D House Leadership Remains Almost The Same:
Delaware House Speaker Melissa “Mimi” Minor-Brown, D-New Castle, has survived a challenge from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to keep her role.
In a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday night, Democrats, which included the nine freshman members, voted to again give Minor-Brown the gavel ahead of the 154th General Assembly.
Caucus members reelected state Rep. Kerri Evelyn Harris, D-Dover, as House majority leader.
State Rep. Cyndie Romer, D-Newark, who declined to comment for this story, will replace state Rep. Ed Osienski as House majority whip.
The challenge came from Working Families Party-backed state Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton, D-Bear, who was campaigning for the speakership. The slate also included state Rep. Kim Williams, D-Stanton, as majority leader.
The vote was reportedly 16-14 in the Caucus.
So. Let’s talk. I think I noted pre-election that you never have the votes until the votes are counted, representations to the contrary notwithstanding. Here’s where we’ll see whether fissures in the Caucus can be kept to a minimum: Will the Speaker finally give progressives representation on the ‘Money’ committees, and will the Speaker appoint progressive representatives to head committees for which they’re qualified? Speakers dating back to Pete Schwartzkopf have given inordinate power to the likes of Lumpy Carson, Stephanie Bolden and Franklin Cooke, among others. Non-entities all. The voters did what the Speaker would not. Will Speaker Mimi pay attention to the voters, or will the Mean Girls’ Club once again reign supreme?
Before I leave this topic, one more related question. What will the House do about Mike Smith? Since there is virtually no committee that isn’t in some way lobbied by the Chamber, I think he should be given no committee assignments. Also, in the past, it has been left up to the individual legislators to determine whether they may have a conflict of interest on any given vote. Almost by definition, the President of the Chamber Of Commerce has a conflict-of-interest on a preponderance of bills. I think that, in this case, the Speaker should have the authority to determine which bills Smith is eligible to vote on.
I’m serious, and I hope the Speaker is as well on this.
Stephen ‘Flood The Zone’ Miller Is Now Trump’s Chief-Of-Staff. You didn’t think that all these malevolent policies started with Trump, did you?:
Introspection has never been one of Donald Trump’s more notable attributes. He never accepts blame or course-corrects; he only becomes a more distilled version of himself.
And so, faced with rejection at the ballot box on an overwhelming scale, the president responded by replacing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, with Stephen Miller.
Technically speaking, Miller had been Wiles’s second in command, as deputy chief of staff. In reality, Miller was already the administration’s most powerful figure, arguably including Trump himself. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and a Miller ally who was briefly cast as the power behind the throne during Trump’s first term, described Miller earlier this year as Trump’s “prime minister.” In a parliamentary system, the president or monarch is merely the symbolic head of state, whereas the prime minister is the head of government.
He is fanatically post-liberal. Miller has repeatedly described the opposition as illegitimate. “The Democrat Party is not a political party,” he said last year. “It is a domestic extremist organization.” He has obsessively, and effectively, employed executive actions to circumvent Congress as a lawmaking body. Trump had little use for the legislature even when his allies controlled it. If Miller remains true to form, he will extend his reliance on executive action, and commit the administration to total defiance of any oversight.
He is especially driven by his belief that immigration is a plot directed by left-wing elites to destroy traditional America. Miller, more than any other single factor, explains Trump’s baffling choice to blow up his 2024 coalition, which registered shocking gains among Latinos. He has directed the administration’s frantic campaign of mass deportation, acting in the belief that the GOP has four years to permanently reshape American demography or face permanent extinction. Miller, more than any other person, is responsible for unleashing violent havoc on American streets, as masked agents in unmarked vehicles have swept up suspects. He has also virtually shut down legal immigration—except for white South Africans, whom the administration has ostentatiously welcomed. Even Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal, has sometimes complained that Miller’s immigration enforcement has gone too far.
I’m sure those Republicans remaining in Congress must love this choice.
How Elon Lost $500 Mill On The Midterms:
Now the onetime trillionaire is all but certain to face investigatory scrutiny and financial pressure with newly empowered Democrats in control of Congress and top state offices in Texas, where he lives and operates many of his businesses. Mr. Musk, who moved there from California in part to escape the regulatory environment, will soon be represented by a senator who has said he wants to “tax trillionaires out of existence.”
The political influence of Mr. Musk, who has become by far the Republican Party’s biggest megadonor, is now in serious question.
How he arrived at this point is a story of an unpredictable tycoon who was never in denial about Republicans’ predicament this year, but who was also characteristically starry-eyed about his ability to help the party beat the odds.
In interviews, nearly 30 people with insight into Mr. Musk’s political operation — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations — recounted how he came to spend so much on the midterms, how tensions grew between his team and President Trump’s advisers, and how his varied and often last-ditch strategies fizzled.
There is now some finger-pointing in Mr. Musk’s broader orbit about who is responsible for what went wrong and whether he should have spent so much, particularly in Texas. Some advisers to Mr. Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, had argued internally that the group should be more focused on persuasion (winning over new voters) than on turnout (encouraging past Republican voters to cast ballots again).
The operation that Mr. Musk assembled was enormous, bigger than what he had in 2024. Thousands of paid canvassers were dispatched to knock on millions of doors of Republican-leaning Americans who were seen as less likely to vote yet could be encouraged to do so. But as Republicans’ polling grew uglier in the final weeks, America PAC began knocking on the doors of likelier and likelier voters, drifting away from its original job.
So. Musk ultimately moves virtually his entire operation to Texas because there’s no way that Texas is flipping any time soon. Texas then–flips. I somehow don’t think that Bryan Townsend will be able to convince the General Assembly to welcome him back due to the exalted nature of Delaware’s Corporate Franchise.
Game-Changers: Newly-Elected Democratic AG’s? Yes, most decidedly so:
The Democratic Party’s historic midterm rout came with a special bonus for state attorneys general. Not only did Democrats capture five Republican-held state AG offices, strengthening the party’s hand in legal and policy battles to come over AI, voting rights, energy, health care and corporate power — they unexpectedly seized one of the most powerful AG offices in the country by winning in Texas.
“We took the head of the snake,” Sean Rankin, president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said in an interview.
What it means:
Soon-to-be-former Texas attorney general and culture warrior Ken Paxton had used the office to aggressively challenge everything from environmental regulations and gay and transgender rights to the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win in battleground states. The Texas AG’s office has also long used the litigation pipeline to the conservative Fifth Circuit U.S. court of appeals to challenge Democratic presidents’ priorities.
“There will be a change in how the Republican attorneys general have to engage nationally if they do not have Texas at the front,” Rankin said. “Having Texas not on the other side, that’s a game changer.”
Can Dems Elect President By Popular Vote?. Yes, yes they can. Will they?
What do you want to talk about?
Could this be the perfect case for Mike smith? No committes and no voting ability but still getting paid to be the full time chamber president? Meaning could he literally never be in Dover for his state job and still get paid
For now, I’m sticking by my prediction that he will not serve in the upcoming General Assembly.
I can understand why he stayed in the race–his appointment to the Chamber job took place so late that it was not practical for the R’s to replace him on the ballot.
But the conflict is so clear and blatant to me that I can’t imagine him trying to be both the lobbyist and the person being lobbied. That, however, just might be due to my lack of imagination.