Delaware Liberal

The December 6, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

So here is President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet so far. Bolded names are actual nominees. Italic names are people rumored or speculated to be in contention.

• State: Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Sen. Bob Corker, Mitt Romney, David Petraeus, Rex Tillerson, Jon Hunstman, Adm. James Stavridis.
• Treasury: Steve Mnuchin
• Defense: James Mattis
• Attorney General: Sen. Jeff Sessions
• CIA Director: Rep. Mike Pompeo
• Health and Human Services: Rep. Tom Price
• Housing and Urban Development: Ben Carson
• Education: Betsy DeVos
• Commerce: Wilbur Ross
• Transportation: Elaine Chao
• UN Ambassador: Gov. Nikki Haley
• Homeland Security: Michael McCaul, David Clarke, John Kelly
• Interior: Sarah Palin, Gov. Mary Fallin
• Agriculture: Rick Perry
• Veteran’s Affairs: Sarah Palin, Scott Brown
• Energy: Gary Cohn, Joe Manchin
• Director of National Intelligence: Rudy Giuliani
• Office of Management and Budget: Gary Cohn
• Labor: Andrew Puzder
• U.S. Trade Representative: Rep. Charles Boustany
• Council of Economic Advisers: ?
• Environmental Protection Agency: Kathleen White, Scott Pruitt, Jeff Holmstead

And there is also his White House staff:
• Chief of Staff: Reince Priebus
• National Security Adviser: Michael Flynn
• Chief Political Strategist: Steve Bannon

Stan Collender: “The Trump administration is seriously thinking about not submitting a budget to Congress next year.”

“Although the Congressional Budget Act requires the president to submit the fiscal 2018 budget to Congress between January 2 and February 6, Trump could easily say that it was the responsibility of the outgoing Obama administration to comply with the law before the new president was sworn in on January 20.”

“But while the new president not sending a budget to Congress might not be illegal, it would clearly be unprecedented.”

Well, that leaves 44% who are reachable. And we already know many are regretting their choice.

“The problem for the Democratic Party is not that its policies aren’t progressive or populist enough,” writes Fareed Zakaria in a Washington Post op-ed. “They are already progressive and are substantially more populist than the Republican Party’s on almost every dimension. And yet, over the past decade, Republicans have swept through statehouses, governors’ mansions, Congress and now the White House. Democrats need to understand not just the Trump victory but that broader wave…Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for instance, should have been centered around one simple theme: that she grew up in a town outside Chicago and lived in Arkansas for two decades. The subliminal message to working-class whites would have been “I know you. I am you.” It was the theme of her husband’s speech introducing her at the Democratic convention, and Bill Clinton’s success has a lot to do with the fact that, brilliant as he is, he can always remind those voters that he knows them. Once reassured, they are then open to his policy ideas.”

Zack Beaucamp on what the Nazis (formerly known as the Alt Right) want from their fellow comrade Donald Trump:

The alt-right’s priority, first and foremost, is preserving America’s status as a white-majority nation. To that end, they want Trump to follow through on the most extreme immigration ideas he’s discussed — such as deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and banning Muslim immigration. These steps, they think, will slow what they call the “dispossession” of America’s whites.

But the alt-right wants Trump to go even further. They want him to slash rates of legal immigration and defund groups that advocate for immigrants, like La Raza. Ultimately, they want Trump to push the boundaries of acceptable opinion to the point where the nakedest of naked racism becomes permissible in mainstream public discourse.

Under President Trump, those goals are plausible, even if unlikely. That means we need to understand the ideology of the alt-right — and the things its members will be working to enshrine in federal law.

Markos Moulitsas is my spirit animal. He says oppose everything:

When a government is legitimately elected, you oppose it. You are the loyal opposition. When a government is illegitimately elected, you resist it. Today, we are the resistance. And that means standing in the way of everything that illegitimate government does. [T]he Democrats’ position on any Trump nominee to the Supreme Court [should be] OBSTRUCT, until either of these happens:

1) We have a president elected by at least a plurality of the American people,
2) Republicans win a filibuster-proof majority in 2018, or
3) Republicans eliminate the filibuster.

Unless those apply, Democrats should stand in the way of everything Trump does, and especially his Supreme Court pick. As Republicans have taught us over the past few years, with hundreds of President Barack Obama’s judicial picks languishing unconfirmed, there is no penalty for such obstruction. So now, it’s our turn.

In his salon.com post, “Want to win the working-class vote? Try progressive economic policies, Democrats,” Sean McElwee notes “Clinton’s campaign erred by not running more ads criticizing Trump’s predatory behavior toward workers and touting the Obama administration’s auto-industry bailout. (Research suggests that in battleground states only 6 percent of Clinton’s campaign ads mentioned “jobs,” while 43 percent of Trump’s did.)…At this point, the key limitation to progressive economic policies isn’t message but mobilization. There are numerous opportunities to run progressive candidates in races and states that Democrats have ignored. As the data suggest, economic progressivism is popular. Now let’s get the people who benefit from it mobilized. Let’s get candidates who can run on those platforms and win…”

Jeet Heer says the Dems need a new leader of the opposition NOW.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have taken the lead in denouncing Trump since his stunning election. Sanders has been particularly valuable in calling Trump’s bluff on economic populism; on Thursday, he criticized Trump’s vaunted saving of jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana as a fraud, tweeting: “Carrier gets millions in tax breaks. Indiana loses thousands of jobs. United Technologies took Trump hostage and won.” In a similar vein, Warren denounced the pick of Steve Mnuchin as Treasury secretary by calling him “the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis,” who “managed to participate in all the worst practices on Wall Street.” She went on: “He spent two decades at Goldman Sachs, helping the bank peddle the same kind of mortgage products that blew up the economy and sucked down billions in taxpayer-bailout money before he moved on to run a bank that was infamous for aggressively foreclosing on families.”

Warren and Sanders are both terrific counter-punchers. But in the current context, they feel like voices in the wilderness. Sanders in particular still has an uneasy relationship with the Democratic Party. He’s returned to Congress as an independent, not a Democrat. And much of his post-election commentary has been about how the party needs to fundamentally change to speak to working-class voters. Sanders is making a valuable contribution as a critic of the party, but that precludes him from being the voice of the party.

Warren, on the other hand, is perfectly suited to be leader of the opposition to Trump.

A Republican member of the Electoral College wrote in the New York Times that he will not be casting his vote for Donald Trump. Said Christopher Suprun: “The election of the next president is not yet a done deal. Electors of conscience can still do the right thing for the good of the country. Presidential electors have the legal right and a constitutional duty to vote their conscience.”

Kevin Drum says the repeal of Obamacare is dead:

[There are] quite a few elements of Obamacare that can’t be repealed via reconciliation, but I think Democrats should focus on one: pre-existing conditions. This is the provision of Obamacare that bans insurers from turning down customers or charging them extra for coverage, no matter what kind of pre-existing conditions they have. I tell the whole story here, but there are several reasons this is the best provision to focus on:

It’s an easy thing to understand.
It’s very popular.
Republicans say they favor keeping it.
Donald Trump says he favors keeping it.
It’s not a minor regulation. It is absolutely essential to any health care plan.
It’s fairly easy to explain why repealing Obamacare but leaving in place the pre-existing conditions ban2 would destroy the individual insurance market and leave tens of millions of people with no way to buy insurance.

The last point is the most important. Take me. I’m currently being kept alive by about $100,000 worth of prescriptions drugs each year. If I can go to any insurer and demand that they cover me for $10,000, that’s a certain loss of $90,000. If millions of people like me do this, insurance companies will lose billions. In the employer market, which covers people who work for large companies, this is workable because insurers have lots and lots of healthy, profitable people at each company to make up these losses. In the individual market—after you’ve repealed the individual mandate and the subsidies—they don’t. They will bear huge losses and they know it.

What this means is not just that Obamacare would collapse. It means the entire individual market would collapse. Every insurance company in America would simply stop selling individual policies. It would be political suicide to make this happen, and this means that Democrats have tremendous leverage if they’re willing to use it. It all depends on how well they play their hand.

“Maine has changed how it will choose most officeholders, becoming the first state in the country to adopt ranked-choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting,” the New York Times reports. “Ranked-choice voting allows voters to list candidates in order of preference so that if in the first round no one wins a majority, officials can recount the ballots immediately until someone does.”

“In Maine, this type of voting will apply to races for Congress, governor and the State Legislature, but not to municipal offices or president. It is to go into effect starting with the primary races in June 2018. Ranked-choice voting had been under consideration for some time in Maine, where independents often mount strong third-party bids. The winner in nine of the state’s past 11 elections for governor won with less than a majority. The goal is to keep that from happening again.”

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