The Politics Of The Kirk Crackdown

Matt Colbert: I think the Dems need to hammer Trump over the horrendous treatment of the Korean workers at the Hyundai plant in Georgia.

It encompasses so many issues: Legal immigration is solid ground for Dems. This is an example of the incompetence of this administration. It's dishonorable and embarrassing behavior towards an ally. It's hurts manufacturing in a reddish state. It checks all the boxes. It's an example of why Dems shouldn't avoid a fight just because you think an issue (immigration) is bad for you.

What say you, Mr. Beutler?

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I definitely agree. And I think you can see, more clearly than usual right now, that Democrats across the party have abandoned all efforts to engage on the salient issues of the moment, in order to prattle on about health care.

Georgia has two talented Democratic senators, and as near as I can tell this, from Raphael Warnock, is the only proactive statement either has made.

More broadly, the party’s big idea to increase the salience of health care is to yoke it the annual budget fight in a way that ensures they lose one way (by caving and achieving nothing) or another (by getting health care “concessions” that politically insulate Republicans from the consequences of their own policies).

On the other hand, I do appreciate it that raising a stink whenever Trump errs badly can become a bit cacophonous. Instead of elaborating here, I plan to write a bit more about this on Friday or next, but the gist is that there are ways for Dems to make things like the roundup at the Hyundai plant pop more than by issuing press releases, or making social media content.

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Hassan: Here's something that's been on my mind for a while. Is there a theory of what Schumer and Jeffries are doing (i.e. their seeming incompetence) that doesn't make them out to be clueless?

I'm struggling to articulate this, but I think there might be incentives that make them do weak-seeming shit over and over. Their view of the second-best scenario may be that trump is in charge but they're in positions of power in the minority. If that's the case, stifling mass dissent might make sense. And the same thing could be said of the business interests they represent.

Long question short: is it maybe not confusion but instead personal interest?

It’s hard to make the case that various fears—fear of backlash, fear of improvising, fear of being deposed—aren’t the but-for reason that Democratic leaders have embraced an approach to politics that’s conspicuously oblivious to timely crises and partisan conflict.

But if we were to stipulate that they truly believe their theory of opposition is optimal—that perhaps in their bones they really want to fight, but they’ve simply been won over by the case for a politics of wallflowerdom—the argument would probably go something like this: ...