Thursday, November 8, 2018

Nancy Pelosi, Trump scandals, and progressive Democrats

Ian Millhiser of Think Progress posted a Twitter thread on Nancy Pelosi as the House opposition leader under Shrub Bush's Presidency. Unitil I got to Tweet 9 of 10, I thought he was contrasting Pelosi's previous willingness to actually fight for progressive goals.

Here's Tweet #1:
Here are Tweets #9 and #10:
I first thought in reading the first one that he was doing some kind of Game of Thrones mock rhetoric to drmatize the change in Pelosi's posture.

By the end, it just sounded like a typical condescending corporate Democratic sneer at progressives, dripping with contempt.

Pelosi has some other admirers, too:

Once again, here is what Nancy Pelosi herself is saying, as reported by Mike Lillis, Pelosi seeks bipartisan tone day after divisive midterms The Hill 11/07/18:
“We will strive for bipartisanship in the belief that we have a responsibility to seek common ground where we can,” Pelosi said during a packed press briefing just outside her office in the Capitol.

“Where we cannot, we must stand our ground,” she continued. “But we must try.” ...

Pelosi said she spoke Wednesday morning with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who will lead the GOP-controlled Senate in the next Congress, “as to how we could work together — especially on infrastructure.”

“That issue has not been a partisan issue in the Congress,” she said. “Over the years, we’ve been able to work together — regionally, across the aisle, across the Capitol and down Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I hope that we can do that, because we want to create jobs from sea to shining sea.”
Lillis' article reads like it could have been dictated by a corporate Democratic spokesperson. But that perspective seems obviously sensible to the Establishment press, so they don't need a lot of encouragement to write it up that way.

Lillis also writes:
Pelosi vowed strong oversight of the administration — before and after the midterm results were in — citing the constitutional “responsibility” of Congress as a check on the executive branch.

But she’s rejected calls from some liberal members to pursue impeachment hearings into the president — a message echoed by her top lieutenants.
Not for nothing, Trump is reinforcing Pelosi's pitch:
At a press briefing at the White House moments before, Trump offered a similar message of potential bipartisan cooperation.

“We have a lot of things in common on infrastructure. We want to do something on health care, they want to do something on health care,” Trump said. “There are a lot of great things that we can do together and now we'll send it up.”
This is a bad joke. The election was Tuesday, today is Thursday, and Trump has fired Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as Attorney General to obstruct justice in the Mueller investigation, a motivation that Trump has repeatedly described openly, though without using the legal phrase "obstruction of justice." And he staged an authoritarian scene worthy of Hungary's strongman Viktor Orbán by bullying CNN reporter Jim Acosta at a press conference, including declaring CNN an "enemy of the people," then banning him from the White House press pool.

The corporate Democratic advocates are saying they want to defer to Mueller on investigating corruption and other criminal conduct by Trump and his Administration. In bipartisan fashion (?!?), Trump escalates obstruction of justice by firing Sessions and is saying explicitly he could fire the whole Mueller team.

Politically, Pelosi saying she wants to defer any Congressional investigation of Trump Administration crime and corruption, is just a declaration of preemptive surrender. Trump is surely taking it that way. Every Republican in Congress understands it that way. And I hope every Democratelected to Congress understands it that way, including Pelosi herself. Because if they really don't think that's what it means, they must really be clueless.

But there's also a serious Constitutional duty at stake. The Congress, both House and Senate, have the responsibility to hold the Executive accountable before the law. Given the real scandals that we know about in the public record at this point, it really is their duty to do serious investigations. The fact that the Republicans don't take that seriously when the President is a Republican doesn't mean the Democrats should follow their example. In fact, it makes it more urgent for them to exercise that power and meet that responsibility.

I won't try to recount Pelosi's whole history as Democratic leader here. She did have a liberal voting record when she became Democratic Minority Leader in 2002. This looked like a step in the right directions. The Democratic habit for House and Senate leadership had been to pick Democrats from "purple" districts, the theory presumably being that Democrats from very competitive districts would present a more consensus face of the party than a more straight-line liberal. The downside was that they would potentially be made more politically vulnerable in their own districts if they acted as a strong party-line advocate.

During the campaign around California Republican Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant Proposition 187, Diane Feinstein felt the need to stress her opposition to immigration. Pelosi, on the other hand, more assertively called it out as a bad thing. (Jerry Brown, then a private citizen, opposed 187 as racist demagoguery.)

But let's go back to Millhiser's example of Pelosi's willingness to fight Bush on Social Security privatization. She was defending Social Security. A core New Deal program that is extremely popular, widely and rightly regarded as an essential part of America's retirement system. Defending Social Security shows that she was willing to defend a program that is popular even among conservatives. It's a good thing. But it doesn't constitute evidence that Pelosi is distinctly progressive in the sense we use the label in 2018.

The fact that some of her fellow Democrats wanted to help Bush cut Social Security benefits is a sign of how deeply conservative economic and social ideology had made inroads into the Democratic Party.

And, of course, Barack Obama as President tried repeatedly to strike a "Grand Bargain" with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare. An extremely bad idea, and one for which progressive Democrats criticized him. I don't recall Pelosi being aggressive in calling Obama out on that particular neoliberal dogma that he embraced.

I'll refer again to Ryan Grim's important report, We’ve Got People: Resistance and Rebellion, From Jim Crow to Donald Trump. He provides a preview in this article, Life After Trump: How Donald Trump Saved the Democratic Party From Itself The Intercept 11/06/2018. In the face of Trumpism - I think it's legitimate to call it a "fascist moment", though obviously not (yet) an overthrown of Constitutional institutions - what we've seen in 2016-2018 has been an upsurge in small-d democratic activism. And much of it has been channeled into the Democratic Party, which produced the House win this week and gains at the state level.

The Democrats can't just coast to 2020 and assume everything will be all right. They need to treat Trumpism and the Trumpified Republican Party as the threat to democracy they are will require more than recycling the ads and talking points of the last 20 years. Citizens United (2010) qualitatively increased the clout of billionaires in US politics. A grassroots based effort, like we've seen in 2018 and like Obama used in his 2008 campaign (but abaondoned as soon as he became President), including relying on grassroots fundraising rather than big donors, is not compatible with the kind of preemptive surrender Pelosi was announcing already on Tuesday.

I'll close by quoting tweets by David Sirota and Marcy Wheeler.>


Here's the perspective of a currently very popular American politician on these issues (Bernie Sanders responds to midterm elections CNN 11/07/2018):

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