Trump should be investigated. Impeachment has to be off the table.
Trump loves playing the victim. The moment the word impeachment is connected to his name we will never hear about any other action that Congress takes until 2028. It’s the worst possible strategy, politically. I know everybody’s still giddy, but seriously. It’s. the. worst. possible. strategy. politically.
At least right now. I wouldn’t rule out future Trump evil, especially with Miller advising/controlling him. But unless you have a minimum of eleven Republican senators in your pocket, impeachment won’t lead to conviction and the loss will doom the Dems just when they got close to the top. And if you have eleven Republican senators publicly declaring they will vote to convict, that world is so different from today we can’t see it from here.
Yeah, if impeachment gets brought up, it should be in response to something new and egregious (and has to be done with support from Republicans). If we see one raised to make up for lost time, it’s going to be seen as nothing more than political retribution and will be worse than useless.
But I’m 100% in agreement with the investigations. They are absolutely necessary, and it sounds like fighting corruption is going to be a goal of this new Congress, so we should expect to see them.
What I want to see is a series of single-issue bills where the Democratic position has broad public support. Single-issue is important, because it focuses the attention on the one thing and prevents representative or senator from voting against the bill because of something unrelated. I believe this is why omnibus bills are difficult to pass and aren’t useful for leveraging political power.
Single issues, for example in no particular order: healthcare, immigration, gerrymandering, tariffs, war powers, etc. Each single-issue bill should have majority support within the Democratic caucus and be broadly popular with the public. Each of these bills should be worked through its own committee in parallel. (I don’t want to hear we couldn’t do X because we did Y–there’s over 300 Democrats in both houses of Congress. Use them.) Democrats need do good work and show it. Then make Republicans go on record with their votes. And make the President sign or veto it.
We either get important legislation passed or a clear record of Democrats trying to do something and Republicans blocking it. This is what we run on in 2028.
As best as I can tell, this is the problems Democrats ran into during the first two years of Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s terms. They spent 2 years getting bogged down in increasingly detailed minutia and wasting times debating those things, getting nothing else done. The failed Hillarycare and ultimately successful (but at what price?) Obamacare led to the 1994 and 2010 red waves / tsunamis. We need to avoid that scenario.
As best as I can tell, it was a “trying to herd cats” type of problem. They would change something to appease one lawmaker, only for another to disagree on some detail, change it again, and so on. That, and they kept insisting they do it “bipartisan” by refusing to get rid of the filibuster. I could very well be wrong, but that’s what I recall.
What’s the lesson? They need to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate. Having the filibuster didn’t stop Trump from proceeding with his worst excesses. Which means that in practice the only thing the filibuster is good for is making it a requirement the Democrats have 60 senators to get anything done while not hindering Republicans in a similar manner. It’s like playing a football game where one of the rules is that the Elephants get to play with 11 players on the field while the Donkeys only get 10.
The thing to keep in mind here is that there is a great deal of diversity within the Democratic Party. That’s why it took months of negotiations for Obama and Biden to find a version of their signature bill that almost all Democrats can agree on. We’re not going to do that for legislation that won’t pass.
If we do pass some sort of legislation that gets vetoed, the implication is that we are promising the voters that we will pass that legislation in the next Congress, when a Democratic President will sign it.
So what are we proposing for healthcare, for instance? Are we doing Medicare For All or some sort of public option deal?
Imagine that you are a Representative with strong feelings one way or the other on this matter. If the Democrats are in power, and you find that the majority of the caucus disagrees with you, you might well vote for your less preferred option just to get something passed that will improve the lives of your constituents. But in this scenario, all that voting for the less preferred option does is lock it in as Democratic policy for 2028, when the newly elected Congress might feel differently than this one.
I think our best bet is to go with Hakeem Jefferies’ 83 page plan, focusing on passing only laws which will just undo obviously bad things Trump has done and return to the Biden-era status quo, without implying that that status quo is actually our end goal.
What major good stuff have the GOP congress managed to pass? The Republicans have the same issues. Look at the battles over the Speaker.
Are you talking Sanders failed idea he called Medicare For All? (which had nothing whatsoever to do with Medicare). Or actually medicare for everyone? My idea is to lower the age for Medicare down to 55 to start. But American voters do not want a Single payer system or socialized medicine.
I like it.
Note that trump is making threats about Congressional investigations-
WASHINGTON — Previewing the partisan battles to come, the White House fired a warning shot at House Democrats’ top investigator Wednesday.
The Trump administration is “monitoring” Democrats’ “abusive and capricious threats” to launch congressional probes, White House counsel Will Scharf said in a letter to Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., who is poised to become chairman of the powerful Oversight Committee starting in January.
Bernie Sanders is pushing for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55 on his social media. If you can’t get agreement on that, negotiate for 60 , anything, really. It will be good for the country and a winning political move with an age group of voters, Democrats and Republicans both, who are getting hammered by brutally high insurance premiums.
Make Trump and congressional Republicans oppose it and watch the Dems win the White House and get to 60 senators in 2028.
Dems should do what Newt Gingrich did in 1994: Get a list of 10 liberal/progressive policy positions which poll at 60% or better, call it the Contract With Americans, and pass bills, daring the President to veto.
Sure. But going over again and again how the Dems did not do much before (actually, they got a lot done) is not helping. Focus on next year, not last decade.
About six-in-ten U.S. adults (62%) say they favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 40% who strongly back the idea.
Immigration Reform-
Please tell me whether you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose each of the following proposals. Allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time
The table presents data collected from June 2016 through June 2026, asking whether respondents favor or oppose allowing immigrants living in the United States illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.
That is hard to read, but 42% Strongly favor, and 33% favor.
Higher taxes on the rich-
With Congress considering legislation that would extend the tax cuts passed during the first Trump administration, a majority of Americans continue to say taxes should be increased, not decreased, for large businesses and corporations. They also say this for household income over $400,000 a year… More than six-in-ten U.S. adults (63%) say tax rates on large businesses and corporations should be raised. This includes 34% who say they should be raised a lot.
Very interesting but long set of articles about the Midterms-
So I think that the real test for the Democrats is whether they can go full-in on demonstrating to America that they are one hundred per cent committed to a democracy that’s truly representative. In Congress, a ramped-up version of H.R. 1 needs to be the first thing. H.R. 1 was John Sarbanes and then Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill, which they succeeded in passing in 2019 and again in 2021, but it died in the Senate both times. It was the most ambitious democracy-reform package we’ve seen since the Civil War. It had changes to the way campaigns were funded. It had gerrymandering reform. It had the John Lewis Voting Rights Act built in. It was kind of a multifaceted objective to get us a representative democracy. That should be Day One. But I think they need to marry that with real substantive changes, so people see things like something dealing with the tariffs immediately.