“Passing the smell test” seems to me a highly subjective judgment, basically saying “I think it stinks” but saying anything very specific.
As to gdave’s enumerated points:
“profoundly dishonest and ethical” Ha ha. You presume politics is honorable and ethical, which I find a profoundly naive assumption.
“Liz Cheney doesn’t even really gain that much by…” Again, silly. She gains a seat in the U.S.Congress that she almost certainly will lose if she stays a GOP loyalist, and she gets to vote pretty much as she wants to vote by running as a Dem.
“After those two years…” How young do you think she is? This situation could endure for several election cycles. I’d like the job of branding her in her future runs. “I stood up to the Trumpist party bosses who tried to destroy my career” would be one theme I’d hit hard. I think that would appeal to both sides–she could win a Senate seat, running and an Ind. in a three-way fight against a Dem and a GOP. I wouldn’t bet a lot against her.
“You still haven’t answered…” I haven’t–they’re trivial details, to be hammered out by experienced pols like Pelosi and Cheney in about 15 minutes. You’re bogging this discussion down in trivia in an attempt to make it seem far less feasible than it is. Pelosi deals with more complicated matters ordering breakfast every day. You make it sound like self-performed brain surgery. It ain’t.
Why would WY Dems go along? As I’ve explained patiently, they have nothing to lose, and they build a brick in their holding onto the House for a cycle (or two, or three, depending). Every D seat is one more small part of the majority, one fewer R seat that they have to worry about. That ain’t nothing, though you’re beinng very stubborn in insisting that it is.
This is where you seem to keep losing me. Having a D next to one’s name on a Fox News chyron doesn’t mean shit (hell, they’ll put it next to a Republican if they are currently in trouble), how they vote is what matters. Liz Cheney currently gets a 0% from Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign and 100% from the National Right To Life Committee, the Family Research Council, and Campaign for Working Families.
Do you think she’s going to suddenly do a 180 on her policies, as appalling as I find them, simply because you give her a new consonant to play with? I like Pelosi, but she’s not turning the daughter of Satan into AOC, no matter how good she is.
I think nothing of the kind. Far as I’m concerned, the voting of Reps from WY are antithetical to my wishes, and will be into the foreseeable future. ALL the Democrats could get out of Reps from WY in my lifetime or that of my grandkids will be to have them caucus with the Dems and help them maintain majority status in the House, and that’s all they’re going to get from Liz Cheney running and caucusing as a Democrat.
Well, again, her seat is only in jeopardy in the first place because she made a politically costly vote based on principle. I don’t think it’s “a profoundly naive assumption” to think she might actually care about her principles.
So, my first point was “profoundly naive”, and this point is “silly.” I’m not sure how much point there is to continuing this, but I’ll give it a go. If your plan works, she retains her seat. But, as I pointed out, multiple times, that seat doesn’t do her much good. She doesn’t get “to vote pretty much as she wants”. By your deal, she only gets to vote as she wants when her vote doesn’t matter. If her vote actually matters, your deal requires her to vote however Nancy Pelosi wants her to. And again, she’ll have no influence in the Republican caucus (traitor) and no influence in the Democratic caucus (opportunist who disagrees with literally everyone else in the caucus on almost everything and whose vote is already sewn up whenever it counts). Other than being able to say, “I’m a Member of Congress”, what does she get out of this.
You seem to be assuming that she manages even the first time to peel off enough never-Trumpers and gets enough Democrats to hold their nose and vote for someone they disagree with on almost everything, which I personally find very doubtful. As I noted above, I think her chances of retaining her seat in a crowded GOP primary are much better than winning in Wyoming as an opportunistic Democrat, and her career prospects as a principled conservative Republican, even if she loses her seat, are vastly better than as an opportunist party-switcher.
“I stood up to the Trumpist party bosses who tried to destroy my career” only works if she actually, y’know, does that. If instead she flees the party and runs as a Democrat, her only appeal is going to be to Democrats, with whom, again, she agrees on almost nothing substantive.
But assuming she does win in 2022 under your deal, what then? Again, she’ll be radioactive in Republican circles. She disagrees with the mainstream of the Democratic Party on virtually everything. Under the terms of your secret deal, as I pointed out above, she won’t actually be able to run as a principled independent, since she’ll have had to abandon her principles and vote against her publicly stated positions and against the will of the majority of her constituents every time there’s a close vote in the House. How does she win in 2024 and beyond? No one will trust her.
If these details are so trivial, why won’t you answer the question? I really don’t think I’m “bogging the discussion.” This is the entire crux of your deal, and you don’t seem willing or able to explain the practical details of how it would actually work.
I genuinely don’t want to bog down discussion, so I’m not going to respond to your characterizations of me. However, as to the substance, you’ve said that the deal where Cheney trades her vote for Democratic support is secret. So Wyoming Democrats, as far as they know, don’t gain a brick in holding onto the House. The fact that she enters Congress as a Democrat doesn’t in and of itself actually make a difference in who controls the House, much less what legislation gets passed. She still has to vote for Speaker, and by the terms of your secret deal, Wyoming Democrats have no reason to believe she’d vote for a Democrat. They have no reason to believe she’d ever vote for any Democratic legislation. They have no reason to believe she’d ever vote with the Democrats on any procedural votes. You might get some Democrats to vote for her if her Republican opponent in the 2022 general election is obnoxious enough (which is, granted, a very real possibility). But I think you’re going to have a lot of voter apathy among Democrats who will see no benefit to electing a “Democrat” who will vote with the Republicans on literally every vote. I just don’t think she can put together a winning coalition as a Democrat - and more importantly, I don’t think she’ll think that she can. Or that Pelosi will think it’s a plausible path, for that matter.
And Democrats seeking to tip the scales can do the primary-crossover move if they really care about Liz Cheney being the name in the ballot – though, as earlier mentioned, that sort of gaming of the primary seldom if ever really makes a difference, but at least it’s straightforward strategic voting.
You have explained nothing. You have built castles in the clouds while thinking you can live in them, while being condescending as anything. As for what Wyoming Democrats have to lose, their self-respect comes to mind. Then there’s the standard item one offers in a deal with the Devil.
No, actually, it couldn’t. I lived in northwestern Wyoming for 26 years; Kron lives in eastern Wyoming, Maybe you have to have lived there to fully grasp how batshit crazy Wyoming has become. It’s not that it’s the most conservative state in the U.S.; it’s that it’s gone so far off the rails that there were calls for the ever-conservative former US Senator Al Simpson to get kicked out of the GOP for being “too liberal.” Only about 20% of Wyoming voters are Dems, many if not most of them in Laramie, the home of the state’s only four-year university, and Jackson. Of 30 state senate seats, only 2 are held by Democrats; of 60 HR seats, only 7 are Dems. Even splitting the GOP vote would not result in a Democratic victory.
Trump is widely and deeply revered in Wyoming: As soon as Trump said, in January 6th speech,
“We got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world,” Trump said in the speech, singling her out as he urged the mob to march to the Capitol.
I’m not so sure. I was at that ‘protest’ in Cheyenne in January where Matt Gaetz was the featured speaker. There were only 3 or 4 hundred MAGAts in attendance. I’d call that a miserable showing since the weather was not at all bad for January.
After the election the Trump signage all but disappeared here in Cheyenne.
The Cheyenne area might be turning “Wyoming Purple”… But Johnson/Campbell/Converse/Crook/Weston counties sure aren’t. The mouth-breathing Trump Love is still strong as hell here. Fox News and all of its factless reporting is still on in every public place with a TV. And local Facebook communities are a toxic cesspool.
To the degree that your counter-argument makes a shred of sense, it is true that the biggest obstacle to my notion becoming a reality is that Wyoming Democrats may lack the necessary imaginative capacities that you’re exhibiting so boldly here. That is, I think it’s a fairly lucid and self-explanatory process, but persuading voters of its wisdom may not be so easy. It involves, for example, them accepting that one vote by a GOP rep in a Democratically-held is very often meaningless. Right now, they would have no way to believe that Rep. Cheney (R-WY) would ever vote for Pelosi as Speaker, and that no WY rep will ever support Pelosi in thei foreseeable future, but if Cheney were to strike a deal with Pelosi that says that she will support her on Speakership votes (in exchange for caucusing with the Dems, just one of the codicils that would take under 15 minutes for them to agree on) that Cheney woud balk at complying with her end of the deal? You seem to be arguing that she is a person of the highest principles and also a low-down, untrustworthy, amoral scumbag incapable of keeping her word on anything, and both at once. I have no problem assessing her as someone whose basic principles I disagree with thoroughly but who will reliably do what she has agreed to do with her political adversaries. The risks you keep describing, that she will find a little horsedealing with the Dems so objectionable that she will not be able to make herself do what she agrees to do, are very minor for the Dems: the result of Cheney’s unreliability is that 1) she votes contrary to her word, whch is exactly the way that any WY rep will vote anyway, and 2) the Dems will see “Oh, she lied to us!!” and cut her loose in two years, having lost exactly nothing.
As to the particulars of what her agreement with Pelosi would look like exactly, which I refuse to specify because it’s colossally obvious to me that any agreement can be struck with one’s political adversaries (always has been, always will be) and you’re simply trying to bait me into a discussion of these particulars as a diversionary tactic, I will note that one simple way (too simple) to do this is simply to give each party a certain number of vetoes over particular issues, and agreeing to exercise those vetoes in turn. So in super-simple form, taking about 15 seconds rather than the 15 minutes a more complicated agreement would require, it goes “OK, Nancy, I can vote however I like on anything, except you can tell me 10 times this year to change my vote, and I can overide your veto 5 of those times.” Well worth a seat in the House, which the GOP wants to take away from her.
I’m going to try to pick out a few points in there (and again ignore your repeated personal attacks on me).
That last bit is simply bizarre. This entire time, I’ve been assuming that Cheney does keep her side of the deal. Which is itself a problem, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out. If she votes as Pelosi directs instead of in accord with her conscience, the wishes of her constituents, and her understanding of the Constitution, and not incidentally in direct contradiction of her publicly stated positions, she sacrifices any pretense of being a “principled conservative”, while simultaneously being a traitor to the Republican Party and at best an opportunistic ally of the Democratic Party. And, again, you said upthread this deal would be secret, so the Democratic voters of Wyoming have no reason to think electing her would do them any good. And after one term of voting against her own positions on key votes, Republican voters in Wyoming, even the never-Trumpers, will have no reason to vote for her, since she’ll vote against them on key votes. She might get one more term (but, again, I think her chances of surviving a crowded Republican primary or even running as a principled conservative Independent in 2022 are far better than as an opportunistic “Democrat”), but then what?
Diversion from what? This is also simply bizarre. This is the whole crux of your deal. The question isn’t whether political opponents can cut deals (of course they can), the question is whether the specific deal you’re proposing makes sense to either side, which I don’t think it does.
I don’t think I’ve written anything here that can be interpreted as a personal attack --everything I’ve written in the previous post is directed to the ideas you are espousing, which i find flimsy, weak, and insubstantial. You might be a brilliant and deep thinker for all I know, and maybe I’m a doofus who doesn’t read English too good, but you’re not making much sense to me. For example, you write that I “said upthread this deal would be secret, so the Democratic voters of Wyoming have no reason to think electing her would do them any good.” I also said that SIMPLY HAVING HER CAUCUS WITH THE DEMS, AND ADD TO THEIR NUMBERS, contributes substantially IN ITSELF to persuading Dems that “Cheney D-WY” is a plus (the rare vote she casts at Pelosi’s direction would merely be an additional incentive). This is not “no reason.” It’s a pretty plain and clear reason that you, for reasons of your own ,have been choosing not to address. This is not an isolated example of your reasoning flaws through out this thread–you keep ignoring or misrepresenting my argument so you can divert and strawman it. I do not deign to point out all the ways you keep doing this, merely that you do.
Basically your “argument” boils down to your final line–“the question is whether the specific deal you’re proposing makes sense to either side, which I don’t think it does.” In other words, you don’t agree with me, so therefore you don’t agree with me. But you have yet to provide a plausible reason my proposed deal doesn’t make sense, just that to you it doesn’t. I will accept that as your reason for disagreeing–I don’t agree because it doesn’t make sense to me"–but you’ll have to provide some more substance to entice me to explain my argument much further.
I’ll grant you, “attack” was probably an overstatement. However:
As to your other other points:
I have, in fact, repeatedly addressed this. Having Liz Cheney in the House with “D” by her name does not in and of itself do actually do Democrats any good. It’s only useful for them if Cheney actually votes with them. And by your own words, the deal she’s supposed to make will be kept secret from the voters of Wyoming. There seems to be an odd disconnect here. Issues aren’t decided in the House by counting up the membership numbers of the caucuses. They’re decided by votes. And Wyoming Democrats would have no reason to expect Liz Cheney to vote any differently after the 2022 election than she had in her entire political career up to that point.
Well, since you won’t “deign” to tell me how I’m misrepresenting, strawmanning, or “diverting”, there’s no meaningful response I can make to those accusations.
I’ve provided you with an enumerated list. I get that you disagree with me, but since you won’t provide more substance to entice me, I agree there’s not much point in continuing this.
If someone else wants to pick up, have at, but I’m unlikely to continue engaging at this point.
Not disputing any of your contentions, but this snip seemed an apt spot to tack my comment onto.
May I humbly suggest we all begin using the word “reactionary” in most of the spots we’d traditionally have used the word “conservative”.
There is no longer anything “conservative” about these wannabe revolutionaries. “Reactionary” is the term of art for insane table-toppling right wingery. Which is that both the “mainstream” of the GOP and the Trumply followers have become.
I completely believe you. But I wouldn’t say Cheyenne is becoming purple. My guess is it has fewer crazies, and maybe a population with a slightly better education.
Helped by a growing population of Denver ex-pats willing to trade the commute for much lower property prices. And another perfect example that it isn’t a case of “red state v. blue state” in this country, but “urban v. rural”. Even in Wyoming, the more people there are, the bluer a place tends to be; Wyoming being the most rural of states, tends to be the reddest of states as well.