would only set back Iran’s nuclear program, not eliminate it. So the military option would almost certainly require American involvement in another full-blown Middle Eastern war.
If the United States Congress manages to kill the nuclear deal, international support for the sanctions that have brought Iran to the negotiating table will collapse, and the hardliners in Iran who want a nuclear bomb will be strengthened politically and emboldened to race for a bomb.
The Framework Agreement announced in Switzerland turns out to be much more detailed — and much more iron-clad — than the Neo-Cons’ dire warnings had predicted. So now they have opted to take a more subtle approach.
“Oh”, they say, “all we want to is to give Congress the right to have a say.”
Of course, this line of argument completely ignores the Constitution, which clearly gives the President the right and responsibility to negotiate international agreements and conduct foreign policy.
The nuclear agreement with Iran is not, after all, a legally binding international treaty that must be approved by the Senate. As many Republicans are quick to point out, it could be abrogated by a Republican President if the voters choose to elect one in 2016.
Why in the world would anyone want to give the completely dysfunctional GOP-led Congress the ability to veto this critical agreement?
Why would any Democrat in his or her right mind want to hand that power to the likes of Senator Ted Cruz or to “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” McCain, or to the Tea Party “nuclear experts” who dominate the House Republican caucus.

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In his New York Magazine post, “Why Hillary Clinton Is Probably Going to Win the 2016 Election,” Jonathan Chait shares a six-pack of reasons for the argument encapsulated in his title. He leads with his strongest point:

1. The Emerging Democratic Majority is real. The major disagreement over whether there is an “Emerging Democratic Majority” — the thesis that argues that Democrats have built a presidential majority that could only be defeated under unfavorable conditions — centers on an interpretive disagreement over the 2014 elections. Proponents of this theory dismiss the midterm elections as a problem of districting and turnout; Democrats have trouble rousing their disproportionately young, poor supporters to the polls in a non-presidential year, and the tilted House and Senate map further compounded the GOP advantage.
Skeptics of the theory instead believe that the 2014 midterms were, as Judis put it, “not an isolated event but rather the latest manifestation of a resurgent Republican coalition.” Voters, they argue, are moving toward the Republican Party, and may continue to do so even during the next presidential election.
It has been difficult to mediate between the two theories, since the outcome at the polls supports the theory of both the proponents and the skeptics of the Emerging Democratic Majority theory equally well.
A Pew survey released this week gives us the best answer. Pew is the gold standard of political polling, using massive surveys, with high numbers of respondents and very low margins of error. Pew’s survey shows pretty clearly that there was not a major change in public opinion from the time of Obama’s reelection through the 2014 midterms:

Of course, Pew is not surveying actual voters. It’s surveying all adults. But that is the point. What changed between 2012 and 2014 was not public opinion, but who showed up to vote.

Chait goes on to acknowledge that “The Emerging Democratic Majority thesis places a lot of weight on cohort replacement.” But he also notes that “every new election cycle incrementally tilts the electoral playing field toward the Democrats,” despite the oft-cited Harvard Institute Poll of millennial voters (which had flunked its prediction that millennial voters would favor the GOP in 2014). Further, younger millennial voters are still tilting pro-Democratic in the Pew poll.
Chait’s other points are well-rooted in reality as well. And it’s not like the Republicans have yet left the fever swamps to adopt a more temperate approach to win moderates. Indeed, as Chait puts it:

The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Even if the relatively sober Jeb Bush wins the nomination, he will have to accommodate himself to his party’s barking-mad consensus. She is non-crazy America’s choice by default.

It’s good to have political demographics on your side, and Chait is surely right that sanity is a big plus as well.

The headline in Stephen Deere’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, “High voter turnout in Ferguson adds two black council members, for three total,” heralds good news. The lede notes, “For the first time in Ferguson’s 120-year history, the City Council will have three African-American members…”
But the article also notes “Perhaps the most significant aspect of the results for Ferguson City Council was that 30 percent of the city’s 12,738 registered voters cast ballots — more than double the typical turnout.” We are so accustomed to low turnouts in non-presidential elections that 30 percent in this context is good news, even though about two-thirds of those eligible to vote in Ferguson are African Americans.
The article goes on to add that two protest candidates supported by activist groups lost, and thunderstorms may have reduced turnout. Call it a qualified victory for activists, but at least the turnout trend is in the right direction.
After all of the protests, marches and rallies and all of the speeches have been made, it is increasing turnout of African American voters that offers the best hope for ending bias and abuse in law enforcement in Ferguson, North Charleston — and across the U.S. Yesterday’s election in Ferguson is a good start. May it inspire African American communities nationwide to energize their voter registration, education and turnout efforts.
In another important Tuesday election, Mitch Smith reports at The New York Times that Wisconsin voters rejected a conservative candidate in favor of the more liberal incumbent, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. But they also approved a constitutional amendment that gives the states Supreme Court justices the power to elect the chief Justice, who has been chosen by seniority. This will likely lead to a conservative chief justice replacing the current liberal CJ, Shirley Abrahamson.

The following report is cross-posted from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:
A recent nationwide survey shows that a majority of Americans worry about paying for retirement, affording health care, and losing their job. Retirement raises the most concern, as more than 60 percent of Democrats, independents, and Republicans are concerned about having enough money to retire or having Social Security available throughout their retirement. On all measures of economic security, women and those without a college education are the most concerned.
The following are key findings from a survey of 1010 Americans nationwide.[1] The survey, part of the ORC International Omnibus, was conducted for the Institute for Communitarian Policy Study, part of The George Washington University. Its director, sociologist Amitai Etzioni, stated that the findings of the study “support our hypothesis that the majority of Americans have a wide spread sense of economic insecurity.” He added that “it seems that no political party is addressing this issue directly.” His institute is about to issue a list of steps that seeks to address this wide spread anxiety. He can be reached at 202 460 3446 or etzioni@gwu.edu.

• Retirement raises fears among most Americans, even young people. Americans are skeptical about their ability to retire, or that Social Security will be around to help. This fear spans every demographic group, with 66 percent of those under 50 (and even 59 percent of those under 30) worried about having enough money to retire.
• Women of every demographic are more worried about their economic security than men. The gender gap is significant: on nearly every measure, by double digits, women are more concerned than men about affording retirement, paying bills, losing their jobs, and affording health care. For example, 62 percent of women worry about the cost of health care compared to 47 percent of men. The exceptions are “losing my home” (only a 6 point difference), and “being able to do the same job in 10 years” where only 33 percent of both men and women are concerned.
• A college education significantly reduces economic fears, but even 40 percent of college graduates worry about having enough money to pay the bills. Americans without a college education are fearful of affording retirement, paying their bills, and losing their jobs and homes. Compared to their college-educated counterparts, they are significantly more concerned about affording health care (41 percent to 60 percent). Yet, even among college-educated Americans, a majority still worries about having enough money to retire.
• Non-white Americans worry more about their economic security compared to white Americans, especially when it comes to losing their homes. Compared to affording retirement, paying for healthcare, and losing their jobs, the fear of losing one’s home ranks slightly lower, with 45 percent of Americans concerned about it. Yet, there is a significant gap between white Americans (41 percent concerned) and African Americans (51 percent) and, notably, Hispanics (61 percent).
• A majority of Americans still worry about affording health care. More than 60 percent of women and Americans without a college degree worry about the cost of health care.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Friday, Senator Harry Reid announced he would step down at the end of this term — ending a decade-plus of strong, effective progressive leadership of Democrats in the Senate.
His announcement set off a wave of speculation about who would run to succeed him as Senate Democratic Leader.
Most observers believed the announcement would serve as the starting gun for a year-and-a-half-long struggle between former roommates Dick Durbin of Illinois, the whip who is currently number two in the Democratic leadership, and Chuck Schumer of New York, who occupies the number-three spot.
Handicappers rated the race a toss-up. Durbin is widely regarded by his colleagues as a super-effective and politically generous leader and progressive champion.
Schumer is an effective bulldog who fights hard for his positions and helped many of his colleagues get reelected during his tenure as the chair of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.
But the prospect of a prolonged Schumer-Durbin battle cast a pall over the coming campaign by Democrats to retake control of the Senate in 2016.
So late Thursday night, after hearing of Reid’s plans to retire, Durbin went to Schumer and told him that in order to prevent the divisive, distracting battle, he would not challenge Schumer for the leader position and would instead run again for his post of Democratic whip.
That was classic Dick Durbin. Durbin is an ambitious and successful political leader. But when the chips are down, he has always put the interests of his colleagues and the Democratic Caucus and his commitment to progressive values ahead of his own narrow personal interests.
That is precisely why Durbin is so beloved by his fellow senators, and why progressives of every stripe are thrilled that he will likely remain second in command among Senate Democrats.
Progressives view Durbin as an unwavering, relentless champion. And his reputation is well-deserved.
In the late 1980s, when he still served in the House, Durbin, like everyone else, flew back and forth to Washington on airplanes that allowed onboard smoking. For those too young to remember, this may be hard to fathom, but about half of every airplane was designated as the “smoking section.” In fact, back then, when airlines served in-flight meals, they often included a three-pack of cigarettes right on the tray.
Of course, when a bunch of people light up in a small, cylindrical tube hurtling through the sky, the smoke on one end of the cabin does not stop at an invisible wall. It fills the airplane, forcing second-hand smoke on the entire flying public. That was back when tobacco industry “scientists” claimed that smoking had nothing to do with lung disease and cancer.
For years many air travelers complained. Durbin decided to change the law.
Against what seemed at the time to be impossible odds, he won. And it was the beginning of the end of the tobacco industry’s reputation as an unbeatable, dominant power in the United States Congress.
Next time you fly an airplane and can breathe freely, thank Dick Durbin.
That battle was just one of many.
Years later a group of young, undocumented immigrants came to meet Durbin after he’d become a senator. They explained that they had lived their entire lives in the United States since being brought here by their undocumented, immigrant parents. They had been educated in America and wanted to make contributions to the only country they had ever known. Yet they were subject to deportation, could not serve in the military and in many cases were unable to go to college.
As a result of the meeting, Durbin, who had long advocated for comprehensive immigration reform, authored and championed what became known as the DREAM Act. And when it failed to pass the House, he worked with President Obama to help craft the president’s 2012 executive action that allowed “Dreamers” to live and work in America and protected them from deportation.
Durbin is tough. He has joined Elizabeth Warren as a nemesis of the big Wall Street banks whose recklessness sank the world economy in 2008.

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Republican Congresswomen Cathy McMorris Rodgers apparently had nothing better to do with her time than hatch a facebook scam bashing President Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act. So she requested her constituents to submit Obamacare slams. But Jen Hayden reports at Daily Kos that it didn’t go quite as planned. Some examples:

I work for cancer care northwest. We actually have more patients with insurance and fewer having to choose treatment over bankruptcy. Cathy, I’m a die hard conservative and I’m asking you to stop just slamming Obamacare. Fix it, change it or come up with a better idea! Thanks
My daughter is fighting for her life with stage 3 breast cancer! We are about to enter a second go round of diagnostic procedures and possibly more treatment after two full years of treatment! So yah! The ACA is more than helping! I resent that our rep thinks the only problems involve her personal story!
My story is that I once knew 7 people who couldn’t get health insurance. Now they all have it, thanks to the ACA and President Obama, and their plans are as good as the one my employer provides–and they pay less for them. Now, that’s not the kind of story you want to hear. You want to hear made-up horror stories. I don’t know anyone with one of those stories.
And now my daughter, diagnosed with MS at age 22, can have insurance. What do you plan to do with her?
Obama Care saved us when my husband was unemployed and we couldn’t afford coverage. We might have been ruined without it. My husband could not have had the eye surgery needed after an accident. So grateful.
The Republican solution to the Affordable Care Act? Let people drown in debt, clutter our emergency rooms, and die from lack of coverage due to pre-existing conditions. No thanks, “Congresswoman”. Some of us care more about our fellow Americans than trying to bash the President. Keep trying to scare your followers with phony horror stories, though

Hey, maybe Rep McMorris Rodgers could get Sen. Ted Cruz to submit something.

From TPM Cafe’s “How Bush-Appointed Ivy Leaguer Ted Cruz Became A Tea Party Darling,” by Vanessa Williamson, co-author, with Theda Skocpol, of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism“:

Ted Cruz, who has become one of the Tea Party’s most prominent voices, has officially announced his bid for president. But how is it that a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, a Bush appointee, can pass muster as the standard-bearer for a movement that is supposed to represent anti-elitist, anti-establishment, “real America”?
To understand Cruz’s role in 2016, one must recognize that the Tea Party in Washington today is a not an insurgency from below. It is a realignment within the Republican establishment that has committed the party to a position of extreme non-compromise. As Megyn Kelly pointed out yesterday, Ted Cruz has put himself at the vanguard of that strategy. The willingness to naysay, more than any policy position or connection to the conservative grassroots, is what distinguishes him from other Republican presidential hopefuls.
Let’s remember: The Tea Party, more than an organization or even a movement, was a political moment. In early 2009, the person and the policy proposals of President Barack Obama galvanized grassroots conservatives. But, after the exceptionally unpopular President Bush left office, the Republican brand was toxic and the party leadership was in disarray. Encouraged by conservative media, rank-and-file Republicans built ad hoc local “Tea Party” groups to oppose the new president’s agenda. There was plenty of room at the top for any Republican who could seize the “Tea Party” momentum.
At the national level, those who profited were rarely actual newcomers. Instead, longtime conservative insiders like Dick Armey and Jim DeMint became “Tea Party” leaders. Although the adoption of the Tea Party name and symbolism gave a sense of novelty to this intra-party realignment, there is nothing new about the rightmost wing of the Republican Party except its ever-increasing authority.
Today, we are reaping the candidates the Tea Party has sown. One of these is Ted Cruz, whose 2012 campaign received support from several major players in the Tea Party field, including Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund and Dick Armey’s Freedom Works, as well as other longtime funders of the far right, like the Club for Growth. These players aren’t new, but their degree of power is; the Republican Party has been growing more conservative for decades, and the Tea Party was only the latest step in that direction.

For the rest of Williamson’s TPM Cafe post, click here.

At the Plum Line, Paul Waldman posts that “Democrats may have lost the battle over voter ID, but the war over voting isn’t over.” Regarding the Supreme Court Decision upholding the Wisconsin voter identification law, Waldman writes:

It may be time for liberals to admit that, barring a significant change in the makeup of the Supreme Court, this just isn’t a battle they’re ever going to win.
That doesn’t mean every challenge to a voter ID law should be dropped. Many of these cases are still important to pursue because the details vary from one state to another. Some laws are more restrictive than others, and it’s important for liberals to press the Court to clearly define what’s permissible and what isn’t. For instance, the Texas law (which is still working its way up to the Court) said that hunting licenses could be used as valid identification, but IDs issued by state universities couldn’t. Everyone understood why the Texas legislature wrote the law that way: hunters are more likely to be Republicans, while students are more likely to be Democrats…

But invalidating voter I.d. laws as a whole will have to wait for a different high court majority. As Waldman reiterates, “no one should fool themselves into thinking that this Court is ever going to rule that the basic requirement to present photo ID at the polls is unconstitutional.”
As for an alternative course of action for Democrats, Waldman suggests:

So where does that leave liberals and Democrats? The best-case scenario in this round of lawsuits is that the Supreme Court upholds the requirements to show ID at the polls (which it has since 2008), but also mandates that states make such requirements less onerous. So liberals have to acknowledge that this is primarily a legislative battle, not a legal one. Last week Oregon passed a law providing that everyone who gets a driver’s license or other ID from the state DMV will automatically be registered to vote unless they opt out. It should be the first of a wave of state laws to make registering and voting as easy and universal as possible.
Conservatives may have won the battle over voter ID. But liberals can still win the war over voting.

In a 2012 article in The Nation, Ari Berman cited another successful strategy:

In May 2011, a poll showed that 80 percent of Minnesotans supported a photo ID law. “Nearly everyone in the state believed a photo ID was the most common-sense solution to the problem of voter fraud,” says Dan McGrath, executive director of Take Action Minnesota, a progressive coalition that led the campaign against the amendment. “We needed to reframe the issue. We decided to never say the word ‘fraud.’ Instead we would only talk about the cost, complications and consequences of the amendment.” According to the coalition, the photo ID law would have disenfranchised eligible voters (including members of the military and seniors) dumped an unfunded mandate on counties and imperiled same-day voter registration. On election day, 52 percent of Minnesotans opposed the amendment.
The amendment’s surprising defeat has ramifications beyond Minnesota. “There’s been an assumption of political will for restricting the right to vote,” says McGrath. “No, there’s not.” The amendment backfired on the GOP. “Voter ID did not drive the conservative base to turn out in the way that Republicans thought it would,” adds McGrath. “Instead, it actually inspired progressive voters, who felt under siege, to fight stronger and turn out in higher numbers.” The minority vote nearly doubled in the state, compared with 2008. Minnesota was a microcosm of the national failure of the GOP’s voter suppression strategy.

In addition, opinion data indicates that Dems have good reason to put more resources into the fight to protect and expand early voting, as Ariel Edwards-Levy reports at HuffPo, citing a HuffPo/YouGov poll:

Sixty percent of Americans say it’s a good thing for states to allow early voting, while just 14 percent say it’s a bad thing. A 39 percent plurality say the current policy on early voting in their state is about right, while another 20 percent would like to see expanded access. Only 11 percent say access in their state should be reduced.

Right now it’s hard to envision a better Supreme Court. That’s going to require a broad Democratic victory in 2016. In the shorter range, however, Dems have plenty of promising alternative strategies for fighting Republican voter suppression.

From Jay Bookman’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution column on the Republicans’ proposed budget as a moral document:

So what does it tell you about morals and values when the proposed budget is “balanced” solely on the backs of the most vulnerable, the struggling, those too young and too old to fend for themselves, those needing access to education?It repeals ObamaCare, of course, but it also slashes more than $900 billion from Medicaid, the system that today provides health-care coverage for millions of poor Americans, including children, and also covers some 60 percent of grandparents and great-grandparents in long-term nursing care. Overall, the Obama administration estimates that some 37 million Americans would be stripped of health insurance.It cuts Pell grants for those going to college. It cuts Medicare and turns it into a voucher program in which senior citizens will be forced to buy private insurance. It slashes food stamps and housing programs. At a time when Republicans are professing concern for the middle class and working people, this is how that rhetoric is transformed into actual policy.And at a time when corporate profits at all-time highs, the stock market is at all-time highs, and income inequity at all-time highs, what does it tell about morals and values when those prospering the most from this country’s productivity and hard work are asked to make absolutely zero sacrifice on its behalf?In fact, quite the contrary. The animating theory behind “tax reform” in the House budget is that those already prospering the most need and deserve additional rewards, must be enriched still further, while additional tax burdens are placed on those lower on the economic scale.

NYT’s Paul Krugman takes a different angle on it:

But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.
You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do. But it isn’t. The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.
…Outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why…Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.
Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.

The question arises, how do Democrats awaken the needed outrage to hold the con artists accountable?