he's looking like the 2019 GSW warriors. that fall off is TOUGH
it was all good a cycle ago
2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races
- Thread starter mc_brew
- Start date
oh god damn...this is BAD 
Bruh which is it? You tout single dollars or you can't raise money?
@dj-method-x @wire28 @Return to Forever @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @BigMoneyGrip @Lucky_Lefty @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @88m3
Bruh which is it? You tout single dollars or you can't raise money?
@dj-method-x @wire28 @Return to Forever @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @BigMoneyGrip @Lucky_Lefty @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @88m3
Ima need y’all to leave my knicks aloneBiden is the knicks status, living off name alone and wont win anything in the near future
Bernie is GSW, blew it in 2016 and the window is now closed
we going through tough times. We got mods that’ll hit you with ban hammer
makes sense
oh god damn...this is BAD
Bruh which is it? You tout single dollars or you can't raise money?
@dj-method-x @wire28 @Return to Forever @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @BigMoneyGrip @Lucky_Lefty @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @88m3
yeesh. i had some "sponsored" ad pop up on my facebook yesterday with bernie pleading for money so they could hit some monetary goal. i didnt know his pockets was hurting like that tho
sounds like the bros need more $27 donations
Eugene with the law
Never Trumpers have a decision to make
Eugene Robinson
Never-Trump Republicans and independents may be shocked to hear this, but the Democratic Party is likely to nominate a Democrat for president. That means they’re not going to nominate someone who thinks exactly like a Never-Trump Republican.
Break out the smelling salts. I think several refugees from the GOP, pontificating on Twitter and the nation’s leading op-ed pages, just fainted dead away.
I, for one, have pretty much had it with the chorus of center-right voices braying that the Democrats are heading for certain doom — and the nation for four more years of President Trump — if the party picks a nominee who actually embraces the party’s ideals. Elections are choices. These Never Trumpers will have to make one.
Anyone who watched last week’s two-night candidates’ debate should be confident that the eventual Democratic nominee is virtually certain to support universal health care, comprehensive and compassionate immigration reform, reasonable gun control, measures to address climate change and bold steps to address income inequality. No, this is not a Republican agenda. Outcasts from the GOP will have to decide whether to accept it, in the interest of ending our long national nightmare, or reject it and stick with a president who kowtows to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
But don’t blame Democrats for supposedly driving moderate voters into the arms of Trump. For one thing, if Never-Trump Republicans were such brilliant political analysts, they’d never have lost control of their party to Trump in the first place.
For another, polls show that the Democratic agenda has broad public support. Yes, Trump is going to yell “socialism.” But Democrats could nominate the ghost of Ronald Reagan and Trump would still try his best to paint the apparition red. That’s his only play, whether the nominee is comfy-slipper Joe Biden, firebrand Bernie Sanders or any of the others in between.
It should surprise no one that the rhetoric in the debate was aimed at the Democratic base because, duh, that’s who decides the outcome of Democratic primaries. Nor should anyone be surprised when the eventual nominee tacks toward the center for the general election. Every winning presidential candidate I can think of has done that — with the exception of Trump.
Which brings me to another reason those demanding a super-cautious, mealy-mouthed Democratic nominee should spend some time in silent reflection. I believe Trump’s improbable election was possible because the nation is undergoing a political realignment in which the traditional left-to-right spectrum is being shifted in ways not yet fully understood. I don’t claim to have accurately charted the new landscape, but I seriously doubt that aiming for the center point of the old, obsolete spectrum will get you anywhere.
It is true that the Democrats who won House seats in Trump-leaning districts last fall emphasized some elements of the party’s program and de-emphasized others. I assume they’ll do the same thing when they seek reelection in 2020. But it is also true that Hillary Clinton would be president today if the Democratic base had turned out in bigger numbers in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And, for the record, she did win the popular tally by nearly 3 million votes.
It should be taken as a given than Trump’s hardcore base will show up to vote for the incumbent who has called himself “your favorite President, me!” The Democratic base had better be at least equally motivated to cast its ballots — especially in blue bastions such as Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia. Which means the party had better give those Democrats something, and someone, to vote for.
I hope the ancien régime Republicans — or, I guess, former Republicans — are serious when they talk about what a danger Trump is, both foreign and domestic, and how urgent it is to get him out of the White House. Do they think it would really be such an awful thing for more people to get health care? For migrant children to be treated like children, not taken from their families and caged in squalor? For universal background checks for gun purchases, supported by something like four-fifths of Americans, to be made law? For the United States to rejoin the Paris climate accord and stop artificially boosting the coal industry? For some effort to be made to address levels of inequality that would make Gilded Age titans blush?
That’s what the Democratic nominee is going to stand for, because that’s what loyal Democratic voters stand for. The party should welcome refugee Never Trumpers with open arms. But they can’t be Never Democrats, too.
Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her colleagues in a private meeting Thursday that she thought she had a deal this week with her longtime ally, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer: She would ensure passage of a more liberal border funding bill in the House, and he would back her up by persuading Democratic senators to fight for it.
Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, she was blindsided. Nearly all Senate Democrats voted for a Republican-backed bill that kneecapped the House and marked the most embarrassing defeat for Pelosi in the six months since Democrats took over the chamber.
“Schumer destroyed all our leverage on Wednesday by not being able to hold his people,” said a senior House Democratic aide.
Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, believed Pelosi failed to deliver on a deal of her own. After House moderates revolted Thursday, Democrats had to discard a plan to send the bill back to the Senate before an end-of-month deadline.
“They’re blaming everyone but themselves,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. Contrary to Pelosi’s private assertions, the aide said, House leaders never asked Schumer to withhold votes in the Senate.
The breakdown between Pelosi and Schumer revealed the extent of the raw divisions among congressional Democrats and raises the possibility of more skirmishes to come as Congress barrels toward funding and debt ceiling deadlines this fall. Democrats in both chambers agree they have to be in strategic lockstep to have any hope of besting President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The sudden, bitter dispute between the two most powerful Democrats in the country is particularly remarkable given their long history of cooperation — standing arm-in-arm through some of the most partisan moments in Trump’s presidency, including the 35-day partial government shutdown.
This account of the falling-out between Pelosi and Schumer is based on interviews with 18 Democratic lawmakers and aides, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe internal discussions in the weeks leading up to Thursday’s vote.
“The Senate Democrats did us a huge disservice,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The benefit to having one chamber controlled by Democrats is you have people who can fight and win. But that requires the people in the minority chamber to also fight, even if they lose.”
But Jim Manley, who was communications director for former Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid, said, “I don’t quite understand what the House folks were hoping for here. . . . They should have acted on this bill weeks ago.”
“These things happen,” Manley added. “The tension comes from the difference in the rules. . . . The House also has always had a much more diverse caucus than the Senate, and that makes dealing with the House from the perspective of the Senate leader much more difficult.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), shown here outside the House chamber on June 3, said this week that “Senate Democrats did us a huge disservice” in a dispute over border funding. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
The whole mess could have been avoided, according to multiple Democratic aides on both sides of the Capitol. The $4.6 billion emergency spending bill for the humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border will provide extra money for agencies overwhelmed by the influx of Central American migrants at the southern border.
Many lawmakers favored attaching the border funding to a must-pass disaster aid bill that cleared Congress earlier this month. But members of the progressive group and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, another group closely engaged on border issues, were wary of backing any hastily negotiated deal.
That left the border bill adrift and handed more control to McConnell, who could determine when and how the legislation was considered in the Senate. And as June wore on and the border crisis deepened, House lawmakers withdrew as they negotiated among themselves. That was, in part, due to the two caucuses pushing fiercely for tighter strings on any border money.
As talks languished, McConnell announced in mid-June that he would put a border bill on the Senate floor before the July recess. Senate Democrats decided they had a choice: negotiate, or be forced to approve GOP legislation.
They chose the former, and two of the longest-serving members of Congress, Sens. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), cut a $4.6 billion deal with outlines sketched out during a joint trip the two senior appropriators made to the Paris Air Show.
Compared to a White House proposal, the compromise bill was viewed as a solid victory by most Senate Democrats. The bill made sure migrants would receive humanitarian aid while allocating no new funding for migrant detention beds; had a strict prohibition on using the funding for a border wall or to bulk up immigration enforcement; and established new standards for facilities while also delivering funding for immigration judges and $30 million in grants to nonprofits caring for migrants.
The deal had Schumer’s blessing, and it passed the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 19 on an overwhelming 30-to-1 vote. Only Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a staunchly liberal critic of the Trump administration, opposed it.
“I think he was very antsy and wanted to go and was not willing for Pelosi to work through her internal caucus issues,” a second House Democratic aide said of Schumer. “It wasn’t that we weren’t interested; I think that we had boxes we needed to check.”
Finally, on June 20, House negotiators had a border bill they thought they could persuade Democrats in their chamber to pass. Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) presented the legislation to the Hispanic Caucus and filed it the next day. It eliminated funding for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement back pay as well as for Defense Department border operations, and it further tightened the administration’s ability to shift money around.
Meanwhile, new reports of poor conditions for migrant children herded inside Customs and Border Protection facilities further increased pressure on Democrats — and they pressed for even more changes, ensuring that migrants were subject to specific standards of care. Jayapal and progressives worked through the following weekend to secure changes from appropriators.
At first, Democratic negotiators refused the changes. But Jayapal and some in the Hispanic Caucus were able to show that the bill would not pass without their support, angering some in leadership as progressives defended their tactics as vital to protecting migrant children.
McConnell, meanwhile, made clear the Senate was only days away from voting on his chamber’s bipartisan bill, and Pelosi and Schumer started discussing the endgame.
According to House officials, Schumer encouraged Pelosi to pass the more liberal bill in her chamber on Tuesday, the day before the Senate border vote, to keep Schumer’s own members from backing the Senate immigration deal. The idea, the officials said, was to force McConnell to make more concessions to Democrats, and Pelosi proceeded to spend her Tuesday muscling the bill through the House — personally convincing liberals who still wanted more provisions that this was their only shot to improve the Senate bill.
Throughout, she cast the fight for the House provisions in lofty terms, calling their adoption a “moral imperative” and denigrating the Senate bill as the “path of least resistance.”
“I think she shared a lot of the frustration and disappointment of the progressives,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif), a liberal ally of Pelosi’s. “I think she is as emotional and horrified as anyone at what’s going on the border.”
But at the same time, Pelosi, Lowey and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) were also telegraphing to their members that the Senate bill would ultimately be acceptable.
“The Senate has a good bill; our bill is much better,” Pelosi told her members at a Tuesday caucus meeting. Said Hoyer to reporters the same day: “We think it’s not as good as our bill but not a bad bill.”
On Wednesday, Schumer, Pelosi and Lowey met before attending a joint news conference on election security, shortly after Pelosi ended a phone call with Trump, who pushed her to accept the Senate bill. The three agreed on a strategy of sending the bill back to the Senate in hopes of forcing a quick negotiation, according to an aide familiar with the exchange.
In the meeting, Schumer rattled off the list of wins his colleague secured in the Senate bill. Pelosi and Lowey agreed the bill was good, according to a Senate aide familiar with the exchange. But Schumer also said the House bill was preferable, a House aide added, so Pelosi and her team still expected Schumer would play hardball to win more concessions.
Those mixed messages, and the bipartisan Senate committee vote, sent the message to Republicans that they had little reason to negotiate further. McConnell had another card to play as well: The presidential debates Wednesday and Thursday took seven Democratic senators away from Washington. When time came to vote on the House version of the border bill, Democrats could muster only 38 votes — short of what they would need to block passage of the Senate bill.
When it came time to vote on the Senate version, only six Democrats withheld their votes. The rest were absent or voted for it — including Schumer.
Pelosi and those in her leadership circle were shocked. To them, Schumer had given McConnell a nuclear weapon — the ability to brag that his legislation had overwhelming bipartisan support and should therefore pass the House.
The next day, Pelosi walked into the two-hour-long leadership meeting saying Schumer couldn’t keep his members in line. One senior Democratic aide called it “a betrayal”; another lawmaker called it “a broken deal.”
But to those in Schumer’s orbit, the Wednesday bipartisan Senate vote should not have come as a surprise. In their view, the House had gone AWOL on border negotiations for weeks and should have known the depth of Democratic support for the bill following the 30-to-1 committee vote.
In addition, according to Senate officials familiar with the talks, neither Pelosi or any other House Democrat at any point explicitly asked Senate Democrats to block the Senate version of the bill. The real leverage point, they believed, would come after the House sent back an amended Senate bill on Thursday — forcing a negotiation with Republicans.
Instead, Democratic centrists in the House who were fortified by the overwhelming Senate vote blocked that strategy, touching off an intense round of finger-pointing.
During one private meeting this week, some top Democrats mocked Schumer for speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday alongside a horrifying photo of a drowned migrant father and daughter while appearing at the same to be undermining the House’s efforts to make the bill better for children.
Others whispered that Senate Democrats were “smelling the jet fumes” of the July 4 holiday recess — or simply didn’t want to complicate the schedules of their colleagues running for president who needed to attend the debate in Miami on Wednesday and Thursday.
In a statement Friday, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said that “the Speaker’s focus has always been on Mitch McConnell. He shortchanged the children when he said ‘get lost’ to the House.”
“Senate and House Democrats are united in realizing Mitch McConnell is standing in the way of doing so much good for America, including doing even more for the children at the border,” saidSchumer spokesman Justin Goodman.
Neither spokesman would address questions about the other leader.
JoogJoint
In my own league.
Hopefully some of the other candidates just go ahead and drop out. IMO they need to cut it down to 10.
Those five, Castro, Booker, De Blasio, Gabbard, and I GUESS Beto can stay.
The rest need to just go ahead and bow out. Hickenlooper
Delaney, Ryan, and Bennet.
Pelosi & Schumer can't leave soon enough.
JoogJoint
In my own league.
If Warren isn't the nominee, she needs to take Schumer's place.
I dont think minnesota, despite its history of being blue presidentially, should be that dark blue
Didnt hillary win it by like 1%?
Jhoon
Spontaneous Mishaps and Hijinks
People dislike that lady