I Honestly Have Tried to Avoid Piling On When It Comes to Democratic Party Leaders, But OMG
After a party loses an election, it is both necessary and healthy for everyone involved to ask what happened. After the 2024 election, however, Democrats' combination of internal rifts and chronic self-doubt was guaranteed to lead to misreadings -- some honestly mistaken, many cynically deliberate -- that would cause them to misconstrue nearly everything. And misconstrue they did.
Given who holds the real power in that party, it was grimly predictable that people like Thomas Edsall of The New York Times would soon be pushing nonsense like this in March of this year: "Can the Democratic Party as currently constituted move to the center? After the 2024 elections, many sympathetic politicians and commentators made it quite clear that they would like the party to do so. It will be an uphill struggle." And just yesterday, it should have surprised no one that another group of right-wing Democrats falsely grabbed the centrist label and met this moment of emergent Trump-led authoritarian crackdowns by bravely creating a new way to censor other Democrats: "A New Democratic Think Tank Wants to Curb the Influence of Liberal Groups."
But honestly, this kind of hand wringing and pushing the party to the right would only be notable if it had somehow not happened this time. The barely-closeted-Republican wing of the Democratic Party always does this, even when they succeed in getting their nominee to tiptoe around every issue while she campaigns with Liz freakin' Cheney. Yeah, the problem was that the party was too far left. Why not? Yawn.
That is merely one part of the utterly predictable aftermath of 2024, with the hippie-punchers having their say once again. The other part is the inevitable freakout about the Democrats' bad polling numbers after losing an election. But why should that be a surprise? Between Democratic voters feeling generally deflated, and voters in general turning away from "losers," this was to be expected.
Moreover, because Democrats have no power center in Washington -- with the Oval Office, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court all controlled by far-right Republicans -- the too-easy thing to do is to blame Democrats for not being able to stop anything. "Those Democratic leaders are so pathetic! They're in the minority in both the House and Senate, and they keep losing votes. What's wrong with those guys?!"
As I noted in this column's headline, I have avoided the big pile-on when it came to blaming Democratic leaders for being ineffective. Snarky reactions like that seemed both lazy and unfair. Some Dorf on Law readers might also remember that I even defended Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine of his colleagues who made the very difficult -- but completely correct -- choice to vote for a bad Republican spending bill in March in order to minimize the damage of Trump's chaotic early months in office.
And when I say "[s]ome Dorf on Law readers," I mean anyone who read the blog two days ago. My Tuesday column -- "The Democrats' Best (Only) Strategy Now Is to Let the Republicans Shut Down the Government" -- summarized my arguments in defense of Schumer et al.'s tough decision in March, providing links to my earlier columns on both Dorf on Law and Verdict. I also, however, explained why that strategy would be the wrong move now, as Republicans in Congress stumble toward yet another possible government shutdown at the end of this month.
In addition to offering my take on the upcoming shutdown showdown, I also used Tuesday's column to prepare the ground for my argument in today's column. To put it simply, I have truly given up on the Democratic leaders in Congress and elsewhere. They have used up every ounce of possible trust and goodwill from those of us who have been giving them what turned out to be far too much benefit of the doubt.
In Tuesday's column, I took special notice of an excellent piece by Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian two weeks ago: "It's Time for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to Step Down." Although I chided Hasan for repeating the libel against Schumer regarding the March shutdown controversy, Hasan was otherwise completely right: "It is past time for both Jeffries and Schumer to step down and step aside. This fascist moment, this age of Trump, demands outspoken, unrelenting and fearless opposition. Whether you are a Democrat, or simply a democrat, we all deserve better." It is simply no longer possible to disagree with that conclusion.
Note that Jeffries is, at age 55, a relative youngster in Washington. He also has not been his party's leader in the House for very long, unlike Schumer (who, at age 74, is an early Baby Boomer) and his years of being the party leader in the Senate. So this is not about age or being in place for decades. It is simply bad leadership. On Tuesday, I mentioned that Democratic leaders have been ducking and covering when it comes to their party's extremely popular nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani -- very much including Jeffries, who represents a district in Brooklyn. (To her credit, New York governor Kathy Hochul has finally managed to cough out an endorsement -- filled with painful caveats, but still -- of Mamdani.)
But the past ten-plus months have allowed all of us to see how the Democratic leadership has handled the return of Trump, and they have all been frankly ridiculous. One particularly memorable low point came in April, when Schumer was fresh from being lambasted -- unfairly, but that is not the point here -- for how he had handled the shutdown situation. He was interviewed on CNN by Dana Bash, apparently to denounce Trump's attack on Harvard University, and he completely blew it.
For those who missed it, Schumer actually said this: "We sent [Trump] a very strong letter just the other day asking eight very strong questions about why this isn’t just a pretext."
Again, the Democratic leader of the United State Senate responded to Trump's completely lawless attack on America's higher education system by saying with a straight face that he had written a stern letter in response. Although the roasting online and on the late-night comedy shows was wonderfully brutal, no one could top Bash's pitch-perfect deadpanned response: "Well, you’ll let us know if you get a response." Ouch. And given that Bash is anything but a hard-hitting interviewer, that she was the one who delivered the death blow was even more perfect.
As telling as these examples are, however, the larger issue is that Schumer, Jeffries, and everyone like them somehow manage to kill any outbreak of enthusiasm among the people who should be energized right now. It is beyond insane how incompetent these people are. Precisely because the Democrats have no power in Washington, they should be looking for opportunities to grab Americans' attention and keep the heat turned on high. But somehow they manage instead to send this message over and over again: "We're very, very concerned, too, but don't get yourselves all riled up."
Although Supreme Court justices are nominally apolitical, they are still political figures. And one might have thought that Justice Sonia Sotomayor would have been primed to use her interviews promoting her latest book to emphasize in person what she has been saying in her forceful written dissents for years. Instead, as Professor Dorf pointed out earlier last week on Verdict, her recent appearance on Stephen Colbert's show was strange in the extreme:
Justice Sotomayor seemed so reluctant to criticize her colleagues that she repeatedly interrupted Colbert to defend the majority’s recent approval of racial profiling by ICE in Los Angeles. That led to a bizarre moment when Colbert had to interrupt Justice Sotomayor to read the stirring and passionate closing lines of her dissent in that very case.
I watched that interview as well (available on YouTube in two parts), and Professor Dorf is in fact being far too kind. She started by saying to Colbert, "I'm a teacher," but she then proved that she might be the worst teacher ever. It was almost as if she took Ambien and then channeled Stephen Breyer and Merrick Garland on their most boring days. Colbert could barely contain his frustration.
On substantive matters (such as they were), by the time Sotomayor had finished "explaining" the shadow docket, I honestly was no longer sure that I understood what it is. She was utterly incoherent. And her big point -- that it is essential for Americans to actually read Supreme Court opinions in full -- was a parody of an out-of-touch elite.
Worse, Sotomayor has now followed that up with another blunder, this time saying that "Americans may not know the difference between presidents and kings." Although she was reportedly "warn[ing] that the poor quality of civics education means Americans may not be entirely clear on what makes a president different to a monarch," it is difficult not to read those words in the context of her "read our decisions in full" admonition -- along with her insistent "we all get along together" vibe -- without wondering why Sotomayor seems almost insistent on being oblivious.
The usual response would surely be that there are standards of decorum that members of the judiciary must follow, because they are not politicians. But seriously, is that what we are going to go with in this context? Sotomayor is not officially a politician, but she is a very prominent government official who seems to see how bad things have become. She has as little hard power as Jeffries and Schumer have, but if anything, she has a bigger megaphone. She does not have to "sound like a politician" to make important -- and, dare I say, not boring -- political statements.
More to the point, she does not have to stare at a group of people who are looking for even a little bit of validation and encouragement and say to them, "Meh, I'd rather tell you stories about life lessons in sympathetic listening that I learned from my mom."
Donald Trump and his policies are extremely unpopular. His top talking heads (Pam Bondi, Steven Miller, and the like) are bad parodies of Bond villains' thugs. Congressional Republicans are impossible not to mock. The Democratic leadership is out of power, which means that they are going to look like losers as a default. The least they can do is stop sucking the oxygen out of every room they enter.
This is not about intra-party rifts. This is about political survival, which is the one thing that a reasonable person would expect every politician to feel down to their DNA. Democrats need to figure out who among them has a pulse -- or find someone who does. This would be funny if it were not so serious.
- Neil H. Buchanan