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- Not Quite Dred Scott
The Supreme Court voted to allow Trump’s ban on transgender military soldiers to remain as the case works its way through lower courts. Apparently it was the usual 6-3.
In the long run, I think being against trans rights will play about as well politically as being against African-American citizenship (though that seems to be playing a little better politically nowadays.) So I wanted to check in on a perhaps anti-trans Member of Congress, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. She was one of the few Democrats who voted for the Defense Budget that stripped out funding for abortion and gender-affirming healthcare. (The others were Golden - ME, Davis - NC and Vasquez - NM.)
Gluesenkamp Perez went on the Ezra Klein show to shit on Democrats, and Steve M has a really good post talking about the form that her shitting on Dems takes. It’s pretty toxic:
Klein begins the conversation with some questions about Trump's tariff plans. It doesn't take Gluesenkamp Perez long before she's bashing her party. She says:
“One thing that’s weird is watching the Democratic Party suddenly become the defenders of the stock market and Nasdaq. That’s a weird thing to me.”
I share her contempt for Democrats who are too cozy with Wall Street, but that's not what's happening here. Wall Street sometimes does well when ordinary Americans are struggling, but at this moment Wall Street is shaky because it believes the tariffs will kill jobs and be rocket fuel for inflation. At this moment, the concerns of Wall Street and Main Street roughly coincide. And while I'll sure that many of Gluesenkamp Perez's constituents don't have any retirement savings, millions of non-"elite" Americans do, and those savings are in retirement accounts that have been hammered since Trump's tariff "Liberation Day." Democrats who point all this out are not expressing contempt for ordinary people.
Later in the interview, Gluesenkamp Perez says,
“I’ve talked to folks from home who used to be a part of the Democratic Party and left. They were like: Yes, we can never be correct enough for you, and the Republicans are having a kegger.”
Is this something these voters have experienced firsthand? Or is it something they're told over and over again by the media -- both right-wing and mainstream -- and by centrist Democratic politicians as well as Republican politicians? It's a poisonous stereotype, and it doesn't reflect the way Democrats, up to and including the party's presidential candidates, actually run.
I read through the interview and her take on immigration is based on her father, who’s from El Salvador, both hating gangs and loving due process. So in that instance, her stance is actually fairly reasonable, because of course she has some personal acquaintance with it. One would think she knew a woman who had an abortion, but apparently her ambition is bigger than her desire for that woman in the military to have a basic human right. Similarly, I’m guessing she doesn’t know any trans people.
It’s unlikely that Democrats will get anyone better than her in this district, and my God does she know it. Still, there’s a huge gulf between excessive political correctness (which Steve M rightly points out was not a feature of the Harris or Biden campaigns) and supporting the rights of others. This kind of “centrism” or whatever you want to call her positions is incredibly unprincipled and anecdotal. The reality is that the Gluesenkamp Perez “winning formula” can’t be replicated because it is both incoherent (mostly based on who she knows), and it throws too many people who we should value under the bus.
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