#have republicans in her cabinet

[transfemgorgug]

You know typically in posts that put the lives of USian citizens above the lives of Palestinians y’all at least pay lip service to the people you’re willing to let Kamala genocide because you’re shaking in your boots about Project 2025. Interesting strategy here to instead completely ignore all of Kamala’s Bush-esque policy promises and act like it’s so #girlboss to vote in the self-described Top Cop and there’s zero nuance whatsoever. What exactly does Kamala offer Palestinian-Americans, and for that matter Arab-Americans as a whole, that they should vote for her?

due to systemic oppression, usamerican leftists don't currently have the political power to instate a leftist president. we do, however, have enough power to make one of two candidates lose the election. we could use this power to make the white supremacist lose to the black woman, or we could use it to make the black woman lose to the white supremacist. the obvious choice for leftists would be to prioritize making the white supremacist lose, but tumblr users have devised a loop hole, where they agitate primarily for making the black woman lose, but omit the detail about who she would be losing to. this makes their stance more palatable to people who correctly believe that having a white supremacist president would be the worst possible outcome.

[gwyoi]

They pandered so hard to republicans to get them to vote for her and didn’t get any of them

[bisexualdinahlance]

I have started seeing some INSANE posts in order to try and ignore/avoid the fact that Harris's campaign wasn't very good

[area51-escapee]

My whole thing is that I don’t. Care if someone feels like voting for Kamala is the best thing they can do for themself. That’s kinda what you gotta do is just vote for who’s best for yourself. I understand that this is a decision people are gonna make and I know I can’t ask people to just Not Do It, that’s really not my business. My problem is how people keep saying things that just. Aren’t true. Vote for Kamala if that’s what you plan to do but you don’t have to lie for her, you ain’t on her payroll.

[saywhat-politics]

Some Senate Democrats have been willing to vote for Donald Trump’s less outlandish Cabinet nominees, but Pam Bondi’s nomination for U.S. attorney general was a qualitatively different kind of case. The Florida Republican is a scandal-plagued election denier and former lobbyist for foreign governments, who, even during her confirmation hearing, refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

Members of the Senate’s GOP majority were eager to confirm Bondi anyway, but there was no way that Democrats were going to go along with such a scheme. When the dust settled, the final tally was 54-46, with every member of the Democratic minority opposed to her nomination — with one exception.

Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted with Republicans.

[jyndor]

cool cool so kamala just said there will be no change in policy re: gaza in her cnn interview with dana bash.

you guys need to understand the harris campaign is swerving to the right on several issues like immigration, fracking and yes palestine, and she is NOT separating herself enough from joe biden.

and she's also said she's open to having a republican cabinet member.

but the dnc couldn't even let a palestinian american pro-harris speaker on stage for TWO MINUTES.

I'm sorry that's unacceptable.

[politijohn]

Distractors when discussing Kamala’s loss

I'm frustrated by liberals and Democratic strategists blaming voters, racism, and misogyny for the election loss instead of the candidate and party. Dems will lose forever if their analysis remains this shallow. It shows they still don't understand how this game works.

Perhaps this is a hot take to some…

Kamala’s key reason for losing wasn’t because she is a woman or because she’s black or because of Jill Stein or non committed voters. These excuses are distractions to a deeper underlying issue.

Kamala lost because the Democratic Party abandoned their base, swung right, and catered to their donors rather than the American people. Look at this embarrassment:

Kamala lost because she ran on a radically pro-Israel stance despite a majority of voters disagreeing with that approach. Say goodbye to the Muslim vote (MI). Look at the staggering difference in Dearborn, MI, a significant Muslim district when you campaign for your constituents:

Kamala lost because she backtracked on fracking and the environment. A majority of Americans want to see more done on the environment and this status quo agenda was uninspiring.

Kamala did terribly with young people (who are significantly more left leaning) because they saw a mediocre centrist platform, students saw classmates tear-gassed during pro-Palestine movements on their campuses, and no real messaging that spoke to their needs.

Americans want to hear how the candidates will improve their livelihood. Trump makes a lot of empty promises. We knew that since 2015. But Kamala barely even tried. When asked how she would have governed differently than Biden the last four years, she said nothing except put a Republican in her Cabinet. Voters aren’t to blame for this pathetic response when we know Biden's popularity and the economy are incredibly bad! Differentiation, where? Solutions, who?

The good news? We can fix these things! Focusing on misogyny, racism, third-parties, etc is NOT a winning strategy - they exist and can’t be fixed in four years. I know, groundbreaking. You need to bring people in, not turn them away like the Democratic Party has for years. I mean, on a surface level did you think the condescending comments about uneducated Americans, men, non-voters, third-party voters, and Latinos was going to win them over, bring them into the fold, encourage them to vote for Kamala?

Where is the camera?

There is so much to be learned from Bernie’s stump speeches that captivate all kinds of voters.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Scott Dworkin at The Dworkin Report:

We are 8 days into Trump’s return, and it’s clear as day that the pushback from Democrats is disjointed, and needs to be much stronger. But there are some absolute bright spots: outspoken, forceful, determined leaders, who will never cower to Donald. If we want to get serious about winning this fight against maga, these are the types of champions we’ll need to rally behind. US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has been an extremely effective messenger, who triggers maga at a baffling level. AOC’s slams get viral news coverage, and she knows how to cut through the nonsense better than most anybody out there. Just last week, AOC called out the Broligarchs who once criticized Trump, saying they’re now in a “kiss-ass race,” and enjoying “a billionaire feeding frenzy.” AOC also dropped the mic on Donald, calling him “the quintessential New York con man.” When Trump threw a tantrum about Colombia’s president refusing to accept deported immigrants, AOC said: “Trump is about to make every American pay even more for coffee,” and cause inflation to be “worse for working class Americans.” Spot on.

Then there’s US Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who truly knows how to command an audience. Crockett constantly takes on Marge Greene, Nancy Mace and the rest of the maga cult—during hearings and in public. In Crockett’s DNC speech, she said Trump “is a career criminal, with 34 felonies, 2 impeachments, and 1 porn star to prove it.” “If you’re looking for me to sugarcoat the reality we’re facing, I can’t do that,” Crockett recently told Harper’s Bazaar. US Sen. Tammy Duckworth has been taking on Republicans in ways few others could. A Purple Heart recipient, who lost her legs and severely injured her arm in battle, Duckworth said: “Trump is despicable. He doesn’t deserve to be commander-in-chief.” On cabinet picks, Duckworth took the gloves off, saying Tulsi Gabbard is “compromised,” and doubts “she could actually pass a background check.” Duckworth’s also sounding the alarm about the most unhinged nominee, Kash Patel—warning he’d use “law enforcement to seek retribution against his political enemies.” And as always, US Sen. Elizabeth Warren continues to completely decimate Trump on his corruption, and long list of failed promises. Just last night, Warren blasted Trump: “his failure to even try and move in the direction of lowering [grocery] costs is a betrayal of the American people.”

Happy to have AOC, Duckworth, Warren, and Crockett fighting for what is right.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Many of Harris’s mistakes were similar to those Hillary Clinton made in 2016. Like Clinton, Harris cozied up to billionaire donors. Mark Cuban, for instance, said he was delighted that Harris was abandoning Democrats’ commitments to progressive principles and letting the business community propose the policies it wanted. Like Clinton, Harris and Tim Walz made hubristic campaign stops in solidly red states like Texas and Kentucky rather than spending the final days laser-focused on crucial battlegrounds. Like Clinton, Harris emphasized celebrity endorsements while failing to successfully court unions. (Most notably, the Teamsters declined to endorse her after she refused to pledge that she wouldn’t break a national railway strike.) Like Clinton, Harris focused too much on the danger of Donald Trump (which is very real) and not enough on the reasons why she would be good at being president herself. Most importantly, like Clinton, Harris ultimately decided upon a strategy of trying to woo moderate Republican voters away from Trump, reasoning that it didn’t matter if doing so alienated progressive voters and the Democratic base. Chuck Schumer, speaking of Hillary’s 2016 strategy, infamously promised: "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." In fact, they just lost the blue-collar Democrats and didn’t pick up the Republicans! In 2024, Harris, too, aggressively touted endorsements from Republicans, promised to put a Republican in her cabinet (she even cited that as the answer to what she would have done differently from Biden!), and went so far as to praise and embrace Dick and Liz Cheney! The strategy was an abject failure. Because she wanted to appease both Republicans and progressive voters, Harris had to further indulge her weakness for speaking in meaningless word salads, since taking stances that were meaningful could have alienated one of these constituencies. Trump, who is canny about portraying himself as more anti-war than Democrats, correctly pointed out that an endorsement from the hawkish Cheneys should be a badge of shame, not honor. (Specifically he said Cheney is “"the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!")

[...]

The lesson to Democratic leaders in 2016 should have been that Bernie Sanders had been right, that the party had betrayed working-class voters and would be doomed if it could not effectively counter Trump’s pseudo-populist appeal with a visionary alternative. (See the excellent analysis in Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal.) Unfortunately, the lessons weren’t learned then, and it doesn’t seem like they’re going to be learned now, either! MSNBC anchor Joy Reid is already insisting that Kamala Harris’s campaign was “flawless” (because she got “every prominent celebrity voice”), and pundits like Jill Filipovic are saying things like, “this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.” (Good luck ever winning with the slogan “You’re the problem, America!”) USAToday’s Michael Stern says that instead of talking about “where the Harris campaign went wrong” we should talk about “where the American people went wrong.” The Harris campaign itself is blaming unspecified “obstacles that were largely out of our control.” 

6 November 2024

[mariacallous]

What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era.

Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics.

Trumpsim has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them. One can see manifestations of this in the congresswoman Nancy Mace’s deranged bullying of the congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride, the endless and deliberate mispronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name, and the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the top fundraisers in the House of Representatives.

This phenomenon also exists on the left. The coffers poured open for Jasmine Crockett following a tête-à-tête with the aforementioned Taylor Greene, during which Crockett mocked her colleague’s “bleach-blonde bad-built butch-body”. And one could argue the strongest period of the Harris-Walz campaign – at least in terms of Democratic enthusiasm – was during the “weird” and “couch” sagas of Brat summer.

As the commentator SE Cupp recently observed, “it doesn’t get said enough, but Trump’s enduring legacy will be convincing BOTH parties to lower the bar, and that possessing moral authority on anything is no longer a currency that matters”. Democrats can either bemoan the fact the fundamental rules of politics and discourse have changed or they can adapt to it. In the four years to come, emboldened voices on the right will work to expand the Overton window. Democrats’ reaction to this effort must not materialize as feigned – or earnest – injury and horror. Take the punch and return the favor.

This new, more muscular messaging strategy must be combined with a far more aggressive war footing in the halls of Congress.

The Democrat Adam Gray’s unseating of the Republican congressman John Duarte in California’s 13th congressional district cemented a nigh-historically tenuous situation for the House Republican party. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, will have only a 220-seat majority. However, Republicans are poised to lose three seats (if not more) as members resign to join the Trump administration. That will leave them with a majority of 217-seats, meaning Johnson can only afford to lose one member on major – and minor – votes.

The Republicans’ legislative to-do list is nothing to scoff at. In addition to renewing Trump’s first term tax cuts and possibly imposing hyper-controversial tariffs on various imports, Johnson will need to pass a bill to fund the government. Democrats must not help him.

Time and again congressional Democrats have swept in to save Republican leaders – and Republican voters – from their own lawmakers. This generosity must end. The Dems must bleed the Republican party of its political capital at every opportunity, even if it means the American people experience some pain. On a Bulwark podcast this week, the writer Jonathan V Last channeled Alan Moore’s iconic comic book anti-hero Rorschach to describe the mentality Democrats should adopt: “The politicians will look up and shout ‘save us,’ and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’”

Yes, Democrats should make the next four years of Republican governance as grueling and painful as possible. Do not help them pass a budget (if Johnson, as Last playfully notes, offers up DC statehood as an incentive for cooperation, we can have another conversation). Do not vote for a single cabinet nominee – even those who qualify as “adults in the room” (sorry, Marco Rubio). Relatedly, do not hold back from highlighting all the darkest aspects of said nominees’ backgrounds – from former Fox host Pete Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault to Robert F Kennedy’s purported role in the deaths of dozens during a 2019 measles outbreak in American Samoa.

While on the Hill, casual comity is fine. Lawmakers should continue to break bread and imbibe brandy with one another. That is all to the good. But Democrats’ outdated impulse to prioritize good relationships with their conservative colleagues at all costs must end. Recall, many of these men and women have spent years valorizing a violent mob that sought to kill them. Comity for the sake of comity is, well, utter comedy.

On that note, there is no world in which Joe Biden and Harris attending the inauguration makes basic strategic sense. Such a move would only serve to undermine trust in a Democratic party brand that’s already on life support. Either Donald Trump is a fascist or he isn’t. There is no such thing as Schrödinger’s autocrat.

Liberals made the decision to compare the former and future commander-in-chief to Hitler. Rhetoric like that can’t be memory-holed. Thus, symbolically lauding the man’s re-ascension to power will not preserve the Democrats’ reputation as the “party of norms”. On the contrary, it will cement the growing sense – particularly after the pardon of Hunter Biden – that Dems traffic in lies and deceit with the same shamelessness as Republicans.

These strategic shifts – in messaging, in oppositional governance, and in observation of norms – will be difficult for some to swallow. After all, as Robert Frost often liked to observe, “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel”. Democrats must get over themselves; far too much is at stake.

What gives me hope now

To the limited extent I’m optimistic about the next four years, my resolve is rooted in the fact that Trump’s incoming administration – and his Republican coalition more broadly – will probably prove to be more fractious and wracked with infighting than it was during his first term. As we saw following the “Doge” chief Vivek Ramaswamy’s deranged, 90’s sitcom-addled tirade about H-1B visas and the “mediocrity” of American culture, deep policy disagreements plague the current marriage of OG Maga and the Silicon Valley tech bro billionaire class.

Steve Bannon, even more recently, vowed to “take down” the “truly evil” Elon Musk and excise him like a cancer from Trump’s orbit. Throughout the president-elect’s last stay in the White House, intra-party conflict was largely drawn along old guard versus new guard lines. Trump has since turned the Republican into a cult of personality. As such, slavish loyalty to the king is the only coin of the realm – and there are now major competing policy interests among his yes-men. Couple this with the reality that Trump is a lame duck and party elites will constantly be jockeying to be viewed as the heir apparent, and his den of vipers may just consume itself.

[marxistlesbianist]

How do I stop getting more and more terrified of the upcoming Trump administration. I know on a material level Harris would not be much better but every new cabinet pick and headline makes the liberal in me scream and cry, I'm a trans woman just starting her transition and I'm scared I will never become the person I want to be. I'm scared it's too late for me. I need a Marxist perspective, what do I do?

Unfortunately marxism cannot provide you with any way to avoid fear as such, but this does not mean it is useless here. Marxism as an analytical method helps us to see the social/economic mechanisms affecting our lives as they really are, rather than as the quasi-divine forces which liberalism supposes them to be. I and many others have found that looking at the world in this more grounded manner has the effect of lessening our anxiety, but how you react to this vision of material reality is still up to you.

That being said, here is a rough outline of a marxist outlook on the US political economy to–day, which might help you to ground through the anxiety of the election results:

The US empire is an empire in decline. This is not the fault of any single politician, but of the inherently unstable ground on which capitalist economies are built. Capitalism necessitates constant market growth, and with nearly the whole world already captured by the US economic order, this is an increasingly impossible demand to meet. As climate change worsens the third world countries exploited by the US are pushed to either drown under ceaseless natural disasters, or revolt against the economic system distroying their ecology—in both cases the US hegemony is weakened and our great empire dies by a thousand cuts. The only way to avoid economic crisis is to move away from the capitalist mode of production all together, but bourgeois politicians will only ever offer us incomplete solutions to the problems they have created.

Fascism is the liberal response to economic crisis. Throughout the history of the 20th century, we have seen that even the most socially progressive liberal “democracies” have morphed into fascist monstrocities when the capitalist economy is threatened. Voting in ostensibly progressive candidates without seriously challenging the political economy won't save us--as the people of Germany learned when the liberal chancellor Hindenburg appointed Hitler as the head of state after beating him in the election. This happens because fascism is at its heart the imperialist system turned inwards; when the German bourgeoisie were no longer able to sustain their economy by exploiting colonized countries like Namibia, they revitalized their economy by building a more advanced version of the Namibian colonial state at home.

Because the system is already collapsing in on itself, the primary task for us to organize toward is not challenging the system as it is, but building something better in its place. Of course, the task of defending our movement will necessarily bring us into conflict with the current bourgeois state, but we must remember that the point is not to oppose our enemies but to defend our friends. Even if a socialist president were elected to the white house, their dictates would only mean anything if there existed an organized body of workers prepared to exicute the plan inspite of bourgeois sabatage. Conversely, a sufficiantly large and well organized body of workers would be capable of building socialism in the US no matter what Washington says.

For trans women, the state of affairs following Trump's election is fundamentally no different than it was before November 6th. For 250 years the US government has been hostile to our existence, and yet there are more of us living out of the closet now than there ever have been in this country's history. The liberties which the republican party now threatens to deprive us of were not given to us by liberal politicians, but won inspite of them by the masses of our trans elders fighting tirelessly for themselves and their children—and for so long as we continue the struggle we have inherited, the bourgeois state will never be able to defeat us. Of course, much of this history of struggle has been obscured by the liberal order trying to co-opt our movement, but it is still there to be discovered. (If you only know about Stonewall, I highly recommend you read about the history of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), an organization founded by some of the trans women who lead that riot.)

Of course, none of this is to say that the situation isn’t terrifying; just that it is also manageable. You may not be able to live the life you wanted, but that doesn't mean you can't still lead a life worth living! The liberal in you screams and cries because she sees that things are bad, but doesn't see how you as an individual can make it right. Adopting a marxist perspective to see not just that things are bad but also how and why, and organizing with your class allies instead of working on your own will silence your inner liberal’s tears as she becomes obsolete. Individual Trump staff picks don’t mean much for us in our project of building a socialist movement. Regardless of who sits in office, the work before us is the same. So let’s get to work—for the revolution of the world!

Lastly, because I always found it annoying when people would tell me to "join an org" without elaborating, here is a brief rundown of some organizations you could look into:

PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) has the widest reach of any nominally communist party in the US. Their top leadership are largely opportunists insofar as I can tell, but the local chapters vary enough that some of them are involved in genuinely productive work.

FRSO (Freedom Road Socialist Organization) is a lot smaller, but with more genuine leadership and a strong ideological line. They are growing, and tend to be much more active in the few areas where they are organized.

DSA and CPUSA (Democratic Socialists of America, and Communist Party of the USA) are both useless as organizations, but you might still find some people there you can organize with—especially of there aren’t any better orgs in your area.

SALT (Socialist ALTernative) basically encompass the worst of all worlds in my experience, but individual experience may vary.

Even if there are no active organizations in your area, joining one and sitting in on zoom meetings is still a worthwhile step forward!

[saltyskeletonkidpasta]

In all seriousness I'm so sorry to anyone who will be negatively affected by a tr*mp administration. I truly cant believe that hate won there is no way that many people saw and heard what that man was saying and thought "yeah the country needs that"...like ur actually fucking stupid. I've been watching from the uk and it blows my mind how he was allowed to even run in the first place or atleast not disqualified for the things he's said over the last couple of months like isulting his opponent, or the threats to Liz Cheney or threatening leftists with the national guard??

America you have let your women down. As if they hadn't lost enough (also if you're one of those "wOmEn fOr tRuMp" literally fuck you ur an insult to the women who fought so hard for you to be able to vote in the first place and now you used it to vote against ur own best interest) and to all the minorities I'm so sorry aswell. You deserve better.

As for the rest of the world we will be impacted aswell. He's already threatened to pull out of NATO which will affect us all and I think it's safe to assume Palestine will truly suffer even more horrifically than they already are. I'd think that goes for ukraine aswell. As for his views on climate change.. well that will affect us all aswell. America are already one of the biggest producers of polution now that idiot who thinks it's a host will most likely cause catastrophic and irreparable damage. The animals and nature have been let down too. I'm truly suprised he won I knew it would be close but I genuinly didnt expect it and not only did he win but Republicans took the house AND the Senate??? Now he has even more power than he did before bc a bunch of his "yes men" are in now...I'm just baffled there is no way that many ppl watched his disastrous campaign and thought "yh I want that" I mean that rally at maddison square garden reminded me of the nazi's...not to mention him undermining democracy, being a felon and convicted of SA oh and also the fact that most of his former cabinet refused to endorse him and said he was incompetent and dangerous...

Thoughts and prayers to all those who worked so hard for change and to not go back but will now be subjected to all the hatred he spreads. Kamala Harris you truly deserved so much better I really hope to see her run again but if not she can come to the UK to be our prime minister anytime I would happily vote for her!💙

I've learned so much about american politics over the last couple of months and have educated myself best I could and even tried to convince some ppl on social media to vote blue I feel defeated and like I could've tried to do more. Its upsetting for women everywhere that ppl really thought it's okay for that creep to be in office. I stand with you and I support you💙

[misfitwashere]

Rejected Cabinet Nominees

Some historical guidance

TIMOTHY SNYDER

JAN 16

Historically, nominees for cabinet positions have been rejected by the Senate or have withdrawn their candidacies in order to prevent that outcome. It is not common, but nor is it abnormal. The power of "advice and consent" granted to the Senate by the Constitution has been exercised in practice. 

A number of Trump's appointments are simply outrageous by historical, ethical, strategic, or any other standards. The ongoing confirmation hearings tend to normalize the bizarre (although Democrats and a couple of Republicans have asked meaningful questions.)

So a few examples of failed nominations might serve as one tool among others to keep the events of the moment in perspective.

Secretary of Defense

John Tower was the first George H.W. Bush nominee for secretary of defense. He has served in the Senate for more than twenty years, and had chaired its Armed Services Committee. He was an author of the Tower Commission report on the Iran-Contra Affair. He was questioned by Senators about his past alcohol use and womanizing.

Pete Hegseth, unlike Tower, has zero knowledge, experience, or qualifications for the of running the Department of Defense. His program, judging from his books, is to ignore foreign enemies, politicize the armed forces, and carry out a "Holy War" against Americans. Pete Hegseth's womanizing and alcohol use, by his own account, far exceed Tower's. Unlike Tower, Hegseth paid off a woman who filed a police report accusing him of sexual assault in circumstances that, by her account, strongly suggest the use of a rape drug. Hegseth had to resign from both of the advocacy groups he ran because of incompetence and drunkenness. He regularly had to be physically carried away from events because he was too drunk to stand. In once case he had to be prevented from joining strippers on a stage. He also displayed total financial and budgetary incompetence. In this connection it is worth mentioning that the Department of Defense has the largest budget of any government in history.

There is a disturbing tendency to forgive Hegseth everything because he is a veteran. This seems unfair to veterans who do not display his failures of character. But it also contains within itself the troubling idea that soldiers can do no wrong: an idea that Hegseth himself seems to hold. That way lies military dictatorship. In any event: Tower served in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War and was in the reserve for decades.

The Senate rejected Tower.

Director of National Intelligence.

This position was created relatively recently and elevated to cabinet rank still more recently. It is meant to oversee the work of all American intelligence agencies. So a relevant historical comparison will be to the position of director of central intelligence.

Anthony Lake was second-term Bill Clinton's nominee for the position of director of central intelligence. Lake was eminently qualified. He is one of the most accomplished American diplomats of the post-1945 period. Among many other positions he was Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under Carter, and National Security Advisor during Clinton's first term. His nomination ran into trouble because of two occasions when his deputies on the National Security Council failed to inform him of discussions with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee about donor access to the White House.

Tulsi Gabbard has no qualifications to be Director of National Intelligence. A very long list of Americans with national security experience regard her as a danger to the safety of Americans. She is known abroad as a supporter of two of the world's most violent dictators, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin. As a congresswomen she consistently made excuses for Assad, whose regime killed something like half a million people before it was overthrown. She proposed that the Russo-Ukrainian war could be ended "in the spirit of aloha" and repeats Russian propaganda tropes. Russian media refer to Gabbard as "comrade" and "girlfriend" and "our agent."

Under Senate pressure, Lake withdrew his candidacy.

Attorney General

Zoe Baird was nominated by Bill Clinton for attorney general at the beginning of his first term in 1993. She was eminently qualified professionally for the job. She had however hired undocumented immigrants in her household and had not paid Social Security taxes for them.

Pam Bondi is Donald Trump's nominee for the same position. As part of Donald Trump's legal team, she sought to justify his attempt to overturn the results of an election. As Florida attorney general, she accepted luxurious perks from relevant parties in cases she was considering. In that capacity she also failed to pursue a case against Trump University after a political group supporting received a check, an illegal donation, from Trump's foundation signed by Trump. As a lobbyist she represented a Russian money manager convicted in Kuwait and served as a public relations representative for the government of Qatar. She was paid more than $100,000 a month just for that assignment, which she left in order to defend Trump from conviction after his first impeachment. Then she went back to working for Qatar.

Under Senate pressure, Baird withdrew her candidacy.

Succeeding events created the closest thing we have to a historical standard for rejecting cabinet nominees by Republican Senators: the employment of undocumented workers.

After Baird withdrew, Clinton nominated Kimba Wood. She too was eminently qualified to serve as attorney general. It emerged that she too had hired an undocumented worker as a nanny. Wood did so at a time when this was legal, and she paid the appropriate taxes. Nevertheless, the mere fact that she had employed one undocumented person, entirely legally, stopped her candidacy. in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Linda Chavez to be secretary of labor. She then withdrew her candidacy after it emerged that she had paid an undocumented person to work in her household.

So one might move beyond the obvious point that Bondi's scandals dwarf Baird's (and Hegseth's those of Tower, and Gabbard's those of Lake) and propose a pragmatic line of questioning that would apply to Trump's other nominees. Have they or their companies employed undocumented workers? It seems a reasonable question to ask, especially of the billionaires. Given the coming administration's oft-declared hard line on illegal immigration, this would seem to be a minimum standard for its cabinet nominees.

The Senate has a constitutional role, and in the past has exercised it. Some of the nominees presented to them this month are wildly inappropriate to the point of risking the integrity of American national security and calling into question basic principles of the rule of law. The history of failed nominations reminds us just how far some of these people fall below any reasonable standard.

[tobiasdrake]

To everyone who's absolutely livid about this election and even more livid about the various pundits and even Democratic politicians claiming that Kamala "palling around with Liz Cheney and wanting Republicans in her cabinet" Harris was "too far left":

Be mad. Stay mad. I need all-a-y'all to show up ready to rock when 2026 Congressional primary seasons begin. Maybe even run yourself.

If establishment Democrats take away from this that they lost because they weren't far enough to the Right, they are only going to alienate Democratic voters further. As Republicans turn into Trumpists, we cannot allow our side to shift so far right that the Dems outright become Republicans.

Democratic voters will not vote for Honorary Republicans.

Democrats who learn the wrong lessons from this and move right? They need to be destroyed. The primary election is where you have the power to do that. If they keep coming out and saying things like "I'm against trans people too!" and "We need to fix our border crisis!" and "Kamala lost because she was woke!" then their ability to court the votes of the Left will necessarily wane.

But they can be replaced.

If you weren't there for the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you need to understand that she was running for the district of Joseph Crowley. Crowley was the guy. He was so important to the party that he was being groomed to replace Nancy Pelosi as leader of the House. This man was so untouchable, he didn't even bother to show up to the debates.

AOC destroyed him in the primary and then swept the general. He was so powerful that he was supposed to lead a key faction of the party and instead he was dragged kicking and screaming out of office by a progressive liberal, because voters liked her better. He's gone. He sells weed now.

And if they learn the right lessons and move left? Great. Still show up to the primaries ready to rock with even more leftist ideas anyway. If you win, great, and if you lose, you still make them scared and force them to come even more to the left.

The primary is where we get to fight for the identity of our own party. So stay mad. Scream at the top of your lungs. Don't be afraid to criticize Dems. And in the meantime, build coalitions, build support for leftist causes, and show up ready to rock when primary season comes.

[contemplatingoutlander]

The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source.

Republicans spent two years sabotaging the U.S. House. Another two years would be ruinous.

Dana Milbank does a masterful job of describing just how dysfunctional the House GOP members have been in the past two years.

This is a gift🎁link for the entire article. Below are some highlights:

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. [...] “I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.” [...] Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.

The above article was adapted from Dana Milbank's (2024) book: Fools on the HILL: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House.

[See more below the cut.]

And this is on top of the well-known pratfalls: The 15-ballot marathon to elect a speaker, the 22-day shutdown of the House to find another speaker, the routine threats of government shutdowns and a near-default on the federal debt that hurt the nation’s credit rating. They devoted 18 months to a failed attempt to impeach Biden, which produced nothing but Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly displaying posters of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts. One “whistleblower” defected to Russia, another worked with Russian intelligence and is under indictment for fabricating his claims, and still another is on the lam, evading charges of being a Chinese agent. As soon as Biden withdrew his candidacy, they promptly forgot their probe of Biden’s “corruption” and rushed to launch a new series of investigations into Kamala Harris (over her record on border security) and Tim Walz (over his military service and “cozy relationship” with China). After a number of failed attempts, they did impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (the first such action against a Cabinet officer since 1876) without identifying any high crimes or misdemeanors he had committed; the Senate dismissed the articles without a trial. House Republicans created a “weaponization committee” under the excitable Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), but it was panned even by right-wing commentators when it produced little more than a list of conspiracy theories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. They lapsed repeatedly into fits of censure resolutions, contempt citations and other pointless acts of vengeance. In all of its history, the House had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times; in the two weeks after Johnson became speaker, members of the House tried to censure each other eight times. [...] In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.

[bambamramfan]

What If They Win

Too much has been written about the horse race of this election, but not nearly enough analysis about how either administration will govern. There's some fearmongering about Project 2025 or courtpacking, but that's propaganda not actual predictions.

(FWIW, I think Trump has this race in the bag, but can understand people who still hope think this is a coin flip.)

If Harris Wins...

Harris has held together a remarkable coalition of people against Trump. Mainstream Democratic politicians, YIMBY pundit technocrats, far lefters holding their nose, and Republican neoconservatives. This is no criticism, it's pretty impressive how they are coming together to defeat a common enemy, and I really really would like them to win.

But what happens to a coalition defined by a common enemy, after they win? Let's assume the best case scenario and she gets a Democratic Senate who confirms her cabinet and some SCOTUS judges.

Who supports Harris in the press, or is vote-corraling for her in Congress? Not those Republicans who hope to turn a page on the Trump era. Not a far left who has decided to hate her as a centrist sell out. Not moderate dems who will run away from any hint of weakness. Maybe a few of those YIMBY pundits who hope she's actually committed to more houses and nuclear power. But that's no political hyperpower.

What would her first major bill be? Who would support it? It will be just one scandal plagued administration with little support from any quarter that makes its ground breaking "first" for subaltern identities a disappointing token. The David Dinkens of the White House.

I predict that President Harris would have the lowest approval rating in her first year of any President we have polling for. It's gonna be brutal, and an easy 2028 win for Republicans (who hopefully won't be running 82 year old Trump.)

If Trump Wins...

This is the interesting one. I've heard a lot of people say that a second Trump term will be even worse than the first because he's fully unleased now and no one can stop him from doing what he really wants. And I think this is partly true.

I just don't think what he wants is "Republican authoritarian rule." Sure, he will probably let the Fed Society still pick the judges (which he never cared about besides thinking they should be loyal to him) and there will almost certainly be a tax cut/extension. But besides that?

In the first Trump term, he had VP Pence, Jeff Sessions as AG, governors like Chris Christie, and three establishment figures at State, Defense, and Treasury making a pact that if Trump fires one they all resign. It was an actual coalition of Republicans and Trumpists who need each other. Even Jared Kushner was pretty establishment friendly (he's the one who approved Pence.)

Jared and Ivanka are gone now, replaced by Eric and Donjr. The VP is a Thiel-acolyte who isn't anti-Republican but sure is "from the blogs." And the endorsers Trump touts are RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk (while more and more mod Republicans endorse Harris.)

This isn't a Trump face over a body of Republicans - this is a Trump leader over all the fringe outsiders of American weirdo culture. I think Trump *actually does* want to appoint RFK to Secretary of Health, and indulge in every conspiracy, organic hippie, crunchy nonsense - which actually has a lot of believers across the country, but extremely little following in DC itself.

I think this will be hilarious beyond our wildest dreams of entertainment. It will not be a functional fascism - it will be closer to Jill Stein and Richard Branson and Andrew Tate. He'll try to pass laws that every kid in America needs to eat healthy and also work in a McDonalds.