Happy New Year, Republicans Remain Ungovernable
Republicans took several days to elect a Speaker of the House, and Kevin McCarthy eventually (barely) got the needed votes after 14 failed ballots, but not before utterly debasing and humiliating himself and his entire party for the better part of a week. Even McCarthy’s hometown of Bakersfield wasn’t impressed by the show on the floor of the House of Representatives this week, and for good reason!
Joe Biden is almost certainly running for re-election in 2024, and he’s quietly pivoting to the center on key issues, namely on immigration.
One of the main reasons Democrats lose bigly on immigration is that we literally don’t have a unified party line stance on it and Republicans take advantage of that by dictating the entire narrative. When you have 1/2 of the Democratic Party saying, “Let’s secure the border and make it easier for people to legally immigrate,” 1/4 yelling “No human is illegal,” and the last 1/4 refusing to discuss immigration at all, it’s no wonder that voters don’t trust Democrats on immigration.
Republicans vary in terms of their immigration policy, with people like John Cornyn willing to work with Kyrsten Sinema on comprehensive immigration reform, but when push comes to shove, Republicans fall into line and start parroting the party line about the border crisis, as they have since John Boehner refused to bring the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill to the House floor to a vote during the 113th Congress. The unfortunate reality is that Republicans benefit electorally from not passing immigration reform, so they have no real incentive to do so, and Democrats can’t pass anything without Republican cooperation.
The point is, Democrats absolutely need an immigration strategy, and sooner rather than later.
It’s really peak comedy that the Senate GOP is not only least insane group of Republicans in the country but also is bracing themselves to literally be the handlers of the House GOP, who are a whole lot closer to the median Republican primary voter.
Honestly, it’s extremely annoying I know as much as I do about New York state politics despite not living in New York state. Why do I know the name of Kathy Hochul’s state supreme court appointee that’s inciting a lot of controversy? I don’t care!
I agree Hochul needed to punch left after all the Biden voters who went for Lee Zeldin during the midterms, but she should have addressed the actual issues articulated by those in the NYT piece in Asian-American voters for instance instead of infuriating the entire Democratic coalition, including labor and reproductive rights organizations. She could have started a task force on hate crimes or like, returned school admissions to being race blind, which are actual issues that voters indicated impacted their decision, but nope! That said, I don’t vote in NY, it’s not my problem lol.
The only way Brian Kemp can win a nationwide Republican primary is if:
A) Trump isn’t running
B) Trump endorses Kemp to fuck over Ron DeSantis
Weirder things have happened, but right now that seems unlikely.
But that said, there are several times as many Kemp-Warnock voters than the number of votes the 2020 election was decided by (in terms of the margins of the states which decided the electoral college) so Democrats better hope Kemp never wins a Republican presidential primary since he’s sail to a victory in the general election.
This was extremely good, especially this part:
It is not unusual for leftists activists and thinkers to focus a significant amount of energy on criticizing Democrats, since Democrats are, theoretically, more likely to be receptive to or susceptible to left-wing ideas, and are more realistic bargaining partners on a number of policy issues like expanding the welfare state. Meanwhile, the right is often seen as a lost cause. (Or sometimes the right is seen as indistinguishable from Democrats, depending on the issue.) But in anti-lib populism, liberal politics is portrayed as irreversibly corrupt, and the populist right is hinted at as an idyllic alternative.