I honestly believe that Democrats will miss Mitch McConnell dearly when he’s gone because whoever replaces him and his Republican Old Guard will be categorically worse. There’s a reason Roy Blunt, Pat Toomey, Richard Burr, Richard Shelby, and Rob Portman are all retiring this year like whether or not you agree with their views (and I usually don’t), they’re infinitely more normal and sane than the rest of the GOP, which is why they’re getting the hell out of dodge. They didn’t vote to overturn the results of a free and fair election like the majority of their colleges in the House of Representatives did last year, and when those colleagues graduate to the Senate, we’ll rue the day.
The Primary Elements of Dhaaruni’s (Public) Twitter:
Telling people to read Andrea Dworkin’s “Right Wing Women”
Dooming about Democrats’ electoral future
“You should have elected Hillary Clinton in 2016”
Stories about dating Republicans
(Semi-Politely) calling people dumb
I’m serious about the dooming though like case in point:
A few weeks ago, a liberal man on Twitter just tried to mansplain to me why Chuck Schumer having senators go on record about the Women’s Health Protection Act is good and smart politics despite Schumer and everybody else knowing full well the bill wouldn’t pass since it needed 60 votes and got 48. This man then tried to blame *checks notes*, young women without children for why Dems are having electoral difficulties at which point I left the conversation. The fact is, my right to bodily autonomy is more important to me than my feeling warm and fuzzy about being “seen” by the Democratic Party. I would rather have a Democratic party that sticks to “safe, legal, and rare” messaging when it comes to abortion and wins presidential elections and retains Congressional majorities and protects the right to abortion for EVERYBODY when elected than a party that calls abortion rad (I see you @ ACLU) and uses phrases like “birthing bodies” (I see you @ Rep. Cori Bush) instead of just saying women (who make up 99.9999% of the people who get pregnant). Obviously, Democrats’ messaging about abortion isn’t the only reason that Dems lose winnable elections, ditto with the whole Latinx debate, but none of this stuff helps, and is generally a lot more fixable than the media’s penchant for sensationalism aka Republicans winning.
This is what I’ve been saying about voter suppression for months!! Democrats aren’t poised to lose swing districts in blue states this November because of voter suppression and the sooner Dems stop pretending that voter suppression is the only reason the party can’t win statewide in 50% of the states, the better.
This article, How Immigration Politics Drives Some Hispanic Voters to the G.O.P. in Texas, was unsurprising to me as someone who pays attention to politics, so I’m kind of appalled that the Democratic Party apparatus didn’t pick up on how troubling Dems’ slippage with Hispanic voters will be in 2022 and beyond. Calling these voters racist won’t bring them back, and given how horrific the current iteration of the Democratic Party does with non-college educated white voters, we have zero room to fall with Hispanic voters and in fact, should be doing better with them. Joe Biden did double digits worse with Hispanic voters nationwide in 2020 than Hillary Clinton in 2016, as well with every other demographic except white men, and including white women, but he won by 43k votes over 3 states and she lost by 77k votes across 3 states because he won 38% of white men while she won 31% of white men. Also, this pull-quote from the linked article was telling: “‘I want to bring God back into politics,’ Mr. Cabrera said. ‘And so that’s what I’m doing.’”
This tweet thread by Matthew Yglesias really hones in on what I say about how the Republican apparatus and aligned parties, are often better at the politics game than their Democratic counterparts. And, I’m not just talking about activist groups or random media individuals like Tucker Carlson and Joy Reid, I’m talking federally elected Democrats. Like, when Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) , who tweets (and then deletes tweets) about “saying the names” of people on death row who raped and murdered innocent people and doubles down on “defund the police” messaging after everybody else in the party, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who gives us fellow small, dark-haired millennial women a bad name by being right 35% of the time instead of the 85% of the time I for one am right) shut up about it, camps out at the Capitol overnight to protest the eviction moratorium from running out, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi’s response should not be to celebrate Bush for camping out on the Capitol and for Schumer to run out and hug Bush and AOC with cameras flashing knowing full well that the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, which ended the moratorium, didn’t pay any attention at all to Bush, House and Senate Democrats, or even the Biden White House in the first place, and Bush’s theatrics were nothing but a well-documented photo op.
Ruy Teixeira on The Bulwark Podcast was excellent as was his write-up on his own Substack, The Liberal Patriot. This part in particular stood out to me like I’m so glad that nobody normal wants to prevent high schoolers from taking calculus (I will never shut up about that proposal that Glenn Youngkin for one had to veto) but it drives me insane that’s even a suggestion. Just say you don’t believe in meritocracy why don’t you?
I’m ending this newsletter with the anodyne statement that even if Biden tried to for instance cancel student debt or enact thorough immigration reform by executive order, the courts can and would strike it down!!! That’s why Congress has to write bills that pass the House and the Senate, which of course members of Congress aren’t interested in doing because nothing they propose will clear the 60-vote threshold with the filibuster in place and since Joe Manchin is our deciding vote, the filibuster is here to say. That’s also why letting Trump become president in 2016 was not smart of the United States and we’re going to be facing the consequences of that for decades to come (aka #3 on the primary elements of Dhaaruni’s public Twitter).