Sure he did work with Eastland and it was probably justified in the context of the time but there was absolutely no point reminding primary voters about this in 2019. A politician isn’t obligated to blurt out everything about their history regardless of context.
Hey everyone, guess what! Trump is gaining.
Poll: Trump’s approval rating hits highest point of presidency
A sitting president could do so easily. Those guys will want appointments (like a brother in law for ambassador), and pork barrel funding for their districts. With the Dems controlling the House and the White House, they wont get any of that. McConnell had to blink on the last bill Pelosi needed, since several GOP senators signaled their willingness to cross over.
McConnell can only get away with so much due to the fact trump backs him. No trump, and I would not be shocked if the GOP votes McConnell out. Well, actually they will signal as much, and he will retire 'due to health reasons".
What about McConnell during the EIGHT Obama years?
By implication, you’re saying that Obama could have gotten more done by using the power of the presidency against Mitch?
Not being snarky or challenging… I’d really like to know if you think this would have been possible.
Amash represents Michigan. A state that Trump carried by around 10k votes. If Amash only registers to run in Michigan he could fuck Trump over.
Right, forming “alliances” with like-minded people. Like how hard is that? I mean AOC needs to form alliances with people in her own party who are vulnerable - who, if they lose, lose control of the House, thus rendering AOC completely and totally irrelevant. See, that’s how politics works. It’s a team sport - you can’t just score victories alone.
AOC and her Twitter posse can criticize Pelosi all she wants for passing the border funding bill. What she can’t say on Twitter, or anywhere else, is how she, Ilhar Omar, Rashida Talib, and others were going to strong-arm Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump into passing her version of the bill. Like it’s great that she knows how to use Twitter, but using Twitter isn’t legislating. Might be time for some of the more junior Democrats to start figuring it the fuck out.
This a thread about winning the presidency, no? AOC ain’t gotta do shit for that. The onus is on whomever is going to get the Dem nomination to make friends and lovers within the party.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1906/27/cg.02.html
…this…doesn’t sound like an unreasonable position. A position that has absolutely nothing to do with twitter, and absolutely everything to do with using the tools the House Democrats have to negotiate for a better bill. I don’t think its the junior Democrats who need to figure things the fuck out.
What she leaves out is the fact that the House and Senate were about to go on holiday recess, which meant that the funding would have run out and the very people she is trying to help would have quite likely been hurt even worse than they already were. The House Democrats had absolutely no leverage – none. You can argue that some Senate Democrats were too quick to agree with McConnell, and maybe there’s a kernel of truth, but the real problem is how the Republicans have for the past 8 years used the federal budget to hold the Democrats hostage pretty much every 3-6 months like clockwork.
I have no solutions for that other than voting the mother fuckers out of office, and the only way that can happen is for Democrats to pick and choose the fights the want to have and for reasons that make sense. I’d love to embarrass and shame Republicans as much as the next person, but holding up a bill to fund administrative services that are about to run out of funding is essentially using these migrants as emotional props, which kinda flies in the face of wanting to help them. Pass the damn bill and be done with it – it’s not like the conditions AOC are complaining about are going to go away anytime soon. She can complain about them once there’s more money going their way.
Well… it really is an unreasonable position. There was neither time nor political room to negotiate that Senate bill.
You may not know or remember that the House had sent up a different bill already and that the intractable Senate had stripped out the bits of the bill with higher accountability in them. And that there had already been talk of drastic cuts of recreational activites and other humane provisions at the facilities where children are being held due to “funding.” And that Pelosi, who can very well count votes, DID NOT HAVE THE VOTES for any alternate writing of the funding bill.
So yes, those junior Dems need to figure things the fuck out. Sometimes the stinky thing is much better than the unacceptable rotten thing.
You’re really not thinking here. It’s the coalition that matters, and people like AOC are absolutely part and parcel of any coalition that Democrats would need in order to drum up support for their candidate.
…ummm, she didn’t leave that out. Its in the transcript. They can delay recess.
Then lets pack up and go home. Why should the House Democrats attempt to do anything? Just give up. Doing nothing for the next two years and hope for the best at the next election is a terrible strategy.
Except there is every chance that Trump won’t get voted out of office, that the Senate will be returned again with a Republican majority, so if that happens what will “make sense” to do then? When do you actually start to fight back? You can’t afford to “cross your fingers” and hope that it all come right in 2020.
Who said it was about “embarrassing and shame?” It was about passing a better bill. Using the tools that the House has available to pass a bill with real accountability.
You should be expecting your representatives to do a fuck-ton more than just “complain.” People are suffering: people have died. AOC has done more to shine a spotlight on the camps than anything any other Democrat has done. Its incredibly dismissive to characterize that as “complaining.”
…nah, I don’t think they do. They’ve been marginalised by their very own leadership so why shouldn’t they speak out? They are representing the will of their constituents, they are doing their job. They think more could have been done. They’ve watched the House leadership capitulate over and over again. They weren’t wrong to speak out.
We all have our opinion on what will defeat Trump in 2020. I don’t think attacking those Junior Dems will do anything to help the Dems chances. Throwing them under the bus to “improve the centerist brand” throws all their supporters under the bus. You are telling them that “they don’t matter as much as those **white Trump voters **that we really really want.”
Mitch didnt try to shut down everything Dem during the Obama years. Note also that the dems controlled the senate for the first four of those years.
And yes, Biden knows where the skeletons are buried and many Senators owe him.
Let’s be frank. If Pelosi couldn’t negotiate it, AOC would’t have had a chance in hell.
Because you see, whatever the House put in the Senate can take out- or simply not pass.
Here, AOC is showing how naive she is.
Banquet Bear, your take on recent House history is mistaken. That’s not your fault, given news coverage and popular progressive opinion, but it’s not correct either. I’ll say one more time, a negotiated bill was not going to happen. Conditions in the detention centers would have worsened with no bill passed, and that worsening of conditions, because of the rules of American beltway journalism, would have been blamed on the Democrats.
So the tactic preferred by AOC and others, though absolutely well intentioned, would have led to a lose-lose for the detainees and the Democratic Party. Pelosi did the responsible thing, and where AOC et al fucked up was not in expressing their dissatisfaction but in claiming the leadership were “irresponsible.” These juniors are very smart people and should be listened to about policy and innovation, but they are comparative political naifs who need to learn from the professionals.
…what did Pelosi try to negotiate?
Look at the date of the transcript.
Pelosi backed down. There is nothing wrong with calling her out on that.
It’s not a bad thing. To paraphrase, “I got positive things accomplished when I had to work with avowed segregationists! Trump is a puppy dog compared to those hardcore guys.”
…in simpler words: its all about “the narrative.” “Don’t do the right thing because they will spin it to make it look like we did the wrong thing.”
Its this fear of the narrative that is entirely the problem. And that fear shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of how “messaging” works in the 21st century. AOC’s use of the word “concentration camp” was declared an utter failure by the pundits immediately after it happened. But it wasn’t a failure. It reset the debate. It changed the conversation. It moved the goalposts. You don’t have to let them control the narrative.
The “professionals” have decided not to impeach, they’ve decided not to hold anyone to account for refusing subpoena and refusing demands for information. Its all a deliberate strategy by “the professionals” to make as little trouble as possible to appeal to “the centre” and to win in 2020.
The “professionals” have decided to gamble. I think the “professionals” have gotten things very wrong. If it was just this bill in isolation I’d probably look at it differently. But it isn’t just this bill. The bill is just another concession in a long line of concessions. And if it all goes wrong in 2020 the Democrats have nowhere to go.
You think the moneyed class and the elite that fund both parties truly want the progressive wing to ascend? They need the votes, obviously, but they don’t want the far left empowered.