Nancy

Documentation. Witnesses. Facts. Truth. That's what they're afraid of.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Schumer Ready to Obstruct

Chuck Schumer is not only getting ready to try to hold Trump and the other Republicans back, he seems to be starting to get "it"...

I particularly like this part:

This has been a key difference between the two parties for a good 20 years now: The Republicans relentlessly pander to their base, while the Democrats keep theirs at arm’s length (think of the way Pelosi immediately slammed the door shut on impeachment talk when she became Speaker in 2007).
That has to be different now. They shouldn’t pander to the base as abjectly as the Republicans do, because that’s what got us to Trump. But they do need to listen more and be less afraid of Republican attacks.
The Democratic Party, as an actually existing thing, has four main parts to it: one, the elected officials; two, the money people; three, the people (a few thousand) who work in the trenches for the various progressive causes; four, the energized base (as opposed to people who just vote once every four years). The four parts don’t really talk to each other. That must change.
Elected officials have to see that they need to take the idea of energizing the base seriously. Again, here, Schumer made a positive and, to me, surprising move when he came out so quickly for Keith Ellison as the new DNC chair. Ellison is well to Schumer’s left, but Senate sources tell me that Schumer recognized that the official party, the one’s and the two’s, have to do a better job of making the four’s feel they’re being heard.
Not only does that indicate the Schumer is willing to listen to the left more than he has in the past, it also shows some serious thinking about what the Democratic constituency looks like. It's like, organized (sorry, Will Rogers)!



Here's why I've been saying that even though we'd like to get money out of politics, and we don't want to give Wall Street much of a say:
That leaves the three’s, and this too is an absolutely crucial point. These organizations on the broad left are constantly underfunded—everybody scrounging to the same few foundations, which take months to decide things and then fund something for three years and withdraw instead of the 10 years that people need to make their organizations have impact.
Let me give you one telling example. As I wrote more than once during the campaign, Judicial Watch did a lot, in this campaign and over many years, to darken Hillary Clinton’s image in the minds of average Americans. They did this through FOIA request after FOIA request, getting their teams of lawyers to comb through every document, and turning up stuff that could be peddled as dirt and that informed the way the mainstream media wrote about Clinton—the assumptions made, the adjectives used, and so on. Judicial Watch has a $30 million annual budget.
Now: Don’t you think liberalism could use a Judicial Watch of its own to file FOIA after FOIA after FOIA on the Trump administration? It sure could. The group would have a field day with this guy. The revelations that would come out would make for a constant media barrage hitting Trump on ethics. He’d be on the defensive all the time.
Well—there is no such group. No one has funded it. Actually, there is one group in Washington that may be capable of doing this work, the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). It’s a good outfit. But CREW’s budget is just $2 million.
You hear a lot about George Soros and rich Hollywood liberals, and you probably just assume that liberals spend more money on this kind of activity than conservatives. Not so. There are far more rich conservatives than liberals for the obvious reason that having pots of money tends to make people conservative—and tends to make them want to invest in the politicians who’ll protect their money. 
We need a war chest. We need endowments. We need institutions. You just simply can't get them without money.

There's more useful information in there. Read on.