Delaware Liberal

The December 17, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

Dahlia Lithwick and Daniel S, Cohen say Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans:

On Monday, members of the Electoral College will vote in Donald J. Trump as president. Though he lost the election by nearly three million votes and almost daily generates headlines about new scandals, the Democratic Party is doing little to stop him. If you’ve been asking yourself “Where are the Democrats?” you’re not alone.

Since the election, top Democrats have been almost absent on the national stage. Rather, they have been involved largely in internecine warfare about how much to work with Mr. Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign, trying to encourage a peaceful transition, has gone almost completely dark, with her most notable appearances coming in selfies with strangers. Nobody deserves downtime more than Mrs. Clinton, but while she is decompressing, the country is moving toward its biggest electoral mistake in history. […]

Contrast the Democrats’ do-nothingness to what we know the Republicans would have done. If Mr. Trump had lost the Electoral College while winning the popular vote, an army of Republican lawyers would have descended on the courts and local election officials. The best of the Republican establishment would have been filing lawsuits and infusing every public statement with a clear pronouncement that Donald Trump was the real winner. And they would have started on the morning of Nov. 9, using the rhetoric of patriotism and courage.

E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post says the electoral college should think hard before handing Trump the presidency:

Memo to Trump’s Republican critics: Your initial instincts about Trump were right. Remember that catering to this man will bring only pain and humiliation.

Memo to those claiming that everyone should give Trump a chance now that the people have spoken: Actually, “the people” didn’t make Trump president. They preferred Hillary Clinton by at least 2.8 million votes. If Trump takes office, it’s the electoral-college system that will do it. And the post-election Trump has been as abusive and self-involved as he was during the campaign. The opposition’s job is to stand up and prevent or mitigate the damage he could do to our country.

Memo to the electoral college that votes next Monday: Our tradition — for good reason — tells you that your job is to ratify the state-by-state outcome of the election. The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton’s popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason to blow up the system. I don’t raise this lightly. The costs of breaking with 188 years of tradition would be very high.

Scott Lemieux at The New Republic says It’s Not Looking Good for Roe v. Wade:

Opponents of abortion rights are “emboldened” by the election of Donald Trump. […] In the short term, the status quo—in which states are given extensive, but not unlimited, leeway to regulate pre-viability abortions—will prevail. But in the longer term, there is a high probability that a Trump administration will spell the end of Roe, with no immediate prospects for recovering a Supreme Court majority willing to protect the reproductive rights of women. […]

The real potential danger lies down the road. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an 83-year-old cancer survivor, Justice Stephen Breyer is 78, and Kennedy himself is 80. Ginsburg and Breyer will almost certainly stay on the Court as long as they’re physically able to serve, but four years is a long time. And it’s possible that Kennedy could resign to be replaced by a Republican successor, although he might be the kind of nearly extinct moderate Republican who disdains Trump. Democrats will face the odd situation of doing their damnedest to keep Kennedy on the court for four more years.
But if Trump is able to get one more nominee confirmed after replacing Scalia, that will make Chief Justice John Roberts the median vote on the Court. What happens then? At that point, the only question is whether Roe is quickly executed or slowly strangled to death.


Claire Lampen at News.Mic says Obama just took an important stand for reproductive rights:

Reproductive rights are more imperiled than they have been in over 40 years, which makes President Barack Obama’s move to indefinitely protect Title X funding for Planned Parenthood and its ilk particularly meaningful.

Unfortunately, because nothing the Obama administration does is sacred under Donald Trump, meaningful is about all his action can be.

On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized regulations to the Title X Project Grants for Family Planning Services, an amendment it had originally proposed in September. The rule will be effective 30 days from its publication in the federal register on Dec. 19, and stipulates that Title X funds cannot be denied to a health care provider “for reasons other than its ability to provide Title X services.”

Moshe Z. Marvit at The Nation on a Lesson on How to Unite Across Race and Class From… the Teamsters:

A few weeks ago, a major election was held in the United States, where working-class whites, in alliance with black and Latino voters, rallied around a progressive populist platform—and won. No, this is neither revisionist history nor some kind of collective blue-state fantasy, in which the Electoral College has been abolished and the popular vote prevailed. Rather, it concerns the largely ignored national election of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—one of the nation’s largest industrial unions—which in many ways serves as a microcosm of our political environment, and may provide lessons for Democrats as they move forward. Prime among them are that before the Democratic Party abandons populism or gives up on working-class whites as unwinnable, it would do well to look to look at how Teamsters have been able to win Rust Belt voters with a campaign that should be familiar to Democrats. […]

The narrative that most have settled on for why Hillary Clinton lost the election was that working-class whites abandoned her and the Democratic Party for a reactionary populist message. But Ken Paff, a former truck driver from Cleveland, now an organizer for Teamsters for a Democratic Union in Detroit, explains, “The same people lost to Democrats and won over by Trump were won by our movement. But where Trump benefited from blue collar desertion, we were the beneficiary of blue collar militancy.” By campaigning on a progressive populist platform that centered on fighting for workers’ rights, stronger health and pension benefits, and inclusion and diversity, the insurgent group of Teamsters was able to win in the United States.

FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have backed a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the presidency, the Washington Post reports. “Comey’s support for the CIA’s conclusion suggests that the leaders of the three agencies are in agreement on Russian intentions, contrary to suggestions by some lawmakers that the FBI disagreed with the CIA.”

“Donald Trump’s barnstorming tour across the states that won him the White House continues to feature far more taunts of triumph than notes of healing after a bruising election,” the Chicago Tribune reports.

“Thursday’s rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, found the president-elect calling for the mostly white crowd to cheer for African-Americans who were ‘smart’ to heed his message and therefore ‘didn’t come out to vote’ for his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”

Said Trump: “That was the big thing, so thank you to the African-American community.”

Yeah thank you. Tons.


First Read: “Out of all of the recent developments in the news about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race — the CIA’s conclusion that it was done to help Donald Trump, the NBC report that Vladimir Putin was personally involved — the biggest has been Trump’s reaction.”

“First, he criticized the CIA… Second, Trump questioned — falsely — why it took the Obama administration so long to act on the claims of Russian interference…. And this morning, he’s re-litigating the information that came from the WikiLeaks dumps.”

“Does he think it delegitimizes his win? Does he truly have affinity for Russia and Putin? Does he not accept intelligence that’s contrary to his worldview? This Russia story is big news. But the biggest news of all has been the reaction from the president-elect.”

President-elect Donald Trump “made veterans’ issues a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. But selecting a leader for the Department of Veterans Affairs will be one of the final decisions to round out his cabinet,” ABC News reports.

“Transition sources say Trump is still considering a number of different candidates… Contenders for the VA job include former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown; Pete Hegseth, the former chief executive of the conservative Concerned Veterans for America; and Adm. Michelle Howard, the first African-American woman to command a U.S. Navy ship.”

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “Mr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it’s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.”

“Many Americans are not overly concerned about Mr. Trump’s authoritarian inclinations because they trust our system of constitutional checks and balances to constrain him. Yet the institutional safeguards protecting our democracy may be less effective than we think.”

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