{"id":178879,"date":"2018-07-28T18:32:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-28T23:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/28\/playing-to-lose\/"},"modified":"2018-07-28T18:32:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-28T23:32:00","slug":"playing-to-lose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/28\/playing-to-lose\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing to Lose"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the past 40 years, the Democratic Party has made what the Republicans would do to the Supreme Court a major portion of their political appeal.<\/p>\n<p>It has been a major argument for supporting corporatist Democrats:  Even if they are against unions, support Wall Street looters, etc., because they would fight with the rest of the party to keep reactionary whackdoodles off of the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it now appears that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/powerpost\/schumer-plays-long-game-avoids-hardball-with-centrist-democrats-over-supreme-court-pick\/2018\/07\/27\/f3fb86dc-90d2-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html?tid=sm_tw\">Chuck Schumer has decided that promises are for suckers<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The top Democrat in the Senate has vowed to fight President Trump\u2019s Supreme Court nominee with everything he\u2019s got. Just don\u2019t expect him to crack down on his red-state Democrats who go rogue and back Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cPunishment is not how this place works,\u201d Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said in an interview this week.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Schumer is trying to stay upright on a nearly impossible political balance beam he has wobbled across throughout Trump\u2019s presidency, caught between his party\u2019s demanding left flank and centrist Democrats whose survival in \u00adNovember\u2019s midterm elections will decide the Senate majority. No other congressional leader has experienced dueling pressures so acutely.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Although anger against Trump has reached a fever pitch in the Democratic Party and activists are clamoring for all-out war against Kavanaugh, Schumer has opted not to use hardball tactics to pressure moderates from Republican states to join the resistance.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yes, eliminate what is literally the only reason to vote for craptastic hypocrites like Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp, but at least your (never to be used) powder will be kept dry.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, I can think of no better way to demoralize your base.<\/p>\n<p>Cowardice is both bad policy and bad politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the past 40 years, the Democratic Party has made what the Republicans would do to the Supreme Court a major portion of their political appeal. It has been a major argument for supporting corporatist Democrats: Even if they are against unions, support Wall Street looters, etc., because they would fight with the rest of &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[447,585,387,407,374],"class_list":["post-178879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-congress","tag-cowardice","tag-hypocrisy","tag-justice","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}