Dems Cant Afford to Say Yes to Trump - by Michael Tomasky
The few last times Democrats were in the oppositional spotlight, they were excessively accommodating to Republican presidents. The party can’t risk that now.
MICHAEL TOMASKY
11.21.16 9:55 PM ET
So Chuck Schumer started saying over the weekend that he would oppose Donald Trump’s infrastructure bill, assuming it looks roughly the same as Trump’s campaign proposal. Good. It’s a sham. Or, as Ron Klain called it in an absolute must-read Washington Post column over the weekend, a “trap.” It’s a tax break plan for developers that wouldn’t create that many jobs or finance existing, crumbling infrastructure, and it would add to the deficit.
So it’s a good sign, what Schumer said, as was his interview with E.J. Dionne Monday, in which he said that when Trump “goes divisive,” the Democrats will “oppose him with everything we have.”
Unfortunately, they don’t have much—no committee chairs, no subpoena power, no oversight power, no control of the legislative calendar. And there’s no prospect of getting any of those things in 2018, either.
To make matters worse, as I noted last week, there are four Democratic senators from deep-red states who are up for reelection in 2018. The pressure on those four—Claire McCaskill, Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester—to support Trump initiatives will be enormous. Another five represent states that Trump won, albeit more narrowly; they too will face such pressures, so Schumer is going to have a tough time holding that caucus together.
So what do the Democrats have? Mainly right now, what they have are a lot of pissed off and freaked out people who want to do something. And Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the other leaders of the official, Washington Democratic Party have to energize and engage these people in ways they’ve always been reluctant to do in the past. Which means they have to behave very differently from the way they’ve behaved as an opposition party in the past.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/21/dems-can-t-afford-to-say-yes-to-trump.html
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