An update on the effort to replace Bayh on the ballot in Indiana. The Indiana Dem Party State Central Committee must meet to pick to pick a nominee. There are 32 voting members. According to a friend who is close to the process in the state, the vote technically doesn't have to happen until June, but they are expected to pick by next week- and if it's a House member, someone would have to start campaigning for that person's House seat. All that incentivizes a quick process, as the Dem Party Chairman commented to the Indy Star:
"The sooner the better," Indiana
Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker said.
Here's the problem. Multiple sources, including the Star and TPM, are reporting that Rep. Brad Ellsworth is under consideration.
Ellsworth, as many of you know, is a Blue Dog who voted against the stimulus package, voted for Stupak, voted against federal funding for stem cell research three years ago, voted for the GOP motion to recommit on health care reform. Yes on FISA, Yes on the bailouts, Yes on the war supplemental, No on Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009. As Taniel pointed out in Quick Hits this morning, he is as far to the right as you can get for a potential Senate Democrat. He's a virtual Parker Griffith, the right-wing Democrat who just switched parties.
Yet that's not all. Over at HuffPo, Bil Browning, a Hoosier based in Indianapolis who publishes The Bilerico Project, and whose partner, Jerame, is on the leadership of the Indiana Stonewall Democrats, has a piece this morning documenting how much Ellsworth has thrown LGBT people under the bus. He was one of just 15 Democrats to vote against the Matthew Shepard Act on hate crimes last year, and when asked by Bil about it later, he actually said he didn't want to stand up for equality because of how it would look to his district. Despite voting for ENDA on the floor several years ago, he voted for the Republican motion to recommit immediately prior that would have killed the bill. He's not a co-sponsor of the current version and has not announced his support. He has not announced a position on Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal. He's not only against marriage equality, he voiced support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which was voted upon before he was elected. He's not publicly in favor of any other pro-LGBT legislation. In other words, not only are there Republicans in the House who are better than him, but according to HRC's scorecard, Republican Sen. Lugar doubles Ellsworth's 30% record with 60%- and Evan Bayh triples it at 90%. The "Indiana's too conservative" argument doesn't fly.
Now, Parker, the Chairman, says he wants a consensus nominee:
Still, he said he wanted the party to
coalesce around one candidate before he
calls a meeting of the central committee.
"Whoever this nominee is," he said, "they
need to have the entire party behind
them."
Great. If that's the case, then Ellsworth cannot be the candidate. In fact, several of the rumored candidates are anti-equality, and we need a pro-equality candidate. Indiana Stonewall Democrats have a seat on the State Central Committee. No anti-equality nominee could ever have the entire party behind him. Stonewall Democrats has a petition to Parker on this. Please sign and share with your friends. Remember you can use our new shareable links to do so on Facebook, Twitter and other sites, as well, with just a click.
Side note: One question raised is "wouldn't all Dems within the realm of possibility be virtual Republicans?" Not quite. Baron Hill scores better on LGBT issues, and is somewhat better on a wider range of issues as well, as Taniel demonstrates. I'm also told former Sec of State Joe Hogsett, who is also rumored to be in the mix, would be better on LGBT issues at least. Bottom line is that Ellsworth is the worst.
In These Times has a great piece by Adam Doster called 'Hounding the Bush Dogs', and David Sirota wrote his latest syndicated column on corrupt Democrats who use their conservative districts as a mask.
There are more primaries to come, both on foreign policy issues and on domestic corporate nonsense.
And if you need a reminder that these conservative Democrats aren't voting their districts, check out this article from Inside Indiana Business, a state suffering from NAFTA where Bush Dog Democrats picked up three seats in 2006 running on Fair Trade.
Unfortunately, Indiana Rep. Brad Ellsworth, who campaigned on a fair trade platform, flipped his position when it came time to vote. During the 2006 campaign, paid television ads for Ellsworth criticized his opponent, John Hostettler, for voting to "expand NAFTA." (watch the ad at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoF3SdOnak). However, Ellsworth sided with Republicans and voted to support Bush's Peru NAFTA expansion.
Ellsworth is aggressively going after undocumented workers as the source of economic instability in the region, which is sort of a racist safety valve for corporate servants that want to exploit fear instead of doing their job. Still, despite the local media crisis and lack of coverage, we are making progress. Paul Rosenberg is beginning to outline a strategy for local organizing around getting members to vote their districts, and hopefully he'll continue to work through it to make it manageable.
We are making progress on Bush Dogs, slowly but surely.
Congressmen Baron Hill and Joe Donnelly are joining Ellsworth in backing a new bill that would put thousands more agents at the border, and require that employers use a free government service to verify that those they hire are legal.
"If you're a business that is doing the right thing and only hiring legal immigrants, you have nothing to worry about," Hill said.
All three are Democrats and part of last year's freshman class who know their positions on illegal immigration are being closely watched. The potency of the issue already being seen in the presidential campaign, and is beginning to stir new action on Capitol Hill as well.
"I think you'll see a number of House Democratic freshmen, especially from a lot of these conservative-leaning districts who were first elected in 2006, emphasize the immigration issue," said Greg Giroux of Congressional Quarterly.
Both Ellsworth and Hill voted for the NAFTA-style Peru Free Trade deal. At least Donnelly did not.
So Ellswoth and Hill vote for corporate trade agreements throwing foreigners into poverty and forcing them to America, and then support militarization of the border to guard against people coming into this country.
Chris calls them Rove Dogs for jeopardizing Democratic prospects among fast growing populations. Really though they are simply con men using economic anxieties to bash immigrants as cover for their corporate agenda. Or maybe I'm wrong, and corporate trade agreements are super-popular in heavily unionized Indiana, where Ross Perot picked up 20% of the vote in 1992.
Brad Ellsworth represnts Indiana's famous (or is it infamous) "Bloody Eighth" Congressional District. The District covers the southern half of Indiana's western border and includes Evansville, Terre Haute and Vincennes. It's a classic blue collar, white district: 94.2% white, 3.7% black, 0.9% Hispanic and 0.6% Asian. While the percentage of high school grads is slightly above the national norm, college degrees and graduate degrees are somewhat rare (15.6% for college vs. over 21% nationally; 3.7 for grad degrees vs. over 6%). The result is fewer "poor" people but family and per capita incomes some 10 to 15% below the national average.
Ellsworth's father was a crane operator for Alcoa. Ellsworth worked his way through a local college by working in the paint and hardware department of the local Sears. This was not "Grease" territory or anything like it. Ellsworth entered the County Sherriff's office and began working his way up the ladder. This meant getting a masters degree in Criminology at Indiana State (in the district at Terre Haute; best known as Larry Bird's school although John Wooden started his college coaching career there). It also meant, eventually, being elected the local sherrif (1998, re-elected in 2002), in Ellsworth's case as a Democrat.
In 2006, the Sherriff took on the local Republican Congressman, John Hostettler. Hostettler was kind of unusual. He voted against the Iraq War Resolution (AUMF) and refused to take PAC funds, In fact, he generally spent small sums and relied on a network of churches and anti-abortion types to turn out the votes. Ellsworth, in a sense, was the perfect candidate. Where Hostettler was not much of a fundraiser, Brad proved to be good at it. He was Catholic, anti-abortion, anti-drug, and the personification of law and order. Brad Ellsworth not only won, he won the largest victory of any of the 30 Democrats who took over a Republican seat with 61.5% of the vote in a district carried by George W. Bush with 61.02%.
Freshman Bush Dog Brad Ellsworth, one of the few Bush Dogs yet to be profiled and a Rahm Emanuel recruit, is still gung ho for the occupation.
Rep. Brad Ellsworth, the only Indiana Democrat and one of only 10 Democrats in the U.S. House who voted against legislation to begin troop withdrawal from Iraq this summer, said today that he still opposed setting withdrawal timelines.
Ellsworth's position illustrates how difficult it could be for Democratic leaders to force a change in Iraq during the congressional debate expected to follow this week's and last week's progress reports.
Ellsworth, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who returned Monday from his second trip to Iraq, said a change in strategy is needed. But he also said it's up to President Bush to make it happen.
"We can suggest," Ellsworth said of Congress' role. "(Bush) is the commander in chief. He is the one that called for this war and it is going to take him to agree to change the strategy."
He's in a district with a Republican PVI of +9. We still need a profile.
UPDATE: Reader AC reminds us that Ellsworth's opponent in 2006, John Hostettler, though crazy, was one of the few Republicans to vote against the war.
I've been kicking around the idea with Chris that we should raise the costs of bad decision-making on things like FISA, or when they fold to Republicans on the supplemental or (insert fight here).
It's not much to put up some google ads criticizing these members for their position on FISA. The way Google adwords works is that the ad will only show up for the search terms we select. That means that if we select 'Chris Carney', then people searching for Chris Carney (PA-04) will see an ad criticizing Chris Carney for his vote on FISA. And the people who are searching for Chris Carney are people who want to know more about Carney, like reporters, activists, and constituents. We can even geotarget his state, so only people in Pennsylvania see the ad.
It'll probably run around $100-150 per member for a six month period, which is the amount of time until the law must be reauthorized.
Would you put a bit of money and effort to go after these wayward Democrats? We can't replace all of them with progressive Democrats, but we can certainly annoy at least a few of them and raise the costs for voting against the Constitution.
Aside from money, this will take some work, since we'll have to get posts written about each member that did this. It's not worth doing unless you'd support it. So if you think this is a good idea, put it in the comments or send me an email at stoller at gmail.com. We need support in one of two ways. One, you could throw in a few bucks for this. Two, you could write up a problem Democrat, on this blog or on your own site, and we'd use that as the Google ad advertised link. Let me know if you'd be willing to do either.
Yesterday, I tested out the idea that what we are dealing with in Congress is a nominally Democratic majority but an effective Republican working majority. I mostly pinned this on the Blue Dog swing bloc and a conservative Senate, but there are other important factors at work. The conversation was really amazing, and punctured some holes in my piece.
The fact is, things have changed quite a bit. I'm friendly with a lawyer in a major executive branch agency, and she told me that the investigations going on by Congress are allowing her to do her job. Steve Novick, candidate for Senate in Oregon (who is really quite terrific), told me the same thing about friends he has in the Federal bureaucracy. Governance itself is getting better, or at least has stopped getting worse. So Blue Dogs are not Republicans.
There are other weaknesses in what I wrote, and the commenters pointed them out. In particular, this comment by Paul Rosenberg is I think accurate, as he argues that we are facing a conservative but not right-wing Blue Dog/DLC bloc combined with an anti-progressive elite consensus in the form of a hostile media establishment, a hostile think tank and academic structure, a hostile regulatory structure, a hostile set of cultural leaders and a set of old world economic incentives for elites.
I'm going to revise my earlier title, and argue that while we don't have a Republican working majority, we do have a conservative working majority to contend with. Most of the strategic problems I highlighted in the original piece remain, with the additional need to attack and/or subvert elite structures. The irony, or perhaps the not entirely-coincidental pattern of the Open Left, is that we're all at once going after the right-wing, their Blue Dog enablers, and the elite structures that love them.
I'm beginning to explore an idea that I'm not entirely sold on, which is that in the House, while Democrats are in control, there is effectively a Republican working majority. If true, this has a number of implications, both electoral and political. But first, I'll illustrate my thinking, which basically boils down to the fact that politically speaking, Bush is effectively using the surge model to govern in all policy arenas. Take tax policy.
President Bush said yesterday that he is considering a fresh plan to cut tax rates for U.S. corporations to make them more competitive around the world, an initiative that could further inflame a battle with the Democratic Congress over spending and taxes and help define the remainder of his tenure.
Advisers presented Bush with a series of ideas to restructure corporate taxes, possibly eliminating narrowly targeted breaks to pay for a broader, across-the-board rate cut. In an interview with a small group of journalists afterward, Bush said he was "inclined" to send a corporate tax package to Congress, although he expressed uncertainty about its political viability.
It's a simple pattern. When Bush loses ground politically, he simply changes his ask. It's the equivalent of negotiating with someone to sell them a bike for $50, and when they find a problem with the bike, changing the price to $75 and negotiating the final price to $65. It's bad faith negotiating, but it's working, because Democratic leaders aren't able to walk away from the table out of a mixture of fear, incompetence, and insufficient liberal voting strength. They always stupidly buy the bike at the higher price.
The FISA bill debacle is a good example. I've been in email contact with a variety of sources inside the House, and there's certainly tremendous bitterness at what happened with FISA, as well as a recognition that the 'stand up and cave' rhetoric strategy is now a clear pattern for this Congress. Steny Hoyer is the weak link in the House leadership, and though I can't read tea leaves that well, I think that Blue Dogs are essentially threatening a revolt against Pelosi if she tries to impose real discipline. In addition, the Senate is making it nearly impossible for her to stand up for liberalism. With a reactionary Senate that has about 10 neoconservative Democrats and a neoconservative President, liberals cannot govern except on the most clear-cut and non-controversial issues, like poor children's health care (which itself might be vetoed).
So while we may have thought we gained a check on Bush in 2006, we actually didn't. What we gained was a more progressive Democratic Party, but we started from such a low base that the Republicans essentially can still govern. Now, holding the majority is nice for subpoena power, and that matters. But when you combine a conservative Senate, a Blue Dog swing block, and an extreme White House, you may have a situation similar to the Boll Weevil Democrats in the early 1980s and their working relationship with Reagan. I'm not sure how well the analogy holds up since I've never studied that period in history, but regardless, Bush has realized that his conservative governing mandate is still intact.
In 2006, the midterms registered a clear antiwar message, but instead of listening, Bush surged troops, and politically speaking, it worked. No one stopped him. Bush, weaker than he's ever been as President in terms of popular approval and credibility, is governing this country through a mix of veto threats, bad faith negotiating tactics via surrogates like Mike McConnell and David Patraeus, and Blue Dogs. This is true with Bush's rampant lawbreaking and authoritarian criminal impulses. No one stops him. I'm no longer content to think that Blue Dogs are acting out of fear of being criticized, at this point I am going to take the Heath Shuler's at their word and recognize them as right-wingers.
To be clear, there's reason for optimism, as this is a temporary situation and we've made enormous progress since 2002. There are more self-identified liberals today than there have been since 1972, independents are swinging far to the left, and the base Democratic vote is making the difference in elections. The Democratic Party of 2007 is much more progressive than that of 2002, and at the rate we're gaining reliable liberal votes (10/year), there will be an unbreakable progressive House majority by 2012. The overall intellectual environment, the shattering of the right-wing careerist foreign policy community, the increasing efficiency of liberal advocacy groups, the increased participation of progressive economy sectors in the political sector, and the liberalization of the White House and Senate, can also have significant effects. Our politicians are obviously behind the curve, with Clinton quasi-supporting the surge and Obama in his most recent Iowa ad doesn't call himself a Democrat. But this is temporary.
I don't have a good strategy on how to 'fix' the Senate, but to get to a progressive working majority in the House, we need to pick up 41 more reliable votes, either by beating Republicans or by converting or beating Blue Dog Democrats. If we can get to an uncompromising progressive majority in the House, then the Senate will be dragged along through conference committees and a Democratic White House. In the Senate, we'll need 16 for a clear progressive majority, but because of institutional dynamics we'll probably need less to have a working majority.
There are several paths to making this happen in the House.
Pick Up Safe Seats Progressives: This is what we are trying to do in Massachusetts 5th, where a reactionary Niki Tsongas is facing four other candidates, including progressive Jamie Eldridge. There's also a primary in TN-09, Harold Ford's old haunt.
Convert Reactionary Democrats: Both Al Wynn and Ellen Tauscher are good examples of how this can be done, and this is continuing against Daniel Lipinski, Al Wynn, and Henry Cuellar.
Beat Republicans: In 2006, Democrats picked up 30 seats in the House. Out of those pickups, 11 voted for the FISA expansion, and 19 didn't.
Convert Republicans: I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq is trying to crack Republicans, but this is very very difficult. Republicans have run right-wing primary challenges against dissidents for 30 years, since 1978. Countering that is extremely tough, though recent moves by the Mainstream Partnership could have effects.
If there is a Republican working majority, with the Blue Dogs as the swing group, that should have one very significant effect on our strategy. In a House with a minority role for Democrats, electing a Blue Dog Democrat is far superior than electing a Republican. But in a majority Democratic House where conservatives have a governing working majority, electing a Blue Dog Democrat is little different than electing a Republican when it comes to public policy choices. Electing a Blue Dog is not going to help us restore out Constitutional fabric, hold these people accountable, deal with global warming, energy, health care, or restore a progressive tax code. More significantly, more Blue Dogs aren't going to give someone like Pelosi the leverage she needs to do any of these things.
What this means is clear. No longer should we as progressives particularly care whether a Democrat is in a swing district or Republican district when considering how to evaluate them. It is more important to elect progressives and destroy the power of Blue Dogs than to increase our partisan advantage in the House, though these goals are complements and not substitutes. The Colorado example, of turning a libertarian-esque red state into a Blue Dog state at the behest of wealthy billionaires, is not something to emulate. Rather, we should look at the New Hampshire example, which has turned a libertarian-esque red state into a deep blue progressive libertarian area.
There's one other important rhetorical consequence here. When Blue Dogs vote with Bush, they are not 'betraying' us any more than Republicans are when they vote with Bush. Blue Dogs just don't agree with us. And when they vote to expand wiretapping or to cut taxes for the wealthy or to support endless war, they are acting like Blue Dogs, and Blue Dogs support President Bush and the conservative movement.
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