No, Let's Have a "Civil War"

Chuck Schumer had to cancel his book tour. (thanks to Reader J for the link) Pour the smallest amount of something, out of the smallest vessel, for tour to support a book that apparently spends a lot of time criticizing Columbia’s response to protests.

Like clockwork, we have someone telling Democrats “not now” for the “civil war”. This time it’s Michael Tomasky at the New Republic. Tomasky’s piece begins with the bad things Trump and his minions have done in the past few days, then transitions to the same argument that Schumer made: if we shut down the government, Musk and his junta would pick and choose which departments to shut down and they might not open it up for a long time.

If you want the counter-argument to this, Norm Ornstein supplies it, and there’s nobody in DC who’s more plugged in than Norm. He doesn’t think a six-month shutdown would happen, read the piece for his reasons. And, to me, it doesn’t matter — nobody knows exactly what would have happened, but at least the Democrats would have put up a fight if they forced a shutdown.

So, back to Tomasky. After extensive throat-clearing, here’s his prescription for Democrats:

This suggestion just pretends the last couple of months didn’t happen. We all know who the leader of the opposition is: AOC. When Jeffries named his “rapid response task force”, it was chaired by Joe Neguse (good), with Rosa DeLauro (she’s great but she’s 82), Jerry Connolly (74 and battling throat cancer), and Jamie Raskin (good). Connolly is the guy who beat AOC for the ranking member position on the Oversight Committee. Notably absent: anyone other than Raskin who has a big media presence and who has shown the ability to “punch” — Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost, etc. Those are the people that Jeffries called into his office and bawled out for being too loud at Trump’s speech.

Perhaps I’d find this piece more persuasive if Tomasky had said “start punching”. And there’s no way in hell that Schumer is going to take this or any other suggestion that takes the spotlight away from him and his septuagenarian leadership pal, Durbin. He’s got hippies to punch. Speaking of punching, please point me at the coordinated Democratic messaging about the horrible, no good black site deportation to El Salvador.

The rest of his piece says that Schumer is right to wait until Trump’s popularity hits 40%, which apparently is the magic number that will cause the Democrats to sweep 2026 without doing anything but “punch”. There’s more:

If there’s a better distillation of the kind of bad advice and status-quo-ante thinking that’s gotten the Democrats into the place we’re in right now, I don’t know it. The base is pissed, and they’re pissed because this little play has been going on seemingly forever:

1. Republicans are doing bad things and some of the Democratic base doesn’t think Democrats are responding with enough fire or doing enough with the power they have.

2. Democratic leadership and the “liberal” press responds: Just let them be, once the public sees (through osmosis or some other special magic) that what the Republicans are doing is bad, they’ll naturally want to vote for Democrats.

3. Therefore, the leaders/press argues, now isn’t the time for Democrats to try to replace the leadership that isn’t fighting back, just shush because if we have a fight now, we might take some attention away from the Republicans fucking themselves. Keep your eyes on the prize, which in this context means the same Dem leadership being re-elected and slowly letting some “younger” leaders (60+ year olds) advance up the hierarchy.

I’ve seen this play before and I don’t want to buy another ticket. Thanks to Chuck Schumer, there’s really very little “punching” that will amount to anything in the next few months. The CR funded the government until the Fall, and they’re going to push through some more horrific legislation using reconciliation, which doesn’t require any Democratic votes. Democrats other than AOC, Bernie, Crockett and a few others (you know the list) aren’t going to be doing any kind of organization or true “punching back”.

So, as far as I’m concerned, now is a perfect time to have a “civil war”, which just amounts to the Democratic base making a lot of noise whenever they encounter a do-nothing like Schumer. It also means withholding donations, or channeling those donations to leaders and organizations who fight. As Kay posted earlier today, the base is pissed, I think for once they’re not going to listen when their self-appointed betters in the media tell them to shush.