DL Open Thread: Sunday, January 12, 2025

Dog Bites Man: Delaware Rethugs Disgrace Themselves:

South Carolina House Republican Nancy Mace spoke at a private Delaware GOP event in Newark Friday following controversy with Congresswoman Sarah McBride.

Mace filed a bill in November that would ban transgender women from using facilities on federal property that do not correspond with the sex assigned at birth.

She has been publicly clear that the bill targets Delaware’s lone Congresswoman Sarah McBride, who became the first openly transgender member of Congress with her 2024 victory.

All Is Revealed:

(State Rethug Chair Julianne) Murray said the event has a broader scope than the recent transgender bathroom ban controversy.

“I know that people have tried to turn this into a whole— something that it’s not. This is about protecting women and the sanctity of women in women’s spaces. This is not a bathroom issue. I know that everybody wants to make it that, but it is so much more than that, and I, as a woman, as a state party chair and as a Republican, am so thankful for the advocacy of this woman and what she is— the heat that she is taking, in my view, unjustifiably so,” Murray said at a press conference preceding the event.

Oh.  BTW, just curious, was Kevin Hensley there?  Did he drive himself to the event?

Trump Vs. Cali: The drama’s already begun:

WASHINGTON (AP) — As cataclysmic wildfires rage across Los Angeles, President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t been offering much sympathy. Instead, he’s claiming he could do a better job managing the crisis, spewing falsehoods and casting blame on the state’s Democratic governor.

Trump has lashed out at his longtime political foe Gov. Gavin Newsom’s forest management policies and falsely claimed the state’s fish conservation efforts are responsible for fire hydrants running dry in urban areas. Referring to the governor by a derisive nickname, Trump said he should resign.

Trump v. Newsom: Round 2 was to be expected — the liberal Democrat has long been one of Trump’s biggest foils. But the Western fires are also a sign of something far more grave than a political spat or a fight over fish. Wildfire season is growing ever longer thanks to increasing drought and heat brought on by climate change.

Trump refuses to recognize the environmental dangers, instead blaming increasing natural disasters on his political opponents or on acts of God. He has promised to drill for more oil and cut back on renewable energy.

Delawareans, Any Of This Sound Familiar?

Seymour P. Lachman, a former New York State senator who was so fed up with the political shenanigans in Albany that he quit the Legislature and wrote two books that helped spur reforms, died on Jan. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

A Democrat, he often described himself as a traditionalist. But he would have been the first to acknowledge that the tell-some book he wrote about secretive power-brokering in Albany probably had more impact than his party-line votes as a legislator.

Its thrust was that anything of consequence that occurred in the state capital was predetermined by the governor, the Senate majority leader and the Assembly speaker and reflected “a subservience by lawmakers that has no peer in the United States Congress nor in many American statehouses.”

The book told of the corrupting power of money, the outsize influence of lobbyists, and public authorities’ lack of accountability.

“The reward for lawmakers’ compliance includes party assistance and taxpayer-financed pork-barrel morsels for community organizations in election years,” Mr. Lachman and Mr. Polner wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in early 2007.

They added: “Those who play by the rules of the leadership also benefit by having their names appended from time to time to bills of importance. They receive committee assignments that can earn them as much as $40,000 on top of their $79,000 yearly salary, and their district lines are rigged in their favor for lifetime job security.

What do you want to talk about?