A key vote on the Women's Health Protection Act, a Democrat-led bill aimed at preserving access to abortion nationwide, failed in the Senate on Wednesday.
The vote comes as the US Supreme Court may be poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, as indicated by a leaked draft opinion.
The final tally was 49 to 51 with moderate Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, joining with Republicans to vote against the measure and stop it from advancing.
The bill's failure to advance was expected amid GOP resistance. But the outcome of the vote nevertheless underscores how Democrats are severely limited in what they can achieve with their narrow Senate majority.
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Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, rare Republican abortion-rights supporters, have introduced their own legislation to codify the rights established by Roe into federal law.
Both voted against the Women's Health Protection Act in February and voted against it again during Wednesday's vote. Collins criticized the Democratic bill in a statement ahead of the vote. The Maine Republican said the bill "explicitly invalidates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in connection with abortion and supersedes other longstanding, bipartisan conscience laws."
Asked at a news conference on Friday why he won't instead bring the Collins and Murkowski bill to the floor, which could receive bipartisan support, Schumer said, "We are not looking to compromise something as vital as this."
Chaser:
In my family law practice, I often find myself representing people who’ve been denied access to their children for some reason. They’ll tell me the most important thing in the world, their absolute top priority, is being able to see them again.
But then they’ll insist that the access schedule has to be the one they’ve put forward, with no supervision at all even though they haven’t seen their kids in years and the other parent is alleging abuse and/or serious drug addiction problems, or they’d rather have no parenting time at all. Period.
And my response is usually along the lines of, “I thought your top priority was being able to see your children after a long time apart. Having your access supervised will be hard, but if it goes well, you should be able to get supervision lifted and get more time. You have to crawl before you can walk.”
Usually they realize the alternative is no parenting time. But there’s a hard core that absolutely will not give in, because their pride and their “principles” are more important than their kids. That’s usually when I find myself telling them they might be better off with other counsel. (Standard response: “yeah, I should get someone who’s actually going to fight for me.”)
The point of all this (and there is a point, seriously) is that the Democratic Party, supposedly the one force standing between America and literal fascism, is acting like one of my more obstinate and delusional clients. Take it away, Mr. Teixeira:
How much is the Democratic Left losing? Let us count the ways.
1. Build Back Better. This was the vessel into which all the hopes and priorities of the Democratic Left were poured. And it has proved to be a catastrophic failure. While the Democratic Congress, on the Democratic Left’s insistence, wasted months in arcane negotiations about bill structure, what programs it would and would not cover and how many trillions of dollars it all would cost, ordinary voters were trying to cope with the Delta wave and the emergence of supply and inflation problems in the economy. As they became increasingly unhappy with the Biden administration and increasingly unsure just when things would finally get back to normal, the endless, confusing negotiations went on.
This was a terrible look for the Democrats, making them seem out of touch with the country and ordinary voters. And in the end, nothing got done.
2. The Infrastructure Bill. Here is a textbook case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Dimitri Melhorn, an advisor to Democratic politicians and anti-Trump megadonors, put it well in an exchange on Micah Sifry’s substack:
We had a moment in August 2021 when Biden was not yet underwater, and he achieved a landmark victory in getting 69 Senators to vote for a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The power of the word "bipartisan" in this era is immense, which is why McConnell and his allies have worked so hard to prevent it from ever happening under Obama or Biden. The power of roads and bridges is immense, especially for an administration that campaigned largely on the narrative of restoration of basic norms, especially at a time when the left claimed that we could not get 60 votes to pass an "ice cream tastes good" resolution. We had a $1 trillion bipartisan bill and opportunity at that point to pass that bill and reap massive, massive PR and electoral benefits. We decided not to, apparently based on a desire to energize the base, with a hardline campaign to fight for the best stuff in BBB at the highest possible spending levels.
This is political malpractice of the highest order. And another egregious failure for the Democratic Left’s balance sheet.
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7. Abortion. With the likely impending demise of Roe v. Wade at the hands of the Supreme Court, the Democratic Left is on high alert. Unfortunately, that high alert doesn’t seem to be too centered on what most American voters would actually support. With the enthusiastic support of the Democratic Left, Chuck Schumer had the Senate vote on a bill that would effectively have legalized abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy (perhaps a third of Americans support legal third trimester abortions). Of course, it failed.
As the previously-cited Dimitri Melhorn noted:
The fight about abortion is all about framing. Most Americans are in the middle. Republicans ranged from moderately pro-choice to hardline pro-life but no one really cared because Roe was the law of the land. The hardline pro-life position in other words did nothing to bother most voters. Democrats’ historic track record in attacking people with even soft pro-life sympathies and purging them from the caucus created this current moment of threat to women by helping associate Democrats with an extremely unpopular position rather than the Safe Legal and Rare positioning that could actually win elections….Democrats are intensely skilled at allowing the GOP to get away with unpopular extremism by running to their own extreme.
As the great Casey Stengel might have put it: “Can’t anyone here play this game?”
The thread that runs through all these failures is the Democratic Left’s adamant refusal to base its political approach on the actually-existing opinions and values of actually-existing American voters. Instead they entertain fantasies about kindling a prairie fire of progressive turnout with their approach, despite falling short again and again in the real world. It hasn’t worked and it won’t work.
Instead, what they need is a plan on how to win outside of deep blue areas and states (the average Congressional Progressive Caucus leader is from a Democratic +19 district). That entails compromises that, so far, the Democratic Left has not been willing to make. Cultural moderation, effective governance and smart campaigning are what is needed to win in competitive areas of the country. If democracy is in as much danger as the Democratic Left appears to believe, would not such compromises be worth making? And wouldn’t winning make a nice change of pace at this point?
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Donald Trump is literally Hitler and the GOP is literally a Nazi political party. If we use that analogy, the Democrats - especially the “progressive” wing of the party - are acting like Ernst Thälmann:
In the 1930s, fear of Bolshevism persuaded many middle-class Germans to support Hitler (and led the Catholic Church to throw in its lot with fascism in Italy, Spain and elsewhere). These days, fear of Corbyn buttresses the worst Tory government in living memory. Worse, although we again face danger from the far right, the far left refuses to work with potential allies in the centre and centre left. Again. Instead, it spends much of its energy attacking them. The obsessive hatred for “Blairites”, “red Tories” and “centrists” is reminiscent of the KPD’s hatred of “social fascists” during the years when Nazism could have been stopped. If the phrase is new to you, you’d be forgiven for thinking it signified some form of fascism. It didn’t. “Social fascism” was the communist term for social democrats – and it helped pave the way to catastrophe.
In the words of Theodore Draper, the American former communist fellow traveller who turned against the party and became a historian, “the so-called theory of social fascism and the practice based on it constituted one of the chief factors contributing to the victory of German fascism in January 1933”.
The theory, developed in the early 1920s, favoured by Stalin and established as Communist orthodoxy by 1928, held that reformist social democracy was the worst enemy of the proletariat – worse than fascism – because it created false consciousness and made revolution, the party’s overriding goal, less likely. This notion derived from the left’s misunderstanding of the dark forces about to overwhelm it.
Thälmann and the KPD regarded fascists and Nazis as products and tools of capitalism. Since social democrats were also capitalists, it followed that social democracy, fascism and Nazism were simply different facets of the same oppression. To further the dream of a Soviet Germany, the party was willing to help the Nazis destroy democracy, thinking it could beat the Nazis easily in the aftermath.
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With hindsight, his relaxed attitude to the threat of Hitler seems astonishingly foolish. For example, as Russel Lemmons shows in his 2013 book about Thälmann, Hitler’s Rival, when the Nazis made their electoral breakthrough in the Reichstag elections of 1930 (winning 18 per cent of the vote to become the second-largest party) Thälmann insisted that if Hitler came to power he was sure to fail and this would drive Nazi voters into the arms of the KPD.
Foreshadowing the 2017 claim that Labour actually won the general election it lost, the KPD newspaper the Red Flag even hailed the KPD’s defeat in that election (up by 2.5 per cent to 13.1 per cent) as a victory on the grounds that communist voters were ardent revolutionaries (“one communist vote has more weight than ten to 20 national socialist votes combined”). The 1930 election left the Social Democrats and KPD with almost 40 per cent of the seats in the Reichstag between them. In November 1931 the SPD suggested the two parties work together but Thälmann rejected the offer and the Red Flag called for an “intensification of the fight against Social Democracy”.
Along the way Thälmann made any number of tactical blunders. In 1925, for example, against the advice of Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev, the KPD leadership refused to stand Thälmann down in the second round of the German presidential election. This split took enough votes away from centre candidate Wilhelm Marx to give the First World War general Paul von Hindenburg a narrow victory. In 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor, then signed the decrees enabling the Nazi terror against the left after the Reichstag fire.
As the Nazi menace intensified in the early 1930s, Thälmann continued to be sanguine. As late as February 1932, he was arguing that “Hitler must come to power first, then the requirements for a revolutionary crisis [will] arrive more quickly”. In November 1932, just three months before Hitler’s takeover, the KPD and Nazis even worked together in the Berlin transport workers’ strike.
While discussing the Dems’ tactical incompetence on a recent episode of The Bulwark’s Next Level podcast, JVL not unfairly responded that the GOP is completely in thrall to its hardcore base and hasn’t really suffered any consequences for it at the ballot box.
That was certainly true in 2016, and we’re all still suffering the consequences. On the other hand, the GOP lost the House in 2018 and the Senate and White House in 2020. As I’ve written before, I think this year’s elections are by no means a lost cause for Democrats, considering who’s winning some of these Republican nomination races.
But, yes, we’re going through a period where the Republicans have structural advantages on their side. They’re over-represented in the Senate (though the people who complain about Wyoming’s two Senators never whine about Vermont having the same) and have used the filibuster to great effect (which means it’s now a racist impediment to progress barely a decade after it was an important check on one-party rule).
Give me your arguments for reforming the Senate1 and eliminating the filibuster and I’ll gladly give you a hearing. But all your arguing isn’t going to actually reform the Senate nor eliminate the filibuster. And that’s all the more reason Democrats should take what they can get and come back for more later.
If it’s really an emergency, for God’s sake, start acting like it’s an emergency.
I’m partial to the way the upper house of Germany’s legislature, the Bundesrat, is organized. Each German state is represented by anywhere between three and six seats, depending on population, which keeps the largest Lander from running roughshod over the whole country while ensuring that smaller ones don’t have a disproportionate advantage.
Also, its members aren’t directly elected, but instead appointed by the state governments (usually coalitions made up of several different parties). I’m not so sure I’m on board with that part.
The more I watch the political situation in the U.S. churn, the less distinction I see in how each side of the political divide operates, writ large. To be clear, I'm not trying to introduce some kind of moral equivalency here, because at least so far there is none in the larger scheme of things. The D's pretty much hold that patch of ground hands down.
I'm talking about the fact that the odious noise from the flanks is driving the narrative and actions on each side, not the moderates, and this puts the advantage on the right, both in terms of the 'structural advantage' that you mentioned, and the drum beat of the constant 'loser narrative' about the left being propagated by the mainstream media. And the D's don't get it that if you want to win, you have to win the middle, since your base alone isn't going to get the job done, no matter how much you energize and fire them up. And if you're going to do that, you'd better start showing yourself to be capable of representing and promoting the values of the denizens of that demographic. Otherwise it will end up being the noise that decides who wins, not the substance...just a bunch of 'Rinos and Dinos' going along for the ride as the extremes battle it out, leaving the folks like me shaking their heads in bewilderment and despair and thinking WTF is the damned point?
Not that I personally would ever consider *not* casting a ballot with every office / proposition marked with my 'choice', however much I may dislike the 'lesser evil' of the moment. But I know a handful of genuinely good and decent people who in '16 and '20 cast ballots sans votes for president and even senators and congressmen, because they were pissed off and dejected by the carnival show our politics has become. And we all know who lower voter turnout or ballot choices left blank favor.