Monthly Archives: July 2022

Stuck in a mouse trap

Posted by on 2022-07-28 No comments

Republicans, Republicans, and more Republicans have joined forces to create a new political party — for Democrats.

This new party, calling itself Forward, will initially be chaired by Andrew Yang, who in 2020 posed as a Democrat for the sake of the primary, and Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and EPA Secretary under George W. Bush.

Forward joins forces with two previous GOP attempts to splinter the centrist wing of the Democratic Party: Renew America, launched in 2021 by a group of Reagan/Bush Republicans; and Serve America, another Republican group founded by Morgan Stanley lawyer Eric Grossman with [George W.] Bush administration figures.

Forward is an idea Christine Todd Whitman has been pushing for at least a year, usually by painting Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party like Jim Jones’ destruction of his own cult.

But rather than simply throwing “rational Republicans” a lifeline, Whitman’s other goal is to hollow out the Democratic Party by peeling away as many centrists as possible from the Democratic Party’s supposed “radical left.” When NPR host Steve Inskeep asked Whitman what she wanted from Democrats, she answered: “We want Democrats, when faced with a radical left candidate from the Democrat Party, to vote for a centrist Republican.”

Andrew Yang might have run as a Democrat in 2020 but earlier this month he showed up at a far-right event called Freedom Fest 2022 to rub elbows with both American and European fascists and to introduce them to his new project with a talk, “Forward — Notes on the Future of our Democracy.”

If you were paying any attention to the Republicans’ CPAC (Conservative Political Action) Conference in Budapest last May, many of the same elements attended Freedom Fest 2022. But instead of painting themselves as “rational Republicans” as they’re now doing with Forward, at CPAC they were fawning all over Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party — precisely because of its illiberal policies.

Fidesz, which is now a hard right Christian nationalist party, originally started out as a center-right coalition offering a “big tent” for both right-leaning liberals and far right nationalists. Over time, Fidesz has become increasingly repressive, antisemitic, and fascistic — so much so that last week, after Viktor Orban delivered a speech warning of the dangers of “race mixing,” one of his long-time advisors resigned from Fidesz, slamming Orban’s remarks as “pure Nazi text worthy of (Nazi propagandist) Goebbels.”

Whether the Republican Party’s new Forward movement will be an oasis of sanity for “rational Republicans” or a tasty cheese trap for Democrats who have to compete in Red districts, Forward is likely to suffer the same fate as Fidesz because the people and organizations who created Forward are just as unscrupulous and authoritarian as the orange meanie they created but can’t control.

If Yang and Whitman’s project goes anywhere — and that’s a big if — no doubt a number of fickle Democrats would be tempted to jump ship and join Forward. And good riddance. But if history offers any sort of guide, the Democratic Party would then try to staunch the hemorrhaging by moving even further to the right itself, creating an even more unfriendly climate for progressives.

This is why progressives — presently stuck in the Democratic Party’s mouse trap — will be forced to leave the Democratic Party sooner or later. Because America doesn’t need a second centrist party half as much as it needs one that represents working class people, the poor, and the marginalized.

GOP Sheriffs: Start the Steal

Posted by on 2022-07-22 No comments

A couple of years ago Massachusetts state representatives Antonio Cabral and William Straus sponsored H.5083, An Act Relative to Polling Place Security and Integrity. The bill limits sheriffs and deputies from policing polling places unless both local police and the secretary of public safety request assistance. The bill went nowhere.

Massachusetts law already authorizes police to preserve order at polling places, but the bill was filed only after Donald Trump began laying the groundwork in August 2020 for “Big Lie” accusations of voter fraud — three months before the election — boasting to FOX’s Sean Hannity that “we’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling stations sniffing out voter fraud. Trump’s demand for sheriffs to oversee the 2020 election was clearly intended to recycle time-tested racist and authoritarian voter intimidation and suppression tactics.

No sooner had H.5083 been filed when Bristol County’s scofflaw sheriff — and then-state Trump campaign director — Thomas Hodgson promised to defy the law if enacted. “No legislator is going to tell me when I can and cannot respond to someone who needs protection,” Hodgson told the Boston Herald.

Though still smarting from the loss of his 287(g) ICE program, Hodgson hasn’t dropped his anti-immigration rhetoric. But now he’s focused on enabling GOP voter suppression and ballot box tampering.

Hodgson’s new project is Protect America Now. On the surface, PAN’s leadership looks like another motley Hodgson crew of faux-patriotic Constitutional sheriffs. PAN members include an additional 69 far-right sheriffs, some with Oathkeeper affiliation.

But the brains behind PAN is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative and acolyte of Karl Rove, long involved with numerous voter suppression efforts. A while ago I investigated Sproul and Kory Langhofer, a Trump Stop the Steal lawyer also involved with PAN, both of whom share the same office address.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) has connected Protect America Now, the Constitutional Sheriffs Association (CSPOA), and TrueTheVote in resurrecting Trump’s plan to have sheriffs intervene in the next election.

But by “intervention” we’re now talking about sheriffs seizing voting machines.

In June, PAN spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb, announced the creation of an “election integrity” project that will funnel reports (no doubt as ridiculous as those from Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell) to sheriffs for “quick evaluation of incoming information.” And last week at the FreedomFest 2022 conference in Las Vegas CSPOA founder Richard Mack announced that sheriffs would actually seize voting machines.

Massachusetts voters have reason to fear that Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, ever the Trump sycophant, would put his deputies at Trump’s disposal as enthusiastically as he tried to use his inmates to build Trump’s wall.

Hodgson did not appear on the speakers list of the FreedomFest 2022 conference but there is a gap in his social media posts between July 13-16. I have called, emailed, and texted Jon Darling, Hodgson’s media representative, to confirm if Hodgson attended FreedomFest. So far, nothing.

In any case, if we want to prevent the theft of voting machines (and elections), it’s time to dust off Cabral and Straus’s bill keeping our increasingly partisan and authoritarian sheriffs out of polling places.

And then we need to send Hodgson packing in November.

Fighting Fire the Wrong Way

Posted by on 2022-07-17 No comments

The Democratic Party is the only thing standing in the way of the Republican Party replacing America with a Christian theocracy.

And that is an absolutely terrifying thought.

The geriatric Democratic Party leadership — faced with an ongoing Republican coup, a Christian nationalist Supreme Court, dramatic assaults on civil liberties and separation of church and state, a war in Ukraine, energy price spikes, galloping inflation, the possibility of a recession, and more mutations of the COVID virus — well, they’ve certainly had their hands full.

But they’re fighting a national five-alarm fire with a home extinguisher.

Rather than leveraging the tools of a government still in power, Democrats have refused to enforce party discipline on Democratic Senate free agents like Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema, abolish the filibuster, prosecute January 6th insurrectionists, expand the Supreme Court, or employ the considerable powers of the Presidency to preserve what’s left of American democracy. There is no presumptive Democratic candidate for President in 2024 and no apparent plan to replace the many geezers in Democratic House and Senate leadership roles.

There’s also no way Joe Biden can run and win the next presidential election. GOP hostility is a given, but many Democrats are worried that Biden & Co. are not up to the many challenges and disasters facing the country. Biden would be 82 if he actually began a second term as President. But who wants him? Not GOP voters, and not engaged progressive Democrats.

Merely competent, Biden has exhibited few of the leadership skills necessary to pull the country back from The Abyss. He is not a reassuring presence, as FDR or even Jimmy Carter were. His public addresses have been few and far between and he and the Democratic Party he leads have backtracked on almost every progressive promise ever made.

Right down the line — canceling student debt, expanding Medicare, enacting police reform, bolstering voting rights, shrinking the Pentagon budget — the Democratic House may have put on legislative dinner theater, but the Senate has done little to advance these bills. Is Chuck Schumer really less gifted than Mitch McConnell? Or is there simply a lack of will when it comes to full-throated support for Democratic policies like racial equity and abortion rights? — values once regarded as mainstream but now apparently too “far left” for some Democrats. A 2019 article in The Atlantic by Peter Wehner enumerates many of the fears of these Democrats who have internalized conservative claims that “self-styled progressives” from the “Far Left” are “taking over” the Democratic Party.

But that’s nonsense, say progressive Democrats. NY Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fires back on the “Far Left” label with: “The extreme left is taking over WHERE. In Texas, Republicans passed a law allowing rapists to sue their victims for getting an abortion. Can anyone name a ‘far left’ policy that extreme implemented anywhere? We can’t even get our party to import cheaper RXs from Canada.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s complaint raises the bigger issue that you can’t get Democrats to take strong action on even wildly popular issues. Take the worst of recent Democratic losses — abortion. Democrats lost abortion because they didn’t try hard enough to keep it.

For years Democrats refused to formalize abortion rights into law. Asked if his administration would fight for the Freedom of Choice Act — which he had promised to do as a candidate — President Obama told CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry that it “is not the highest legislative priority.” Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate was a long-time foe of abortion. Nancy Pelosi famously argued that “of course” you can be [both] a Democrat and against abortion.

Like Obama, the younger Biden also refused to support abortion rights. “I do not view abortion as a choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy,” Biden was quoted in a videotaped interview with Texas Monthly. “I think it should be rare and safe […] I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions.”

Even after the leak of the draft overturning Roe v Wade, the Democratic Party went out of its way to undermine pro-choice Democrat Jessica Cisneros in a primary contest with Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat being currently investigated in an illegal scheme with Azerbaijani energy interests.

There’s no denying that budgets are expressions of priorities. While there never seems to be much money for the social safety net, expanding healthcare, subsidizing education, making vaccines available to poorer nations, or providing debt relief for our own students, somehow Democrats managed to scrounge together an extra $53 billion lying around the house to give to defense contractors for the Ukraine war. And the war is just getting started.

This is in addition to the record $800 billion Pentagon budget passed by a three-to-one majority by the Democrat-controlled House. Representative Andy Levin, a member of the Progressive Caucus, expressed his dismay: “On the whole, the National Defense Authorization Act exemplifies the basic fact that we spend far too much on military-first solutions and far too little on diplomacy and on human needs at home and around the globe.”

Even our foreign policy under a Democratic President has not departed considerably from that of the Trump administration. While Trump (and Bush before him) may have glimpsed a soul in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, Biden is no slouch when it comes to sucking up to autocrats and repressive regimes.

Biden’s recent hat-in-hand trip to the Middle East was an embarrassment. Instead of penalizing Israel for killing American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, Biden gave it an extra billion dollars in military aid and agreed to restrict the rights of Americans who support boycotts against Israel’s Apartheid-style occupation of the West Bank. And by the time he got to Saudi Arabia, rather than sanctioning the Saudi regime for the gruesome murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, Biden allowed himself to be lectured by Khashoggi’s killer in order to extract Saudi concessions to produce more oil.

If Democrats think that they can run Biden or continue to limp along with leaders like Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, and Clyburn, they are mistaken. Yet we are sure to hear that “now is not the time” to let a new crew steer the ship of state. Some new iteration of an uninspiring “Better Deal” or “Build Back Better” campaign will be unloaded on voters and we will be reminded how competently Democratic septuagenarians and octogenarians saved the economy from calamity and kept thousands from dying of COVID.

And they’re not totally wrong. But what American voters want is not mere competence but boldness. And here’s why.

The fact is, no one has much faith that American democracy as it now exists can survive with perpetual gridlock, such intense political divides, endless conflicts between state and federal courts and law, and ongoing assaults on people of color and sexual minorities. To this, throw in the fact that no solution to this stalemate is possible under our deeply flawed, deeply destabilizing, and deeply anti-democratic Constitution.

We are in the midst of a Constitutional crisis not so much because one party figured out how to sabotage it but because the Constitution itself is such a mess. Until this document is shredded and re-written, we can have no political stability.

And this is precisely why American voters are always seeking bold change instead of unexciting competence. Like it or not, setting fire to the country does constitute bold change. If Democrats want to compete, then, where are their bold ideas? Purposely thrown overboard as “too far left.”

I fear that the potential of the idealized “America” which most of us grew up with and truly love will be gone in a few years — permanently disfigured by Christian nationalists and abandoned by those who couldn’t bring themselves to fight harder to hold onto it.