In his post “The 2014 Midterms Matter More Than You Think: Winning the Senate would finally put Republicans on the spot” at The New Republic, Brian Beutler explains why a GOP takeover of the upper house would burden their party with elevated expectations they won’t be able to satisfy:

Republican hardliners in Congress and their enablers on the grassroots right will expect a Senate takeover to translate into the kinds of results they’ve been denied thus far. No more blinking in budget showdowns. No more balking at the prospect of confrontation.
But by the time those fights roll around, the presidential contest will be in full swing, and to the extent that mollifying the base would be politically damaging to the Republican party nationally, Congressional leaders will be more reluctant than they are now to do so. If GOP voters nominate a member of the Senate or House, that person will be linked to the Congressional party and all of its hijinx. If they nominate a governor or a former governor, that person will feel tremendous pressure to draw contrasts and divide the party ahead of the election. Those are both outcomes Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would like to avoid.

Beutler adds that Republicans would likely create confrontations with the White House over Obamacare, greenhouse gas regulations, nominee confirmations and impeachment, to name a few issues. While “Obama can counter each these impulses with a veto pen, the bully pulpit, and a determined minority party in Congress,” the Republicans will be expected “to behave like a governing party. And to succeed they’d have to overcome the impulse to behave like the opposition.” Not an easy challenge to meet when their tea party flank is screaming for blood at every turn.
Beutler concedes that “The flip side, of course, is that Republicans would gain agenda setting power.” But the problem is that the GOP lacks a popular agenda. Sure, many Americans want tax cuts for themselves, but the Republicans would have a tough sell ahead in pitching the rest of their agenda, particularly weakening environmental and financial regulations, greasing the skids for corporate tax dodges, restricting reproductive rights of women and gutting the popular provisions of Obamacare.
In short, the GOP would finally have to own and better explain its agenda in the spotlight, instead of just bashing away at Democrats. It wouldn’t be pretty.
All of that said, however, Democrats still have a huge stake in doing better than expected in November. Every senate seat held could make a tremendous difference, if not before 2016, then certainly afterwards.

Do give a read to Jenee Desmond-Harris’s post, “Will White Voters in the Black Belt Ever Get Out of Their Own Way?” at The Root. It’s a great title, which encapsulates the political neurosis of too many white voters in the south who habitually vote against their own economic interests. But it also contains a couple of insight nuggets, including:

In the area of the American South informally known as the Black Belt, cross-racial political coalitions should form naturally. After all, the poverty rate in the region hovers around 16.5 percent and cuts across racial lines. Plus, polling has shown that white Southerners hold populist views similar to those of their black neighbors–the majority agreeing that the government should spend more on health, education and improving people’s standard of living.

Desmond-Harris quotes former NAACP President Ben Jealous, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress:

“White conservative leaders have systemically undermined these coalitions by playing up racially divisive wedge issues” and “the strategy of divide and conquer has worked…In recent years, candidates in the Black Belt have consistently voted differently than voters of color, even if this has meant voting against their economic self-interest.”

Desmond-Harris adds, “Repairing this disconnect–and building coalitions based on shared interests–is…”the key to transformative political power” in the region.
Further, Even if white voters don’t budge…there’s still the possibility of change when it comes to race and political representation. “Registering just 30 percent of unregistered black voters would yield enough new voters to upset the balance of power in North Carolina and Virginia in presidential or midterm election year,” says Jealous. This, he predicts, “could allow voters of color to elect a candidate of their choice, and, at a minimum, affect the political decisions of all candidates in the race.”
For Dems, the challenge is not to pursue one path or the other, but to work like hell to support both of them.

It’s just a midsummer snapshot, but viewed as the latest of a series of snapshots in a trendline, Democrats are in decent shape to hold their Senate majority at this political moment, according to recent polls. Put another way, it could be a lot worse for Dems, considering the number of seats they have to defend compared to the GOP (21-15).
From Harry Enten’s take at FiveThirtyEight:

If Democrats win all the states in which the polls now favor them, the party would lose four seats (Alaska, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia) and pick up Georgia. Add on a probable loss in the Senate race in South Dakota (which isn’t included here because it’s a three-way matchup), and Democrats will hold on to a 51-to-49 seat majority in the next Senate. Sum up the probabilities of each race, and Democrats end up with about 50 seats, on average, in the new Senate. That would be good enough for them to keep control of the chamber, with Vice President Joe Biden acting as a tiebreaker.
…In other words, the final outcome for the Senate could be anything from a minor Republican gain to a GOP romp. At the moment, the state of play seems manageable from a Democratic perspective, but the party’s position is perilous. A tiny shift could tip the canoe and spill a lot of Democrats overboard.

We knew about the ‘perilous’ party position already. However, Dems being competitive at midsummer, given the number of exposed senate seats, is a lot worse for Republicans than they had hoped. A narrow victory or loss is pretty dicey for them too. And with Democratic candidates leading in some polls in states like GA and KY, where their senate leader is in danger, something isn’t working for the GOPs.
At NBC First Read Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann observe:

…Our brand-new NBC/Marist polls of Colorado and Michigan show Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) leading Cory Gardner (R) by seven points among registered voters, 48%-41%, in Colorado’s key Senate race. They find Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) ahead of GOP challenger Bob Beauprez by six points, 49%-43%. They have Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI) up over Republican Terri Lynn Land by six, 43%-37%, in Michigan’s Senate contest. And they show Gov. Rick Snyder (R) leading Democratic challenger Mark Schauer by two points, 46%-44%. So why are Udall, Peters, and Snyder all ahead in their contests? Here’s an explanation: mind the gaps — the gender gap, the Latino gap, and the independent gap. In Colorado, Udall is up by 12 points among female voters (50%-38%), as Democratic groups like Senate Majority PAC are up with TV ads (like this one) on abortion and contraception. Indeed, 70% of Colorado voters in the NBC/Marist poll said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who supports restrictions on the use of contraception. And in Michigan, Peters is ahead by 13 points with women (46%-33%).
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The Democratic path to survival in this very difficult midterm season for the party is through women. And that’s especially true after the Hobby Lobby decision. There’s no doubt Democrats are going to win women voters in the fall; the questions are by how much and whether it will be large enough to save the party’s Senate majority.

Todd, Murray and Dann also cite Dems’ favorable edge with Latinos as a big plus, while the GOP leans increasingly on stale whining about Obamacare, a dubious lawsuit fronted by an intemperate House Speaker and reduced to ugly immigrant-bashing, as the economy improves. This is not the political — or economic — landscape smarter Republicans wanted to see at midsummer.
Sure, there is plenty of time left for Dems to screw up, or the economy to falter. But right now, polls everywhere give the Republicans little to be encouraged about. The trendline at this juncture has an increasingly blue tint.

From Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s Salon.com post, “Walgreens shouldn’t have a say about how the U.S. government does anything: The former secretary of labor weighs in on corporate America’s newest bid to reduce its tax bills“:

Dozens of big U.S. corporations are considering leaving the United States in order to reduce their tax bills…But they’ll be leaving the country only on paper. They’ll still do as much business in the U.S. as they were doing before.
The only difference is they’ll no longer be “American,” and won’t have to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they make.
Okay. But if they’re no longer American citizens, they should no longer be able to spend a penny influencing American politics.

Reich demolishes the corporate whine that they have to split the U.S. because, y’know, taxes:

It’s true that the official corporate tax rate of 39.1 percent, including state and local taxes, is the highest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…But the effective rate – what corporations actually pay after all deductions, tax credits, and other maneuvers – is far lower.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office, examined corporate tax returns in detail and found that in 2010, profitable corporations headquartered in the United States paid an effective federal tax rate of 13 percent on their worldwide income, 17 percent including state and local taxes. Some pay no taxes at all.

He continues, “One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower. The subsidiary merely charges the U.S. parent inflated costs, and gets repaid in extra-fat profits. Further says Reich, “Becoming a foreign company is the extreme form of this dodge. It’s a bigger accounting gimmick. The American company merges with a foreign competitor headquartered in another nation where taxes are lower, and reincorporates there.”
Clearly, this is an issue Dems could make some serious gains with, especially because their Republican opponents will do everything they can to kill any reforms to end this privilege that robs the U.S. treasury and increases taxes on working people. He cites the example of Walgreen’s:

Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain in the United States with more than 8,700 drugstores spread across the nation, is on the verge of moving its corporate headquarters to Switzerland as part of a merger with Alliance Boots, the European drugstore chain.
Founded in Chicago in 1901, with current headquarters in the nearby suburb of Deerfield, Walgreens is about as American as apple pie — or your Main Street druggist…Even if it becomes a Swiss corporation, Walgreen will remain your Main Street druggist. It just won’t pay nearly as much in U.S. taxes.
Which means the rest of us will have to make up the difference. Walgreens morph into a Swiss corporation will cost you and me and every other American taxpayer about $4 billion over five years, according to an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.
The tax dodge likewise means more money for Walgreens investors and top executives. Which is why its large investors – including Goldman Sachs — have been pushing for it.

Reich responds “Even if there’s no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there’s no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship…In fact, Walgreens should no longer have any say about how the U.S. government does anything.”
Reich notes further, “Since the 2010 election cycle, Walgreens Political Action Committee has spent $991,030 on federal elections. If it becomes a Swiss corporation, it shouldn’t be able to spend a penny more.”
Amen. Democratic leaders should make this a leading issue and force Republicans to squirm as they try to justify this indefensible expat corporate privilege that screws American taxpayers. If there was ever an issue that could win the support of the white working class the pundits are always talking about, here it is, a big fat softball, begging to be belted out of the park.

Aaron Blake of The Fix has a post, “Who doesn’t care about politics? People who would otherwise vote for Democrats.” It’s about “the bystanders.” These are the 10 percent of Americans who aren’t registered to vote and don’t really follow political news.” Blake mines the data from a new Pew Research study and observes:

So why do these people matter? Because politics is as much about who doesn’t participate as who does.
American politics is dominated by the wealthy, the old and the educated — because they’re the ones playing the game. The “bystanders,” as you might imagine, are not wealthy, old or educated. They’re also disproportionately Hispanic.
Hispanics’ share of the “bystanders” (32 percent) is about 2½ times as large as their share of the entire population (13 percent), and young people’s share of the most apathetic group (38 percent) is nearly twice their share of the populace (22 percent).
These “bystanders,” as a whole, also tend to favor the Democratic Party and a liberal ideology — to the extent that they even care, of course.

Assuming the Latinos referenced in the study are eligible voters, Democrats have a challenge to meet in persuading more of them to get registered, since voter registration status remains the most reliable indicator of who is likely to vote. This won’t be done with gimmicks. It is apparently not enough that the GOP is all-out opposed to reforms that could help Latinos improve their lives. Like all demographic groups, they need to feel that they have a stake in the party they are being asked to support.
As for youth ‘bystanders,’ some more creative approaches to get young people registered and motivated are urgently needed, especially for midterm elections. This may be the most progressive generation ever, in terms of their attitudes. But that doesn’t mean much if they sit out elections. Dems may need to hold a summit to address this biennial problem that keeps festering on the party’s prospects for growth.

In his New York magazine column, “How Barack Obama Saved the Obama Administration,” Jonathan Chait takes on the meme Republicans (and some Dems) are parroting about President Obama being an ineffectual chief executive, particularly with respect to health care and environmental protection.Conceding that Obama probably could have pressed for a bolder stimulus, Chait argues that Obama’s grit, (along with his congressional majority early in his term) is pivotal reason why we have health care reform and progress on environmental protection.

The logic of Obama’s environmental regulations is fairly straightforward now. But it wasn’t straightforward before he announced them. Some extremely smart reporters and political analysts considered it doubtful (John Broder), or even vanishingly unlikely (Matthew Yglesias, Ryan Lizza) that Obama would actually regulate existing power-plants. If it was that obvious that Obama would use his regulatory authority this way, nobody would have believed otherwise. The decision obviously undertook some political risks that not any Democratic president would have unhesitatingly accepted.
On health care, the record of Obama’s personal influence is even stronger. It’s surely true that any Democratic president would have pursued health-care reform in 2009. But as the health-care bill dragged on, while it, Obama, and Democrats in Congress grew increasingly unpopular, many Democrats would have pulled the plug and tried to get out with a small, incremental bill. In late August of 2009, Jonathan Cohn later said in his deeply reported reconstruction of the bill’s passage that both Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull the plug on comprehensive reform, but Obama overruled them.
The true moment of peril occurred in early 2010, when Scott Brown won a Massachusetts Senate race, depriving the Democrats of their ability to break a filibuster. At that point, probably most Democrats wanted to give up. As Cohn reported, “many administration officials assumed that health reform really was ‘Dead, DEAD DEAD,’ as one put it to me in an e-mail.” Emanuel again proposed abandoning comprehensive reform for a small, incremental measure. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, operating on the widespread assumption that comprehensive reform could not be resuscitated, argued, “Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care … The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.” Even liberals like Anthony Weiner and Barney Frank wanted to throw in the towel. Now, the logic of passage was always clear to those who paid close attention to the legislative dynamics, but not everybody did. If Obama had given up on health care, most analysts in Washington — and even many Democrats — would have deemed it a sensible, or even perfectly obvious, decision.

Chait concludes that “On most issues, Obama simply used his power the way any member of his party would have.” However, “On climate and health care, he bucked significant pockets of intra-party disagreement — not about policy goals themselves, which the whole Party shared, but of the prudence of accepting political risk to achieve them. Not coincidentally, suggests Chait, “these two episodes where Obama’s own intervention proved decisive happen to be the two largest pieces of his domestic legacy.”

Tip of the hat to the American Civil Liberties Union for their great work in fighting voter suppression. From Dale Ho’s “Four Bad Voter Suppression Measures We Have to Kill in Four Months“:

North Carolina. North Carolina’s sweeping voter suppression law, among other things, cuts early voting, bans same-day registration, and prohibits the counting of ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The ACLU and co-counsel, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, filed suit against this voter suppression, and on May 19 filed a motion to stop the law before the November election. A hearing on our motion is scheduled in federal court in North Carolina on July 7.
Arkansas. On April 24, the ACLU of Arkansas won a court order ruling that Arkansas’ strict voter ID law violates the Arkansas Constitution. The trial court, however, halted the decision, permitting the ID law to go into effect for the primary elections. That meant nearly 1,000 voters were disenfranchised. On June 24, the ACLU filed a motion with the trial court to lift the stay, and block the ID law for the November election. Meanwhile, the case is headed to the Arkansas Supreme Court.
Kansas. The ACLU is challenging Kansas’s dual registration system, which segregates voters into two separate and unequal classes: those who can vote in all elections (who need to show a photo ID when they vote), and those who can vote for federal offices only. On June 27, we filed a motion to stop this illegal system, as a violation of Kansas law. A hearing on our motion is scheduled for July 11 in Topeka.
Ohio. The ACLU is challenging Ohio’s elimination of a week of early voting, evening voting hours, all but one Sunday of early voting, and same-day registration. Yesterday we filed our motion in federal court to stop these cutbacks before the November elections.

The post goes on to note that the ACLU’s win vs. Iowa’s shameless voter purge program is being appealed to the state’s Supreme Court. The ACLU’s victory in striking down Wisconsin’s voter ID law is also being appealed in the federal Seventh Circuit court.
The ACLU doesn’t get as much news coverage as it used to. But it’s still providing critical leadership in the fight against voter suppression laws designed to disenfranchise minorities. Killing these suppression laws before election day is a tough challenge. But if it can be done the ACLU will find a way. For more information about their fight against voter suppression, click here.

Photograph by white house photographer Cecil Stoughton
In the photo above Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stands behind President Lyndon B. Johnson, as he signs the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964 — 50 years ago today. The act desegregated public facilities and began a profound transformation of American society toward racial equality. Credit Dr. King and the movement he led for providing the courageous leadership needed to make it happen. As Sheryll Cashin puts it in today’s New York Times, “And Presidents Kennedy and Johnson would not have advocated for the bill without being pressured to do so by a multiracial grass-roots movement.”
On May 29 the house where Dr. King was staying during the movement to desegregate St. Augustine was riddled with gunfire, but he was out at a speaking engagement. On June 11th he was arrested in a protest at St. Augustine’s Monson Motor Lodge. King returned to St. Augustine after the signing to protest against resistance to the Act and continued violence against the protesters. The Monson Motor Lodge was firebombed on July 24th because the owner complied with the new law. As King’s top aide, Rev. Andrew Young, who was brutally beaten at the town square on June 9th, explained, the St. Augustine campaign was “the only movement where our hospital bills were larger than our bond bills.”
JFK, before he was assassinated, and other Democrats along with LBJ, stood up and took a stand for the legislation, while Dixiecrats opposed the bill. Some Republicans like Senators Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits and Ken Keating and House Minority Leader Charles Halleck (pictured at far left) and others joined progressive Democrats in supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in stark contrast to today’s GOP, which overwhelmingly supports suppression of minority voters and opposes other measures to reduce racial discrimination.

Bill Scher’s “Why Democrats Are More United Than Republicans (And Why That’s Good)” at the Campaign for America’s Future provides a compelling takedown of the much-parroted “Dems in disarray” meme favored by conservative pundits. Scher takes particular issue with a recent Russ Douthat column arguing that Hillary Clinton’s persona is the only thing holding a fragile coalition of Democrats together.

That does not ring true. Signs of long-lasting Democratic unity abound…Unlike Republican Reps. Eric Cantor and Ralph Hall (and possibly Sen. Thad Cochran next week) no incumbent Democrats have been ousted in the 2014 primaries. Walter Shapiro of the Brookings Institution deemed the policy debates among the House Democratic primaries this year as so nonexistent that they amount to “a hefty dose of Xanax.”
And in 2012, only two Democrats lost primaries. One had ethics problems. The other was beat by a challenger on his left, but his district had become more liberal because its lines were redrawn, so it’s not much of an example of a progressive uprising.
Recent history of presidential primaries shows little evidence of Balkanization. President Obama did not suffer a primary challenge in 2012, nor did President Clinton in 1996. When presidential primaries were hard fought, in 2008 and 2000, the bruises did not prevent the party rank-and-file from coming together in the general election and winning the popular vote (notwithstanding the tiny but consequential Nader 2000 campaign).
Unity is the word not just on the campaign trail but inside the Capitol. In 2013, the Senate Democratic caucus broke the record for “party-unity votes,” in which a member votes with the majority of his or her party, with 94 percent. House Democrats were off their 2008 peak of 92%, but still tallied a strong figure of 88%.

Scher concedes, however, “While there is a basic ideological glue – belief in active government – that defines the Democratic Party, there are many areas of significant disagreement within the party’s big tent,” such as criticism of the Wall St. Bailouts, Social Security benefit modifications, carbon caps, the extent of tax hikes for the rich and trade policy. Also the “ideological range” in the Dems’ caucus is wider than that for the Republicans. Scher notes also that “the distance between Brat and Cantor is not as far as the distance between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Mark Pryor.”
But, argues Scher, “The Democratic Party is more politically united despite encompassing more ideological diversity.” Further,

…What keeps Democrats unified is not rigid political homogeneousness or leader worship, but a tolerance for differences of opinion and an acceptance of political pragmatism that many conservatives lack.
Does that dynamic make a strong stronger party for Democrats? Absolutely…Some of the left might chafe at the power of the corporate-friendly wing, but the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” wins some of these intra-party battles. For example, there have been no Social Security cuts under Obama. And fair trade advocates have held the upper hand to date in “fast-track” fight.
More often, the two wings hammer out compromises that adhere to liberal principles, such as with Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the Recovery Act. This is what effective governing parties do. As the Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it: “A party big enough to aspire to becoming a majority is a coalition of people and groups that don’t always see eye to eye.”

In stark contrast:

Meanwhile, the shrunken, ideologically purified Republican Party can’t govern its way out of a paper bag. Speaker John Boehner can only keep the government open by letting the Tea Party faction lead the party into a brick wall first. Moreover, while the right-wing keeps the party leadership on a short leash by winning scalps of Establishment favorites in primaries, some of those coups have been short-lived. What should have been easy Republican victories were given away in Delaware by nominating Christine O’Donnell, in Nevada with Sharron Angle, in Colorado with Ken Buck and in Indiana by firing incumbent Sen. Dick Lugar. The perpetual chasing of the Tea Party tail has left the Republican Party with 29% approval in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, 9 points lower than the Democrats.

Scher provides examples of Democratic primary challenges leading to electoral failure, noting that most of the challenges are not about ideology, but “perceived ethical failings or redrawn districts.” Better yet, while the GOP civil war rages on,

Democrats have gotten plenty done inside of a bigger tent thanks to a tolerance for differences of opinion and a willingness to compromise. Liberals have been able to keep conservative elements of the party in check, without scorched-earth primary challenges, through effective organizing around issues and winning arguments on the merits. And the 2016 presidential campaign begins with the Democratic frontrunner beating all possible Republican opponents handily.

Scher concludes, “That’s what deep party unity, solidly built on the parallel foundations of common belief and respect for differing views, will yield.”