House Democratic Campaign Arm Nears War With Liberals Over Primary Fights

WASHINGTON — The House Democratic campaign arm is nearing open warfare with the party’s rising liberal wing as political operatives close to Speaker Nancy Pelosi try to shut down primary challenges before what is likely to be a hard-fought campaign next year to preserve the party’s shaky majority.

Progressive Democrats were infuriated last month when Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the chairwoman of the campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, moved to protect centrist incumbents by formally breaking committee business ties with political consultants and pollsters who go to work for primary challengers.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who owes her seat to a successful primary challenge, went so far as to encourage her 3.8 million Twitter followers to “pause” their donations to the campaign committee in protest. She also started a fund-raising push on her official Twitter account for Representatives Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, Katie Hill of California and Mike Levin of California. That initiative, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter, raised $30,000 in roughly two hours. She also helped raise money for Representatives Katie Porter of California and Lauren Underwood of Illinois.

The open hostilities are just the latest in the rising tensions between an experienced party establishment focusing on what is possible in the short run and a group of young liberals chafing at such restraint. House Democrats have divided over single-payer “Medicare for all” versus incremental legislation to bolster the Affordable Care Act and over Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal versus less ambitious climate change policies. Liberal Democrats and more moderate newcomers from Republican-leaning districts have fought over Republican procedural motions.

And divisions on health care, climate change, military spending and tax policy convinced the House Budget Committee chairman, John Yarmuth of Kentucky, last week to give up on drafting a budget that would have laid down a broad legislative agenda for the new Democrat-controlled House.

Now that tension has migrated to the mechanics of the 2020 campaign.

Ms. Bustos’s rule prohibits Democratic consultants and vendors working for a primary challenger to an incumbent from receiving work from the committee. It comes as ardent liberal organizations like Justice Democrats, emboldened by a pair of high-profile wins in 2018 — Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — are aggressively gearing up to challenge centrist or old-line Democrats with liberal candidates.

In the latest swipe in a fight that has erupted into open hostilities, a coalition of progressive groups on Friday introduced an online database of go-to vendors for insurgent candidates emblazoned with the heading, “Despite the D.C.C.C.’s bullying, we’re still going to work on primaries.”

One group, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said Friday that it was exploring a challenge against Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, because he has not committed to holding hearings on the single-payer health care system known as “Medicare for all.” At the helm of that panel, Mr. Neal has been on the front lines of conducting oversight on President Trump’s finances, and last week requested six years of his personal tax returns.

“We reject the D.C.C.C.’s attempt to hoard power, which will only serve to keep that talent pool — and Congress itself — disproportionately white and male,” María Urbina, the national political director for Indivisible, a progressive grass-roots group, said of the campaign committee. “Incumbents who engage fully with their constituents shouldn’t fear primaries and shouldn’t rely on the national institutions like the D.C.C.C. to suppress challenges before voters ever have a say.”

The Trump scam has officially hit rock bottom

Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) defends Trump’s attacks by claiming his voters see McCain as the “embodiment” of the sort of “lifetime career politician” who left them feeling “powerless and voiceless for many years,” until Trump arrived.

GOP consultant Mike Shields claims Trump’s attacks on McCain tap his voters’ frustration with “politicians that lie to them” and “aren’t real,” whereas these attacks show Trump is “real.” Trump’s outsider authenticity turns out to be a willingness to slime a dead man who can’t defend himself.

.. And in a new interview with Fox News, Trump himself makes similar claims. He rips into McCain as “horrible” for voting against Obamacare repeal, adding: “We would have had great health care.” And he slams McCain for turning over to the FBI the “Steele dossier,” which he claims was “paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.”

Thus, the narrative Trumpworld is spinning is that, in attacking McCain, Trump is standing up for his voters, by going after a symbol of the GOP elites he campaigned against and of the deep-state forces working against the will of those voters, and those who blocked him from delivering on his health-care promises.

.. My intention here is not to defend or exalt McCain, but rather to look at what all this says about what a con this whole presidency really is.

Trump did not merely promise to repeal Obamacare. He also vowed to replace it with “insurance for everybody.” He explicitly campaigned on the idea that his desire to give people health care made him different from GOP elites. But he sold out on this promise, by embracing the actual goal of GOP elites: rolling back Obamacare’s coverage and protections for millions without meaningfully replacing them.

Because this was so unpopular, Republicans employed extraordinary partisan tactics and secrecy to try to push it through. This procedural abuse is what McCain voted against. He blocked Trump’s efforts to conspire with GOP elites to sell out on his promise to his voters.

That’s of a piece with Trump’s broader selling-out of his economic populism. After getting elected by promising to drain the swamp of elite corruption and take on the plutocrats who rig our political economy to enrich themselves, he gave those elites a deregulation spree that further rigged the economy in their favor, and a corporate tax cut that lavished enormous benefits on top earners. (As it happens, this is an area where Trump and McCain broadly agree.)

Republicans Need to Save Capitalism

Democrats have gone left, so they’re not going to do it. The GOP needs a renewed seriousness.

.. Pew Research sees the party lurching to the left since 2009; Gallup says the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has jumped 23 points since 2000. But you don’t need polls. More than 70 Democrats in the House, and a dozen in the Senate, have signed on to the Green New Deal, an extreme-to-the-point-of-absurdist plan that is yet serious

Millennials, the biggest voting-age bloc in America, are to the left of the generations before them. Moderates are aging out. The progressives are young and will give their lives to politics: It’s all they’ve ever known. It is a mistake to dismiss their leaders as goofballs who’ll soon fall off the stage. They may or may not, but those who support and surround them are serious ideologues who mean to own the future.

None of this feels like a passing phase. It feels like the outline of a great political struggle that will be fought over the next 10 years or more.

.. The American establishment had to come to look very, very bad. Two long unwon wars destroyed the GOP’s reputation for sobriety in foreign affairs, and the 2008 crash cratered its reputation for economic probity. Both disasters gave those inclined to turn from the status quo inspiration and arguments. Culturally, 2008 was especially resonant: The government bailed out its buddies and threw no one in jail, and the capitalists failed to defend the system that made them rich. They dummied up, hunkered down and waited for it to pass.

Americans have long sort of accepted a kind of deal regarding leadership by various elites and establishments. The agreement was that if the elites more or less play by the rules, protect the integrity of the system, and care about the people, they can have their mansions. But when you begin to perceive that the great and mighty are not necessarily on your side, when they show no particular sense of responsibility to their fellow citizens, all bets are off. The compact is broken: They no longer get to have their mansions. They no longer get to be “the rich.”

For most of the 20th century the poor in America didn’t hate the rich for their mansions; they wanted a mansion and thought they could get one if things turned their way. When you think the system’s rigged, your attitude changes.

On the right the same wars, the same crash, and a different aspect. In the great issue of the 2016 campaign it became unmistakably clear that the GOP elite did not care in the least how the working class experienced immigration. The party already worried too much about border security—that’s the lesson the elites took from Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, according to their famous autopsy. They appeared to look after their own needs, their own reputations: We’re not racist like people who worry about the border! They were, as I’ve written, the protected, who looked down on those with rougher lives. The unprotected noticed, and began to sunder their relationship with establishments and elites.

Donald Trump came of that sundering. He was the perfect insult thrown in the establishment’s face. You’re such losers we’re hiring a reality-TV star to take your place. He’ll be better than you.

Conservatives regularly attend symposia to discuss the future of conservatism. Republicans in Washington stumble around trying to figure what to stand for beyond capitalizing on whatever zany thing some socialist said today.

But isn’t their historical purpose clear? Their job—now and in the coming decade—is, in a supple, clever and concerted way, to save the free-market system from those who would dismantle it. It is to preserve and defend the capitalism that made America a great thing in the world and that, for all its flaws and inequities, created and spread stupendous wealth. The natural job of conservatives is to conserve, in this case that great system.

I’ll go whole hog here. We need a cleaned-up capitalism, not a weary, sighing, acceptance-of-man’s-fallen-nature capitalism. Republicans and conservatives need a more capacious sense of what is needed in America now, including what their own voters need. The party needs a tax-and-spending reality that takes into account an understandable and prevalent mood of great need. They need to be moderate, peaceable and tactful on social issues, but firm, too. This is where the left really is insane: As the earnest, dimwitted governor of Virginia thoughtfully pointed out, they do allow the full-term baby to be born, then make it comfortable as they debate whether it should be allowed to take its first breath or quietly expire on the table. A party that can’t stand up against that doesn’t deserve to exist.

All this must be done with a sense of how Americans on the ground are seeing things. What they see all around them cultural catastrophe—drugs, the decline of faith, the splintering of all norms by which they’d lived, schools that don’t teach and that leave their kids with a generalized anxiety. They want more help to deal with this. If you said, “We’re going to have a national program to help our boys become good men,” they would be for it, they would cheer. If you said, “We’re going to get serious and apply brains and money to what we all know is a mental-health crisis in America,” they wouldn’t care about the cost—and they’d be right not to care. They think as a people we’ve changed, our character has changed, and this dims our future. Make things better on the ground now and we’ll figure out the rest later.