'Turncoat Dems' in House Blasted as Fast Track Fight Heads Back to Senate

[RiverLover]

'Turncoat Dems' in House Blasted as Fast Track Fight Heads Back to Senate
6/18/15

'We expect more regard for environmental protection and respect for working families from President Obama and the Democrats who supported this bill.'

Drawing the swift ire of progressives around the country, the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday took a step to revive President Barack Obama's faltering corporate trade agenda, passing Fast Track, or Trade Promotion Authority, in a 218-208 vote.

Twenty-eight Democratic lawmakers voted in favor of Fast Track, which would make it easier for Obama to ram through controversial trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership, reducing the role of Congress to an up-or-down vote on such mammoth agreements.

"Thanks to House Republicans and a handful of turncoat Democrats, the army of corporate execs and industry lobbyists who wrote the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership will now have an easier time shoving it down the throats of an American public that's broadly opposed to more NAFTA-style trade deals," Democracy for America chair Jim Dean said after the vote. "While we will continue to work to defeat fast-track for the job-killing TPP in the U.S. Senate, we will never forget which House Democrats stood with American working families against Fast Track and who sold them out."

"Our disappointment with the president is profound," said Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica on Thursday. "Sadly, we have come to expect Republicans to sell out the environment for the pursuit of corporate profits. But we expect more regard for environmental protection and respect for working families from President Obama and the Democrats who supported this bill."

While Thursday's vote is a setback, the fight is far from over. The legislation will now head back to the Senate, where as Public Citizen notes, "its fate remains at best unclear."

In May, the Senate originally passed a version of Fast Track that was linked to Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) legislation that gives aid to workers displaced by trade. But last Friday, the TAA measure was overwhelmingly defeated in the House, in turn derailing Fast Track.

Thursday's vote separated Fast Track from TAA legislation, meaning those who voted in favor supported a bill without protections for workers. It is unknown whether Senate Democrats will support a stand-alone Fast Track bill....

Read more~
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/18/turncoat-dems-house-blasted-fast-track-fight-heads-back-senate

These are the 28 Turncoat Dems who voted for bypassing the Democratic process with TPA Fast Tracking corporate "trade" deals:

Terri Sewell (AL-07)
Susan Davis (CA-53)
Sam Farr (CA-20)
Jim Costa (CA-16)
Ami Bera (CA-07)
Scott Peters (CA-52)
Jared Polis (CO-02)
James Himes (CT-04)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-23)
Mike Quigley (IL-05)
John Delaney (MD-06)
Brad Ashford (NE-02)
Gregory Meeks (NY-05)
Kathleen Rice (NY-04)
Earl Blumenauer (OR-03)
Kurt Schrader (OR-05)
Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01)
Jim Cooper (TN-05)
Rubén Hinojosa (TX-15)
Eddie Johnson (TX-30)
Henry Cuellar (TX-28)
Beto O'Rourke (TX-16)
Gerald Connolly (VA-11)
Donald Beyer (VA-08)
Rick Larsen (WA-02)
Suzan DelBene (WA-01)
Derek Kilmer (WA-06)
Ron Kind (WI-03)

[hobbit709]

1. Definitely the usual list of suspects.

EVERY one of them should be primaried out.

[Enthusiast]

17. Huge +1!

[bvar22]

54. They have collected their 30 pieces of silver.

Now, it is time for US to Stone them at the Gates
and hang their traitorous bodies up for the crows to feed on.

[TM99]

2. Primary each and everyone of these

idiot corporatists.

[RiverLover]

4. From your lips...or keypad

They make the 2 party system a joke. We could save a lot of money by skipping elections & just installing corporate lackeys. Instead of states, they can represent their corporate sponsors.

[TM99]

18. Don't they?

And Third Way Democrats wonder why independents, Greens, and libertarians have been saying since the late 1990's that really there is little damned difference between the two parties.

Wonderful flag and very accurate!

[sabrina 1]

45. We don't have two parties, we have one and a half parties now. Corporate entities couldn't

count on just one party, the one they completely own, so they knew they had to take control of at least half of our party. That was the job of the DLC/Third Way.

Now it's up to us to take back that half of the party.

[Fuddnik]

24. Just remember one thing.

Every nickel you donate to the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC, will be used to re-elect these people. They're incumbent protection rackets, and they do intervene in primaries.

Donate to individual candidates only.

[TM99]

44. I have never donated to any

national party, and I won't be starting.

Sanders is the only candidate in my life that I have actually given funds to in an election. He is the only one I have felt truly needed it and was worth it.

[Blue_Adept]

3. Good to see none of my reps there

And I know my senators, Warren and Markey, aren't in favor of it.

[tiredtoo]

5. Glad to see my Representative is not on this list

But somewhat surprised to see the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, on the list.

[hobbit709]

6. I'm not. All her actions show whose side she's on.

[daleanime]

8. Not to me.

Don't expect much from her.

[heaven05]

21. no surprise, at all

[ybbor]

22. Not surprised one bit

She is the definition of SUCKS.

Why in the hell is she still the head of the DNC.

[sabrina 1]

46. She is the first one I expected to see there. She is totally committed to the Third Way and can

always be counted on to make sure they get what they want.

[fredamae]

7. These are Three Disgusting Stains

on democracy ....

Earl Blumenauer (OR-03)
Kurt Schrader (OR-05)
Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01)

I Will work with Whomever to Unseat these Jerks.
DeFazio and Merkley are the Only two of Seven who are thinking about Oregonians and the rest of the country.

Sad.

[Punx]

34. Well I didn't vote

For Bonamici in either the primary two years ago or the general last fall. She would never talk about trade on the local radio which told me all I needed to know this go around. I suspect Nike $ are more important than doing the right thing.

That or she's just clueless about trade and economics. On her website she talks about being able to export more potatoes from Oregon. On the surface maybe not a bad thing, but we don't need as ugly a deal as the TPP to do this, and frankly the jobs around something like exporting potatoes don't pay anything like the high tech jobs that have gone to China in the last 10-15 years.

Rest assured I will be working to unseat her here in Oregon next time around.

Agree wholeheartedly with you on Defazio and Merkley.

[Vinca]

9. People who care about American workers need to challenge those seats.

[mindem]

10. There is way too much bait and switch

going on with the Democratic party anymore, starting at the top and running down through the ranks. I am becoming increasingly more disgusted with politicians in general, I don't care what the stripe.

[RiverLover]

14. "Bait & Switch" sums up our party's problem nicely.

I agree with every thing you wrote here.

[drray23]

11. i am surprised only two reps from virginia voted for it.

I would have expected more bluedogs and corporatists there.

Connelly is from fairfax and beyer has the 8th district with includes alexandria and abuts washington DC. No surprises there.

[a kennedy]

12. Ron Kind (WI-03) Ugh.....wishy washy Dem. eom

[Ed Suspicious]

20. He's always been Republican . . . errr . . . fiscally conservative, socially liberal.

[Triana]

13. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz - yet another reason she should step down

from being head of the DNC.

NO WAY is that woman a Democrat. Not by any definition I have.

[Enthusiast]

16. In actuality she is not a Democrat.

[RiverLover]

19. + 1 She isn't a Democrat.

She's a disgrace to Democrats.

[cascadiance]

47. Now is the time to start a grass roots effort nationwide to get another "Howard Dean" in charge...

... like Howard Dean with democratic organizations to push him from the ground up to take over the DNC early on that helped us ultimately to take over the House with his 50 state strategies. Party insiders might not have liked the DEMOCRATIC efforts to push him in to power then, but it happened for the benefit of all Americans then!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/magazine/01dean.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

...
This conflict between the party’s chairman and its elected leaders (who tried mightily to keep local activists from giving him the job in the first place) might be viewed as a petty disagreement. But in fact, it represents the deepening of a rift that has its roots in the 2004 presidential campaign — a rift that raises the fundamental issue of what role, if any, a political party should play in 21st-century American life. Dean ran for president, and then for chairman, as an outsider who would seize power from the party’s interest-group-based establishment and return it to the grass roots. And while he has gamely tried to play down his differences with elected Democrats since becoming chairman, it seems increasingly obvious that Dean is pursuing his own agenda for the party — an agenda that picks up, in many ways, where his renegade presidential campaign left off. Now, at power lunches and private meetings, perplexed Washington Democrats, the kind of people who have lorded over the party apparatus for decades, find themselves pondering the same bewildering questions. What on earth can Howard Dean be thinking? Does he really care about winning in November, or is he after something else?

The mere fact that Democrats would consider a “50-state strategy” to be novel — as if a national party might reasonably aspire to something less — says volumes about the rapid deterioration of the party that was, for most of the last century, America’s dominant political force. Back when Democrats were the established majority, the state parties were run by bosses who doled out jobs and delivered votes, while the national party, functioning as a subsidiary of whoever happened to occupy the Oval Office, worried about electing presidents. For decades, the party claimed a sizable majority of the nation’s governors, senators and congressmen, and in every one of the states where it controlled those seats, there was a centralized organization — a party “infrastructure,” in the parlance of today’s activists — whose job it was to recruit candidates and make sure voters got to the polls.

All that began to change with the social movements of the 1960’s and 70’s, which redefined the Democratic Party, in the minds of many rural voters, as mostly a coalition of urban blacks and high-minded intellectuals. From the Deep South up through the populist Plains, voters began abandoning Democratic candidates at the polls, and the old state machines found themselves out of power and starved for patronage. Slowly, the parties in these states atrophied, laying off staff members and allowing their network of local volunteers to dwindle. “We were on the verge of extinction, pretty much,” Barry Rubin, the executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party, told me recently.

When Dean took over the D.N.C. last year, he sent assessment teams, made up of veteran field organizers and former state party officials, to every state. A typical assessment report on one rural state — I was allowed to see the report only on the condition that I not name the state involved — bluntly stated that its local activists were “aging” and that its central committee was “dysfunctional.” In most states, there were hardly any county or precinct organizations to speak of. More than half the states lacked any communications staff, meaning that no one was there to counter the Republican talking points that passed from Washington to the state parties to the local media with a kind of automated precision.
...

This needs to happen again so that we can take over the party again! Perhaps Howard Dean can do this again? Or maybe someone new. But just like the Tea Party also made efforts to take over the Republican Party with these methods as well, we need to take back the Democratic Party

I told that as a challenge for people I met last night who were upset with Susan Bonamici and other Democratic Party congressional reps here in Oregon that they need to start going in to try and register as PCPs to take over the party again. I showed them a motion I had passed against the TPA in a recent meeting to note that there are ways to get the party mobilized in the right direction. I met some Republicans there too that absolutely had some good common ground with me on the fundamental issues that the TPP can join us together on in preserving our system of democracy. They can also perhaps go after the Republican party and the RNC as well.

I think this TPA/TPP can be a point of populist unity that gives us the newer revolution that we need to retake America. We need to start with a 50 state effort to get DWS replaced. She put herself out there as the first target with her failure in the last election leading the DNC as well as this horrible set of votes on TPA.

[Enthusiast]

15. This is a betrayal, pure and simple. We know what you are DWS.

What you are will get my post removed.

[fizzgig]

23. i am disgusted that polis voted for this

it goes without saying that my puke bagger senator will support it, but my "d" senator supports it, too.

[zentrum]

25. Take action on Wasserman!

Call her office. Flood her with calls and faxes.

She is the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and she must hear from us.

Here is her Washington DC contact info:

Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

She has her email set up so you have to be from Florida to use it. But, given her poistion of power in the party, she needs to hear from us all.

[dixiegrrrrl]

29. Here is contact info for DNC

"Please submit all political and public policy—related questions and comments"
http://my.democrats.org/page/s/contact-the-democrats

Phone #:
Main phone number: 202-863-8000

For questions about contributions, please call 877-336-7200.

[zentrum]

36. Thank you.

[KeepItReal]

35. Nothing speaks louder than a Primary Election

Hasten her exodus to K Street or the Board of JP Morgan

[zentrum]

37. Really a concern...

…..that when I called her office about ten minutes ago, they picked it up in one ring. She is not being flooded with calls.

[fredamae]

42. Start a Petition for her removal

from leadership, along with Isreal, Schumer et al.

When I call, to try and have a discussion re: the policies etc of the New Dem Party/Third Way/New Dem Coalition et al (which left out the Democratic Wing of the party) "I'm sorry ma'am, I really have to go now"......
The Hard, Blunt Truth Hurts, I guess. But that's no reason to stop.

[zeemike]

26. Proud to say my congressman is not on the list.

[Thespian2]

27. I vote in Florida...

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is not a Democrat...She should be kicked out of the party, but certainly defeated in the next election...

[on point]

28. Don't ever run for wider office. Your career is OVER.

[NorthCarolina]

30. Their concern over what their constituents think has already been

deposited in their bank account...probably the off shore one.

[WestSeattle2]

31. No mention of this vote on Kilmer's website - not

even in his "Jobs and Economy" section.

[RiverLover]

40. I wasn't surprised by the TX votes, but OR & WA Dem reps for bypassing amendments to trade

really did. This is a corporate, conservative assault on Democracy & I just thought the progressives in those states were more true blue liberals...

People confuse this with wanting Dems to be against trade. The TPA fast track is not trade, its allowing trade deals to be voted on only, when lobbyists wrote them, & not allowing the public or our reps to make any changes to the deals the lobbyists wrote.

This just seemed like something our West Coast Liberals would be against...very disappointing.

[WestSeattle2]

52. There is a misconception regarding Washington state - it's not

liberal at all - only Seattle is. You drive 20 miles outside of Seattle in any direction, and the political landscape becomes pink, then blindingly red. Kilmer is a Pierce County Democrat - Pierce County is home to Joint Base Lewis McChord - a very conservative military influence. He votes accordingly.

[brooklynite]

32. I was told that liberal groups were going to Primary them all...how's it going?

[zentrum]

39. Building a new

…party or rebuilding the Democratic party will take time. Movements take time. Then suddenly, the change appears.

We're very patient.

Because we're mad as hell.

[sabrina 1]

48. You missed the mid terms then? It is going great. Blue Dogs lost in both Mid Terms, Progressives

won or held on to their seats. It took THEM time to infiltrate this party, it will take a little less time to replace them with actual Democrats who vote for the PEOPLE who elect them. And all the Corporate money in the world isn't going to save their seats, it didn't last time.

We need two parties, not one and a half, beholden to the top 1%. And now the people are awake to this corrupt system the job of restoring our party to what it claims to be, the party of the people, began a few years ago.

If the TPP passes, there will be a revolt in this party. And it will become even more imperative to elect someone who has consistently voted for the people, that would be Bernie Sanders. Because the powers they are taking from Congress will go to the executive Branch, and that makes impossible to hand those powers over to any Corporate beholden candidate.

[brooklynite]

49. "We need two parties, not one and a half, beholden to the top 1%."

Bringing me back to my point: where are the Primaries? I don't object philosophically, but making a threat you don't follow up on ruins your credibility.

[sabrina 1]

50. Is there an election this year? I referred you to the ousting of Blue Dogs in the past two

mid terms. THAT was the beginning of the revolt against Corporate 'dems'. The next election is in 2016 when many more of them will be up for reelection. Dozens of liberal groups will again work to rid Congress of more of them, that includes now the Unions who have aligned to form a coalition with, advocacy groups, Liberal Organizations, local Dem groups etc across the country. They will support and back financially, by contributing directly, as they did in those mid terms, to the candidates of THEIR choice. No more donating to the DNC etc, they don't need OUR money, their chosen candidates are well funded by Corporations.

Too bad the party mis read those mid terms. The Third Way 'blamed the voters' while missing the beginning of the revolt against them and their policies that have so devastated the working class.

Now the people have some choices. Because now we see the corrupt, 'fixed' as Warren called it correctly, system. Until the people actually witnessed it in action, see the this Trade deal eg, they could not do much about it. NOW they see it. And there are more of us than there are of them. The people do still have the power, they didn't use it until just recently.

OWS was the shot across the bow, which is why it was so brutally attacked. THAT told the oligarchs how awake the people wer becoming to the whole corrupt system.

Now that energy is going into to changing this system. And as I said, with success.

[99Forever]

33. Primary every one of these traitors.

Fucking scum.

[Omaha Steve]

38. Brad Ashford (NE-02)

Not in our district, but we donated $. We called to remind the freshman of that on this several times. The seat will go Republican more than likely in Nov. 2016.

[Triana]

41. These are the ones Alan Grayson asked us to call before the vote.

Did anyone call?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026855392

[d_legendary1]

43. I see that our Democratic Chair Debbie Wasserman Shmucktz

voted for this piece of shit. I'm convinced that she gave Rick Scott the go-ahead win on purpose. I'm embarrassed that she's my representative at this point.

[Populist_Prole]

51. Traitors were also enticed by support in case they are primaried by a real populist Dem

The backlash from this was already thought of, and the president said he'd "support" them against this in future runs for their own seats.

Mine did the right thing at least, but to no avail from the "scabs" who crossed the line and voted with the plutocrats.

[MisterP]

53. hmm, wasn't this "officialist" faction telling us "don't vote third-party, vote in the primaries!"

ahh, life was simpler 2002-6, back before they went back on what they were barking at us like a camp commandant