The ultimate villain in the Federal Government Shutdown is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who could end it by calling for a Senate vote to end the shutdown.
All he has to do is call for a vote on the resolution that was passed in December before the holidays almost unanimously, and the crippling shutdown could end.
But McConnell will NOT do anything to defy Trump, as he has a massive conflict of interest, in that his wife, Elaine Chao, is the Secretary of Transportation.
McConnell and his Republican colleagues are totally afraid to oppose their own President, but what they are doing is making the Republican Party brand more toxic, and one can be assured that the party will lose seats in the US Senate in 2020, and likely will lose control to the Democrats.
And top of the list to defeat is Mitch McConnell, if he chooses to run for a seventh term, as he will have served 36 years in the Senate by the end of 2020, and is up for reelection.
It would take a 40-state landslide and an unseating of Donald Trump to make it more likely Mitch McConnell would become unseated in 2020 Kentucky.
Why?
Kentucky—which votes historically like neighboring Tennessee (a bellwether from 1912 to 2004; getting it wrong in 1924 and 1960)—is now one of the ten best states, margins wise, for Republicans in presidential elections.
The 2020 Democrats would have to unseat Trump with a candidate who is not estabnlishment-preferred, not a corporatist, is for Medicare for All, is highly progressive, and that would be Bernie Sanders. He is the type—with his platform; which is very populous (an agenda for the working people); which is what the establishment Democrats try best to prevent—who can win significant gains of crossover self-identified Republicans nationwide to go along with self-identified independents (most obviously) while holding up party support of Democrats with, say, at least 92 percent of their vote (which is where Barack Obama ended up in both 2008 and 2012). This would be achievable with a popular-vote margin of at least +10 percentage points but—because Kentucky is a Top 10 Republican state—more likely +15.
Since 1992, the average number of states carried by presidential winners has been 29. It has been a range of 26 (Barack Obama, 2012) to 32 (Bill Clinton, 1992). So, the electoral pattern—covering 24 years and 7 election cycles—would have to break. (And this actually needs to happen.)
My guess is that Trump would also have to have a low job-approval rating not exceeding 42 percent on Election Day. (It would be an outcome of Trump garnering only 42 percent to Sanders with 56 or 57 percent—winning the U.S. Popular Vote by +14 or +15. Well above 400 electoral votes. This was the area reported in the polls on Trump-vs-Bernie matchups for the general election of 2016.)
The 2020 Democrats cannot unseat Mitch McConnell with retaining the current electoral pattern. It would have been doable in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton carried Kentucky in both his elections; when the state voted for all winners from 1968 to 2004. We are not in that period anymore.
The same-old, same-old way of doing things won’t, and can’t, work.
Republicans we know in our community wouldn’t vote for Bernie because of him being a socialist. To them, socialism = communism.
Rational Lefty,
Medicare for All has approval of 52 percent of Republicans—a majority. That is along with 85 percent of Democrats and, overall, 70 percent.
The Republicans in your community—whatever that is supposed to mean—is not the nation as a whole.
Republicans in our community are hypocritical. They’re scared of communism yet they are ok with Trump being Putin’s puppet.
Bernie is going to be in a very crowded field of progressives in 2020.
The website Progressive Punch defines itself as “a non-partisan searchable database of Congressional voting records, from a Progressive perspective.†Here’s a screenshot of their page rating current senators: https://progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?topic=&house=senate&sort=crucial-lifetime&order=down&party=
I’m in favor of Medicaid For More.
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/11/16119292/medicare-for-all-medicaid-health-care-expansion
The Republicans in our community believe in Ronald Reagan’s stupid dogma of “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.â€
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17675100/suzanne-mettler-government-citizen-disconnect-welfare
To learn how Progressive Punch identifies a progressive vote, you can find their explanation here: http://www.progressivepunch.org/whatIsProgScore.htm
New polling is showing that Trump is losing support amongst his base. In addition to this shutdown, they are being hurt by his trade wars.
Good point, Southern Liberal. Bernie has more competition this time. Many of the others are saying the same thing Bernie is saying regarding Medicare For All, etc.
As one of the younger people here (I’m in my 30’s), I’m hoping for some young blood. Maybe instead of running himself, Bernie could endorse a young Democratic presidential candidate who will best carry on his own ideas.
I quite agree with Vox on this. This is one of the flaws Bernie will need to overcome.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/12/17847314/bernie-sanders-2020-bezos
If Bernie Sanders runs in 2020, as looks likely, he’ll enter the race as the frontrunner. The upside of that is he won’t have to fight for coverage; every utterance, every proposal, will be a story. He’ll set the terms of the debate. The downside, at least if he lets it be a downside, is he’ll be evaluated as a potential president. He won’t be graded on the insurgent’s curve.
How he negotiates that new reality will be central to whether he actually becomes the Democratic nominee. To succeed, he needs to merge what he did so well in 2016 with an understanding of what he didn’t do so well.
Which brings us to his Stop BEZOS Act. Sanders wanted to dramatize the unfairness of rich corporations with mega-rich CEOs paying their workers so little that they have to use public benefits. So he released a bill taxing such companies a dollar for every dollar in benefits their workers used. It’s classic Sanders: a powerfully populist message built around a specific billionaire enemy.
But the bill is disastrously constructed. In practice, it penalizes states with generous public benefits, penalizes employers for hiring in states with generous public benefits or hiring people who use public benefits, and penalizes workers for having kids and being married.
When policy experts who’ve devoted their lives to improving the lot of the poor — so Sanders’s allies in theory, and usually his allies in practice — made these criticisms, Sanders’s operation reacted furiously and counterproductively, accusing the excellent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of corruption.
This, too, is classic Sanders. As my colleague Matt Yglesias writes, “Sanders and his camp, on a fundamental level, don’t trust the leaders of the Democratic Party or their aligned institutions. They instinctively see criticism as an effort by insiders to freeze him out, rather than a good-faith debate about priorities and proposals.â€
That didn’t matter so much when Sanders was an insurgent critic of the Democratic Party; it matters a lot more now that he is one of the leading Democrats for 2020. A president who can’t hear reasonable criticism of his plans as information that can help him improve them is a president whose agenda will quickly collapse beneath its own contradictions and errors.
And that’s what Sanders is now: a potential president.
Bernie Sanders’s 2020 test: showing how he’ll govern
One lesson Democrats learned from Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign is that the party worried too much about policy and not enough about symbolism. As my old editor Mark Schmitt used to say, it’s not what you say about the issues; it’s what the issues say about you.
Sanders gets this. He’s always gotten this. And he proved the power of it when he came from nowhere to almost beat Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
But if one of the lessons Democrats needed to learn from 2016 was to listen to Sanders and care more for symbolism, one of the lessons Sanders needed to learn was to care more about the workability of policy.
His campaign thrived as an insurgency, when the story was overflowing rallies and inspired crowds; it struggled as his poll numbers rose and his plans came under more scrutiny. His campaign reacted to normal policy scrutiny with outrage. They weren’t ready for their proposals to be looked at closely, and they hadn’t prepared their candidate for it, either. This hurt Sanders tangibly and often. It led to more negative press coverage, disastrous interviews, and debate openings for his opponents.
In 2016, Sanders’s team complained that these criticisms held them to an unfair, even impossible, standard; Clinton had locked up the Democratic policy community, and most of it was too neoliberal to give them useful advice anyway. But in large part due to Sanders’s success, that’s no longer true. The party has moved substantially to the left, Sanders is a big enough name to attract excellent staff and advisers, and there’s a much broader network of lefty policy thinkers working out ideas Sanders could draw on.
A key question Sanders’s next act will answer is whether the weaknesses of his 2016 campaign reflected Clinton’s control of the party or whether they were rooted in Sanders’s personality and governing style. How he develops policy, and responds to criticism of it, will be a crucial test.
As the frontrunner, if Sanders can’t absorb critiques and use them to improve his ideas, it will deepen fears about the kind of president he’d be. Conversely, if Sanders builds a policy process (and policy staff) that designs tighter policy and is able to absorb and persuasively respond to critiques of that policy, he’ll put a lot of those concerns to rest. The choice is his.
Russiagate is one of several reasons why I think that Trump’s chances of being re-elected in 2020 are not so good.
Princess Leia,
The opposite.
Me too, Leia. I predict impeachment.
A follow-up video:
https://youtu.be/V_0e558BpHk
The stories are not bogus. It’s very obvious to anyone with a brain that Trump is Putin’s puppet.
Some people, such as you, D, and the people you read and watch on YouTube, are underestimating how strong the case for impeachment will be and that even the Senate Republicans will not be able to shrug it off.
Former Republican,
Do you figure … U.S. President “Donald Trump is Finished�
https://youtu.be/qjUvfZj-Fm0
I absolutely believe he is finished.
If Trump was innocent, he wouldn’t be yelling “witch hunt” or scheming ways to stop the investigation.
Breaking news from Buzzfeed is that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation?ref=hpsplash
Trump is up to his neck in Russians.
Specifically, on this topic, Mitch McConnell is demonstrating his contempt for democracy.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/01/18/mitch-mcconnell-demonstrates-his-contempt-for-democracy/
Fox News is struggling to defend Trump after the Buzzfeed report.
https://thinkprogress.org/fox-news-buzzfeed-report-trump-michael-cohen-lie-f1c15c64c60d/
‘Mueller’s office disputes BuzzFeed story about Trump directing Cohen’s false testimony’
By Christal Hayes (01.18.2019, published at 08:01 p.m. ET)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/18/robert-mueller-disputes-buzzfeed-story-trump-directing-michael-cohen-lie/2620598002/
“Washington – In a rare public statement, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office on Friday [January 18, 2019] disputed a blockbuster report from BuzzFeed News that alleged President Donald Trump directed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie in his testimony before Congress.â€
Mueller is not disputing that Cohen says Trump told him to lie. He’s disputing the line about corroborating evidence taken from Trump Org emails, texts, etc.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mueller-denial-buzzfeed-trump-cohen_us_5c427385e4b027c3bbc1d076
‘Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump/Russia Story’
By Glenn Greenwald (01.20.2019)
http://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story/
“BuzzFeed was once notorious for traffic-generating ‘listicles’, but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week thanks to its ‘bombshell’ story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like so many others of its kind, blew up in its face, this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller’s office took the extremely rare step to label its key claims ‘inaccurate’.â€
Thanks for the clarification of that Pragmatic.
Buzzfeed story aside, the majority of the reporting on Russia, once again, has not been bogus.
Glenn Greenwald has been on Fox News, parroting what they say about Russia. Anyone who parrots what Fox News has to say is not a progressive!
We watch Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell each week, unless we have something else to watch.
Their shows have been following the money and we’ve learned that Trump has been laundering money for the Russian mob for years. That’s why he doesn’t want you to see his tax returns.
This Vox article talks about that: https://www.vox.com/world/2018/9/12/17764132/trump-fbi-russia-new-york-times-craig-unger
It’s very obvious that Trump is compromised.
And it’s not just Trump. The Russians were wooing the NRA and the Religious Right as well, through issues of gun rights and same-sex marriage.