Coop Scoop: 2/18-19 (Resend) The Time For Democrats to Abolish the Filibuster Edition
It's now or never if the Dems want to pass anything beyond Covid relief
February 18-19, 2021
Issue #64
By Marc Cooper
Notice to Democrats and to their voters: You better start getting used to implementing the 14th amendment against Donald Trump as well as abolishing the anti-democratic relic known as a filibuster. Either that, or save yourself a couple of years of humiliation and certain defeat and just go home now.
I explain:
You’d think that the implosion of the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City with 3,000 sticks of dynamite, the death of extremist bloviator Rush Limbaugh, and the storm devastation in Republican-led Texas all happening within a few days of each other might be a powerful symbolic trifecta signaling that the era of right-wing Trumpiness and craziness has expired.
Add to that the 60% popularity rating of President Biden, Trump dipping to 33%, and Biden’s proposed relief package getting 70% or more thumbs up, and you will further strengthen the sensation that we are moving into a much brighter period of history.
But you would probably be wrong. Or, at least, mostly wrong.
We are, indeed, moving into a new political and social age but what exactly it’s going to look like and what it’s going to lead to remain completely uncertain if not unknowable and there is hardly any guarantee that we are moving into a more humane, more democratic, more sensible future.
Instead, we are experiencing one of the most intensive split-screen moments in our modern history. On the one side we have the grotesque figure of Donald Trump surviving his second impeachment trial and while he came out seriously battered and weakened, he nevertheless has full control of one of our two major political parties, one that now also has a growing and emboldened domestic paramilitary network.
On the other side of the screen, President Biden is winning bi-partisan popular support (at the grass roots level) by escalating as much as possible the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The criminal omissions and indifference of the Trump administration left us more or less unarmed to fight off the virus just as it was peaking during the so-called “transition.” The former president used those 77 days to further brainwash America that he had won a landslide (!) instead of doing his duty to battle the pandemic. And we know how all that came to an ugly head on January 6.
The U.S. is running about 2-3 weeks behind Europe in what is the latter’s current monster virus spike and we are now engaged in a race to vaccinate as many as possible before we are once again immersed in a viral Chernobyl.
Biden’s task is, to use the current phrase, Herculean. Especially when you factor into it the malicious and dangerous actions of imbecile Republican governors like that of Florida, Iowa and South Dakota who scoff at all public health measures and encourage masklessness and along with them about 25% of Americans who think that Liberty means the right to infect everybody around them with a debilitating virus that has now taken a half million lives in just one year.
There can be no other way to describe these execrable officials as anything but war criminals. The voters who follow them are but pathetic Sheeple.
Let’s start by unpacking the Trump side of this split screen first.
I was among those who chortled earlier this week that the Republican Party has descended into a brutal civil war and that such an affair can only be good for the rest of the humanity.
That was wrong. Mitch McConnell’s now infamous CYA speech soundly denouncing Trump after enabling his madness for 4 long years and voting to acquit him twice in impeachment trials, went over like Hitler’s Bar Mitzvah. Trump, predictably, scorched him in a statement he released and vowed to primary anybody and everybody in the Republican Party who has criticized him in the 2022 mid-terms.
Mitch gambled that he could appear as Mr. Reasonable and that he could slowly but surely build back a more moderate GOP that can re-engage Big Donors who fled after the 1/6 insurrection. He failed.
Polling still shows about 75% of Republicans still supporting Trump and almost all of them declaring him to be their preferred 2024 candidate. Pretty amazing. Actually, pretty chilling. The state and local Republican parties, that were Trumpified as successfully as the Nazis “aryanized” their own civic organizations, have gone on a frenzied offensive against the seven apostate Republican Senators who voted for impeachment.
The Goebbels Prize for saying the silent part out loud goes to the moronic chairman of the Washington County GOP in Pennsylvania, Dave Ball, who in blasting Republican Senator Pat Toomey’s vote to convict Trump told a TV reporter: “We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do ‘the right thing’ or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us.”
There is no Republican Civil War. There is the Trump White Nationalist Republican Party and a handful of both sincere and tactical dissenters who have no real constituency. By now, the kind of voters who like the seven Republicans who voted for conviction have already moved into the Biden coalition. And those who remain in the GOP are destined to be a tiny ineffective minority except in a couple of small regional, urban pockets.
Jamelle Bouie writes in the The New York Times:
“That this [ pro-Trump] backlash was completely expected, even banal, should tell you everything you need to know about the so-called civil war in the Republican Party.
It doesn’t exist. Outside of a rump faction of (occasional) dissidents, there is no truly meaningful anti-Trump opposition within the party. The civil war, such as it was, ended four-and-a-half years ago when Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president.
If there’s a conflict, it’s less a war and more a small skirmish with an outmatched and outnumbered opponent. Seventy-five percent of Republicans want Trump to continue to “play a prominent role in the Republican Party,” according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University, and 87 percent say he should be allowed to “hold elected office in the future.” A recent survey from Morning Consult likewise shows Trump far ahead of his rivals in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, with 54 percent support versus 12 percent for the runner-up, Mike Pence.
The Republican Party belongs to Trump for as long as he wants it. Its most prominent politicians will follow his lead and attempt to build on his example. His children and in-laws will have a place as heirs to his legacy. If Trump decides to seek the White House for a second term, the nomination is almost certainly his to lose.”
Just in case you think Trumpism is fading inside the Republican party, I strongly suggest looking up Never Trumper Charlie Sykes latest piece in The Bulwark.
“Actually, the Republicans told us who they were. Let’s run the numbers from the last few weeks:
The number of Republicans who backed the Texas lawsuit to overturn the presidential election: 126;
· The number of Republicans who voted against certifying the electoral votes of Pennsylvania: 138;
· The number of Republicans who voted to protect conspiracy theorist/bigot Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments: 199;
· The number of House Republicans who voted against impeachment: 197;
· And then Saturday’s vote. Overall the pro-Trump GOP vote (in the House and Senate): 240-17.
This is Donald Trump’s party. But worse.
Over the last five years, Republicans have shown willingness to accept — or least ignore — lies, racism, and xenophobia.
But now it is a party that is also willing to acquiesce to sedition, violence, extremism, and anti-democratic authoritarianism.
Maybe that’s what Lindsey Graham meant when he talked about “Trump-plus.”
Sykes writes, and I agree, that most every Republican candidate in the 2022 midterms will be modeling themselves as much as possible on Trump. And that election could wind up being more consequential than the one three months ago.
Keep in mind that among the 160 million votes cast last November, a change in a mere 90,000 of them would have given Trump the White House, the Senate AND the House thanks to the permanent structural advantages that the electoral college and gerrymandering bestow on the Republican Party.
In the meantime, state Republican parties are accelerating their work to further bend the system to their advantage by imposing a raft of voting suppression measures. There are currently more than one hundred such proposed laws floating around in Republican-dominated legislatures, Arizona alone is currently considering twenty of them.
Democratic voters must absorb the disturbing fact that the Republican Party does not need to be a majority party to win and is no longer even trying to achieve that majoritarian status The last two elections have shown that 46-48% of the votes cast in the right places can sweep the electoral college and this is an imminent danger for our democracy.
The Republicans, at least from my perspective, used to be limited to being a pro-business, anti-labor, anti-tax, socially conservative party streaked with underlying racism and disdain for those it considered to be “takers” i.e., common Americans who occasionally or desperately need some form of government assistance.
Not true any longer. Politics are fluid, not fixed. People and parties and movements constantly evolve and mutate, much like the Coronavirus. The long nasty decent into madness of the Republican Party got off to a strong start under Ronald Reagan and its dysfunction, meanness, disregard for the vulnerable and its open scorn of democratic process has weaponized the current GOP into nothing less than a national security threat.
In an opinion piece this week titled Is“The GOP extremist wing too big to fail,” veteran analyst Ron Brownstein asserts:
“Through their inactions on Trump and [Marjorie Taylor] Greene, Republicans are normalizing, they are mainstreaming, what counterterrorism experts would say is violent extremism: that it is acceptable to use inflammatory rhetoric and encourage violence to achieve your ends and ... it is acceptable to engage in public life through conspiracy theories," says Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary for threat prevention in the Department of Homeland Security for Trump who resigned and opposed his reelection.”
Don’t misunderstand me. In no way am I predicting any sort of Republican victory in 2022 or 2024. I am merely pointing out the potential for that. And also trying to knock down illusions that we are somehow on the verge of a political renaissance because Joe Biden has so many good fossilized friends in the senate.
On the contraryI suspect that Donald Trump is a dead duck whose life over the next four years will be defined by confrontations over endless civil and, hopefully, criminal cases.
It’s not just the Georgia prosecutor who has stuck a probe up his rear over his blatant tampering with the election evidenced by his recorded phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State, nor just the nasty tax issues being pursued by the Manhattan D.A. but also the civil suit brought by Democrat Rep. Benny Thompson and backed by the NAACP.
A number of legal analysts think the civil suit alleging interference with proper government functioning will gain real traction and at a bare minimum will allow a discovery process that will most likely unearth emails, texts, and a slew of witness depositions. Including one of Donald Trump, to further fill in all that we still don’t know about the events of January 6 and the role of Trump and other elected officials in that sorry tale.
Nancy Pelosi and the House also seem quite serious about establishing an independent 9/11 style commission to investigate the failed insurrection. This will provide further discovery; the commission will have subpoena power and that means it can also make legal referrals.
Former GOP Florida Representative David Jolly, a fierce critic of Trump, says the devil is in the details of such a commission. Like, you know, who’s going to be on it. He suggests, instead, that the investigation be carried out directly by the incoming Department of Justice and the soon-to-be-confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garlnd. And it’s not just Trump who is skating so far. There are a whopping 57 state and local Republican officials who have been identified as participating in the Capitol assault and we need a reckoning for them as well. I agree fully with Jolly and others who want Justice to take up the case. But I don’t think the Biden admin has the cojones to make that move. Please tell me I am wrong.
Anyway you dice it, Trump was acquitted but not exonerated. Not by a mile. There are still too many unanswered questions about 1/6 and his role and that of others in it. There’s also that little issue of a growing extremist paramilitary movement allied with the Republicans and who, according to the Pentagon itself, is making significant inroads among the military rank and file.
If this nexus of Trump,1/6, extremist paramilitaries and their relationship to the GOP is not a pressing issue for the Biden administration itself, I don’t know what is.
Trump is a Zombie pol now leading a Zombie party that as far as I can determine no longer has any program or ideology whatsoever except adoration for its cult leader and a burning desire to hold power for the sake of holding it. My question is how can a two-party democracy function with one party that is actually a corpse and led by a mentally diminished demagogue?
Let’s move now to the other side of the screen, the Biden/Democratic side.
I am not that interested in intensely debating the wisdom or foolishness of the Democrats having passed on calling impeachment witnesses.
I do think they should have called the Republican bluff on tying up the Senate with defense witnesses and slowing down the confirmation process and obstructing Biden’s legislative proposals.
That’s moot now. But we all know that the flip-flop on calling witnesses can eventually be traced back to someone or a collection of Democratic somebodies warning the House managers that impeachment of Trump should be as short as possible so that Democrats can move on to “Biden’s agenda” and do the people’s work and that calling witnesses was a luxury they could not afford.
That, my friend, is a an overflowing, steaming crock of bullshit. The Democrats’ $1.9 trillion covid relief package must pass and pass soon as current unemployment relief sunsets on March 14. Yes, it is absolutely crucial to pass this package.
The text of that package, however, has not even been written and it will be a number of weeks till it comes to the floor. The Democrats also agreed to a Senate recess this week, a week that could have and should have been used to take the impeachment trial to a deeper level via key witnesses… like Kevin McCarthy.
And, yes, McCarthy or some other witness (how about Trump?) might have fought the subpoenas in court greatly delaying the trial. So what? Even better! Let the trial be suspended for months or a year for that matter. That would give plenty of time to pass whatever the Dems want and then return to the trial much closer to the mid-terms, further weakening the GOP. We know that all future revelations and news about January 6th can only be detrimental to the Trumpanzees.
Nobody who understand American politics could have expected a conviction from this Senate jury composed in part by the allies, enablers and co-conspirators of the accused. Some Democrats are now saying there was no point in calling witnesses because acquittal was pre-determined. True. So why did you impeach anyway?
Not to convince the Senate Republicans. But rather to fully expose the criminality of the ex-president and of extremist militias who staged the greatest threat to our democratic system in modern memory.
Under any circumstances, the Democrats who now CONTROL the Senate could have easily found a way to proceed with both the trial and deliberation on urgent legislation.
As if there would be any deliberation! The Number One Takeaway the Democrats should extract from the impeachment imbroglio is that there just are not ten Republicans who can be counted on to pass any Democratic bills via regular order. They might have seven votes, sometimes. That’s about it.
The only way the Democrats can possibly get to 60 votes on any issue is by watering it down and defanging it sufficiently to satisfy the Republicans whose only job is to do exactly that.
I have to admit that I have little confidence in the Democrats holding firm. They have the 51 votes to pass the COVID relief act as it stands, all $1.9 trillion of it via the budget reconciliation process (that can be used three times during Biden’s tenure). If anything, this bill is too small not too big.
Biden and Schumer are nevertheless extending an “olive branch” to the Senate Republicans hoping that some will sign onto the same bill that Dems can pass on their own without them. How thoughtful!
Think of somebody who has lost their job, who is at home babysitting their kids out of school, unemployed, fearing the March 14 cutoff and scurrying to find a hidden vaccination site somewhere. Does that person really care if the relief bill passes with 51 or 55 votes? Does anybody in the real world care if it is “bi-partisan?” Who thinks that more than 5% of American voters care if a law that benefits them is passed by regular order or by reconciliation?
Biden and the Democrats have also now come up with a pretty solid immigration reform –something that should have been done 25 years ago. Republicans, the pre-Trump Republicans, killed every version of this reform that has come before them since Bush 43 took office.
What makes any Democrat think that the new Trump Republican Party has got ten members who will sign onto this?
We can go on and on down the list of the Democratic platform and frankly I doubt if any single plank in it will win 60 votes. Certainly, none of what might be called core agenda items.
How about that $15 minimum wage proposal? The minimum wage has not been raised since 2009 and there are millions of Americans who are still paid the starvation federal minimum wage of $7.35 an hour.
Biden claims he’s going to include the $15 proposal in the COVID bill headed for reconciliation. I don’t think he’s telling the whole truth. He’s got at least one, if not more, Democratic senators who are willing to kill it and is likely to do so before the bill is finalized. And if Biden thinks he can get ten Republicans to effectively double the current minimum wage through regular order, then you frequent a better weed dispensary than I do.
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is a probable NO vote on $15 as is conservative Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.
American labor reporter Hamilton Nolan writing in the Guardian says:
America’s federal minimum wage today sits at $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009. In that time we have been through an economic crash, a slow, decade-long recovery and another economic crash, and after all of that it is still legal to pay a full-time employee working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks less than $15,000 a year. Our nation’s billionaires have gained more than a trillion dollars in wealth in the past year, but there are full-time workers who have lived with the same poverty wage since before Barack Obama had any grey hair. Anyone who is not actively trying to raise the minimum wage is asserting that this sickening juxtaposition is OK. It’s not…
Even if the Democrats succeed on this issue, either in the relief bill or with the standalone “Raise the Wage Act” that has also been introduced in Congress, it could take until 2025 before the $15 minimum wage is fully phased in. Meanwhile, we know that if the minimum wage had kept up with rising worker productivity over the past 50 years, it would be more than $24 an hour today. A victory will not really be a victory. It just puts us less far behind.
What we need is not a minimum wage but rather a living wage. The campaign for $15 began in 2012, rendering itself somewhat obsolete if that still paltry wage of $600 a week takes till 2025 to phase in. By then it will be worth much less. California’s minimum wage is already $14 an hour and I don’t think that workers earning that salary are taking any overseas vacations or putting their kids through college painlessly.
It seems dead obvious that Democrats do not stand a chance of making any significant changes in our body politic unless, with their simple majority, they move to throw out the anti-democratic cudgel known as the filibuster. Perhaps they will get whacked in the head enough with it in the coming months so that King Manchin and Queen Sinema and other reluctant Democrats come around to the simple truth that the filibuster must go.
At the moment, they are afraid to even debate it. Maybe it’s my problem, but I don’t see many legislative outs without this abolition taking place.
The Republican Party is now in the hands of an unpopular Zombie. If Democrats don’t show maximum courage and boldness at this very opportune moment to make a serious push on COVID, a livable wage, a realistic and humane immigration policy, climate change legislation and economic inequality then they will deserve to fail.
Unfortunately, it will be us, the American people, who will pay the price of such a failure. +++
If you are not already signed up to get this newsletter free about 50 times a year, please do so now with the button below. Also consider seriously a financial donation that will get you not only bonus content but the satisfaction of supporting independent and critical journalism. You can secure a paid subscription also through the subscribe button. Or the Paypal button. And the best way to subscribe is via Patreon where you can pledge a small (or large!) monthly sustainer donation. It’s really important to the future of this newsletter. Thanks in advance.
-