Doomberg After the Democrats great 2018 victory, it should be full speed ahead for them to torpedo the Republicans and the Trump agenda, right? Not so fast, writes the Washington Post:
House Democrats exploded in recriminations Thursday over moderates bucking the party, with liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatening to put those voting with Republicans “on a list” for a primary challenge.
In a closed-door session, a frustrated Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., lashed out at about two dozen moderates and pressured them to get on board. “We are either a team or we’re not, and we have to make that decision,” Pelosi said, according to two people present but not authorized to discuss the remarks publicly.
But Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the unquestioned media superstar of the freshman class, upped the ante, admonishing the moderates and indicating that she would help liberal activists unseat them in the 2020 election.
Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez, said she told her colleagues that Democrats who side with Republicans “are putting themselves on a list.”
…
Triggering the blowup was Wednesday’s votes on a bill to expand federal background checks for gun purchases. Twenty-six moderate Democrats joined Republicans in amending the legislation, adding a provision requiring that ICE be notified if an undocumented immigrant seeks to purchase a gun.
That infuriated liberals who have railed against ICE’s role in conducting mass deportations and embarrassed Democratic leaders who couldn’t keep their members in line on a high-profile bill.
…
The Democratic infighting reflects a fractured caucus and diverse freshman class, with dozens of moderates elected in districts that President Donald Trump won in 2016 at odds with hard-charging liberals. The split has exposed divisions among Pelosi and her top lieutenants, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., over the party strategy to keep its newfound majority.
My feeling on the 2018 election was that the reason the Republicans lost is because Trump’s reforms were coming slower than a lot of people would like, and Republicans were also disenchanted with the GOP’s failure to pass key Trump agenda items, especially the needed funding for the wall. This led to depressed turnout on the GOP side.
The social justice warriors (SJWs) who currently control the Democrats, on the other hand, think the American people voted enthusiastically for their policy program, which is nicely encapsulated in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. The Green New Deal contains, among many other things, calls for the banning of air travel, the banning of sales of steak (because cow farts are bad for the environment), and the forced retrofitting of every privately owned building in the country.
It’s clear from the way the “moderates” are acting that they believe my explanation, or something like it, and not the social justice warrior version of events. They wouldn’t be voting with Republicans on some issues if they believed in the SJW narrative.
What’s going on in the Democrats right now highlights the problems the Democrats are having as a political party. They have been coasting for years with the media working hard to cover up their true beliefs, often posing as moderates while governing as radicals.
However, the SJWs who have taken over the party are tired of waiting and want full, Venezuela-style socialism implemented now, and not 25 to 50 years down the road. The SJWs have never really been in power before, and are discovering the reality that politics is hard and requires the ability to get along with a lot of elected officials.
They’re responding the way they respond to every setback; with public temper tantrums and lots of threats against whoever is in their way.
Most of these Democrat moderates won by carefully wooing unsatisfied Trump voters or by convincing unhappy GOP voters that it would be “safe” if they stayed home. Their voters sent them to Washington to solve their problems, and not join the SJW religious crusade against Trump, and they definitely aren’t going to jump on board with the Democrats’ full-blown Stalinist policy agenda.
This doesn’t mean these Democrat moderates are on our side. Many are probably sympathetic to the SJWs, but they understand the electoral realities of their districts. They understand that if the Democrats spend all of their time trying to impeach Trump, they will have nothing to show their voters.
Furthermore, Nancy Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez are locked in a power struggle as well. Ocasio-Cortez frequently presumes to speak for all Democrats, and while Pelosi has the levers of power, Ocasio-Cortez is the one driving the agenda. Ocasio-Cortez’s fans think she should be Speaker, and indeed, a lot of the time she acts like she IS the Speaker.
What we’re seeing now is a preview for what is coming if Kamala takes the White House in 2020. With the old Clinton wing being driven further and further into the wilderness, the party is being consumed by the far more zealous but for less capable social justice warriors, who are embarrassingly ineffective at governing even with the media trying to help them.
Loading…