So with Donald Trump’s annual Shithole Shutdown reaching a new record for length, and Trump going so far as to enlist the Supreme Court to help him stop SNAP payments to the needy, his occupation government was getting more and more unpopular just as two important governors’ races and a mayoral race in New York were happening, and the results last Tuesday were such a shellacking for the Trump Party that in Georgia Democrats won two public officer races, when Democrats have not won a non-federal race in Georgia since 2006. Republicans have never been more unpopular, and Democrats have never had more leverage since Trump was inaugurated. Trump himself said that the two reasons his party lost were “Trump wasn’t on the ballot and the shutdown.” The first part is probably true given how many of his fan club didn’t vote for anyone else on the ballot in 2024, which is the main reason Democrats still have as many Senators as they do.
So what do you do if you’re the Democratic Party?
What do you do?
That’s right! CAVE!
Over the weekend (to make sure that no staffers would be available to take phone calls from angry constituents) seven Democratic Senators and one Democratic-aligned independent agreed to a deal that would end the shutdown without getting any concessions from the Republican Party to end the ‘recissions’ of the executive branch against Congressional spending, or preserve the insurance subsidies of the Affordable Care Act. What they got was a promise to vote later on a bill that might or might not extend the subsidies for a limited period. A promise. From the party led by the guy famous for making promises such as “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” and “Honey, I brought the condoms this time.”
If you’re Chuck Schumer, you surrender everything in negotiations and get nothing back. It’s what you do.
Now, with my right-wing background, I am sympathetic to the pitch that a government that invests in social spending makes people dependent on it. But the fact is, that only becomes an issue if one party wants to make it a political issue, and the political issue is not how much welfare is to be budgeted, but rather the fact that one party thinks that any level of welfare is a good idea and the other never liked it much in the first place and is increasingly clear will no longer support at all. That party says its motives are based in Christianity, but what they mean by ‘Christian’ is “Jesus fed the hungry and cured the sick by magic, so that means we shouldn’t have to pay taxes for that stuff.”
It was pointed out that both Nevada Senators voted for this, given that the shutdown has been affecting air traffic control for weeks and Trump’s reality-TV Transportation Secretary announced that flights nationwide will be cut by up to ten percent. Of course they haven’t pointed out that Las Vegas tourism has been down for months because regular customers from Canada and other countries are being harassed by Border Patrol. Or maybe tourism is going down because greedy corporate bean counters charge up the ass for hotel parking and 12 dollars for a room service coffee.
Maybe the Democrats thought that if they went along with what the Republicans wanted to do, they could get things back to normal, whatever passes for that nowadays.
Maybe they’re just fucking pussies.
Monday, independent Senator Angus King of Maine went on “Morning Joe” to talk to his fellow collaborator Joe Scarborough, and described his vote to end the shutdown, saying “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work. It actually gave him more power.”
Jesus on a pogo stick, the Las Vegas Raiders fight harder than that.
Senator King – excuse me, MISTER King – would you like to tell that to all those people who voted in Virginia? Would you like to tell that to all those people in Pennsylvania who voted to confirm non-Trumpnik state court judges? Would you like to tell all the people in Mississippi who voted to break the state legislature Republican supermajority, that standing up to Donald Trump doesn’t work? Let’s just lie back and let him treat this entire country like Virginia Giuffre??
What the last election should have told Democratic ‘leadership’ was that the public at large, including a lot of people who probably hadn’t voted Democrat in years, were willing to hold firm on the shutdown, and a lot of them knew that the shutdown and everything that’s happened as a result of it are the direct responsibility of Donald Trump, and he will do worse if we do nothing, and the shutdown is the only thing that has changed anything?
Instead, senior Democrats decided, “eh, no. Let’s just cave on everything and hold out for an empty promise that we know Republicans will never honor, so that their Boss can smirk at the camera like a retarded toad and sneer, ‘I win again. I always win. I get everything I want. Always. Cause God hates the entire human race so he sent me here to turn this entire planet into an unbearable Hell that I will rule for all eternity.
‘Nyahh.”
With such political acumen, it’s a wonder Kamala Harris didn’t lose 52 states.
Because the other thing that senior Democrats should have learned last week but didn’t was that those who voted last week didn’t vote Democrat because of the institutional party, but in spite of it. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries – Congressman from New York – didn’t endorse his own Party’s nominee for Mayor, socialist Zohran Mamdani, until the very end of the campaign. Senate Minority Leader (from New York) Chuck Schumer didn’t endorse Mamdani at all. (In his defense, if he had, it might have caused Andrew Cuomo’s polls to go up by 5 points.) He even refused to admit to reporters who he had voted for. Presumably if it wasn’t Mamdani, it would be Cuomo, an establishment politician who was ruined by allegations of corruption and sexual harassment and ended up getting endorsed by Trump. So for Schumer, that would be par for the course.
Jay Jones in Virginia ran for state attorney general and the press got wind of him having an email conversation where he joked about shooting a Virginia Republican politician. Everybody called on him to end the race cause he had no chance and could have undermined Abigail Spanberger’s race to be Governor. Spanberger won by double digits and Jones won by 6 points.
While Spanberger may be perfectly acceptable to the Democratic establishment, a lot of other people who ran and won last week are not. They won anyway. The common thread was that people thought they would take the fight to Republicans, not that the party machine had given them the stamp of approval.
This is again par for the course. It ties into an operational problem that has been an issue for years and has only become that much more obvious as Democratic Party standard operating procedure is revealed as that much more ineffective against the new Trump occupation government. I had already mentioned that when New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez moved to get the ranking Democratic seat on the House Oversight Committee, she was stymied by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D.-California) who arranged for the seat to go to Gerry Connolly (D.-Virginia) who was at the time suffering from late stage esophageal cancer. And sure enough, he died, which is something that held up business. One of the issues with the House right now is that the most recently elected Congresswoman, Adelita Grijalva (D.-Arizona) is being held up by Speaker Mike Johnson (BR.-Trump’s Colon) because she and the House Democrats plus four Republicans would be enough to pass a petition to release the Epstein Files. That seat was vacant only because Grijalva’s own father, Raul Grijalva, was the Representative, and he died of old age and disease. Would that Democrats had let a younger and healthier candidate run in the last term, that standoff would not have been possible.
It is at this point I should bring up Kamala Harris as another example of Democratic establishment thinking. Because she may be totally irrelevant now, but in her memoir she revealed exactly why she is irrelevant and probably would have been more irrelevant than Joe Biden was when he was President. The book she released this year was called 107 Days, and it basically was organized on the theme that she only had 107 days after Biden’s retirement to run a campaign against Trump. I have not read it, because I’m cheap and I also make it a practice not to contribute to either left-wing or right-wing politicos who fuck up and then seek to profit from their fuckups with a tell-all book tour. But the excerpts I’ve seen are telling. For instance, Tim Walz (Governor of Minnesota) was likeable, outspoken and a good running mate for her but her first choice for Vice President was then Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is very articulate and persuasive enough to be invited on Fox News several times. Her other choice was the very popular Governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. In both cases she took the conservative position, thinking that Shapiro would not settle for a passive position in her Cabinet, and thinking that voters wouldn’t accept a ticket that had both her as a Black woman and Buttigieg as a gay man. (Raising the question of why demographics would be disqualifying if Barack Obama won the presidency and Joe Biden chose her as running mate largely because she was a black woman.) That and the fact that the Party leadership as a whole wouldn’t listen to suggestions that Biden retire until reality forced the issue, and then basically made Harris the nominee rather than have a contested convention where the public could be involved.
Mind you, I still think Kamala Harris would have been a vastly better President than Trump or any of his minions, but so would I, and what does that tell you?
Then of course there’s David Hogg, who moved from surviving the Parkland school shooting to anti-gun activism to general activism as a Democratic fundraiser. He was successful enough in that role to where the Democratic National Committee got him to serve as co-chair, but immediately ran into issues where his PAC advocated for replacing old establishment candidates with younger progressives. In May the DNC came up with an excuse for removing him and Malcolm Kenyatta as vice chairs. Hogg has continued with his PAC and has generally been more active with it than the DNC has been on a national level.
The institution calls itself a Democratic Party, but it practices oligarchy within its own ranks. If the oligarchy knew what they were doing, that would be one thing. I said it before, and I will say it again: Democrats are the house Negroes of American government. They fight to defend a decadent and corrupt system because it’s the system they grew up with and they can’t imagine anything better.
Maybe we need people with better imagination.
Cuck Schumer very cleverly got Senators who are not up for re-election in 2026 to vote for the sellout, and very cleverly refused to vote for it himself. But that means either he was working behind the scenes or he really did oppose the surrender and simply didn’t have the influence to stop his fellows. It is hard to say which is more condemning.
Ezra Klein of Indivisible announced Monday that his agenda is to focus on the primaries of Senators who are up for re-election next year to make removing Schumer from leadership a condition of support, and to make it a condition for support for Democrats running for open or Republican seats. That would be the first step. More broadly, continue to support that organization, No Kings, David Hogg (Leaders We Deserve) and anybody who’s trying to promote something outside the official hierarchy. I’d already said I wasn’t going to contribute to official Democratic Party fundraisers because the difference between a Democratic fundraiser and a Kickstarter campaign is that with the Kickstarter there’s a better chance of getting what I paid for. I now make an exception to that. I may in the future contribute to a Democratic Party fundraiser. Not online, but by mail, with a 5 or 20 dollar bill, after I have used it to wipe my own ass.