Top Senate Dem serves notice to GOP, Trump on priorities
Michael Venditto, where the Democrat now leads by 22 votes – would give them the numbers to create a workable 32-member majority of Felder plus seven Independent Democratic Conference members plus 24 mainline Democrats.
Not only have Democrats lost control of the federal government, their power continues to erode state by state.
Republicans maintained control of both houses of Congress, and now control the legislature and governorships in more than half the states.
“That’s more than at any other time in the history of the Republican Party”, NCSL says on its website.
Democrats should reject the urge to take comfort in favorable demographic trends. Senior Democrats initially were wary of the bold step, reminding their younger colleagues that they would not be in the majority forever and that the move could come back to haunt them. “The Republicans look at the political arena 10 to 20 years out”. Socially pressing issues debated between Trump and Clinton throughout their respective campaigns, such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and civil rights, led Christian voters to side with Trump as his stances aligned more closely with their traditional values. Why are Democrats, who spent eight years lamenting Washington paralysis, now gung ho for confrontation when even Republican voters didn’t feel that way towards Obama in 2008? And now, according to conservative columnist George Will – who left the party in disgust over Trump’s nomination – the Republican Party is “as strong as it’s been since the 1920s”. I don’t have almost enough space to list all the ways in which he disqualified himself.
There will be blood (metaphorically, of course). It’s going to be important that they stay engaged and speak out.
It wasn’t so long ago that obituaries were being written about the Republican Party – that Donald Trump’s widely assumed defeat would be the ruination of the GOP.
President-elect Donald Trump took after the cast of “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live” Sunday, seeking an apology from the former and equal time from the latter.
I think it’s mostly, but not completely, a function of Trump being seen as something “different” and uniquely unsafe by critics because of his demagoguery and strongman persona. Maybe they thought he was bound to lose anyway; if so, they miscalculated.
More than a week after Election Day, the accuracy of polling can be called into question after Republican Donald Trump’s seemingly improbable victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. That’s six out of the last seven presidential contests. “More than trending: It is Republican”. So although Republicans would be able to use a legislative maneuver to send a health care repeal to Trump’s desk with just a simple majority, other major objectives, including immigration and border enforcement, would require some degree of cooperation from minority Democrats. “There are people who are now thinking that Democrats don’t care about them”.
Asked about Schumer’s view, a White House official said that clemency is not an option for granting legal status to undocumented immigrants. There still would have been an unusually large number of Dems calling for their leaders to “stand up to” a new Republican president, even if that president were Kasich or Rubio instead of Trump, for the “payback” reason I noted above.
This points to a potential flaw in the Democratic strategy. When (Trump) doesn’t deliver, they will keep looking. Democrats need a hopeful but realistic message recognizing that while most big cities prosper in today’s globalized economy, much of the rest of the country suffers. “As we have repeatedly said for years, only Congress can create legal status for undocumented individuals”, the official said, also noting longstanding policy against commenting on individual pardon applications.