A Failure In Plain Sight
Who, if anyone, will acknowledge the obvious, and do something about it?
Here’s the roll call for the Friday House vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
Look closely and you’ll notice something telling. The bill passed 220-207, with the help of seven Democrats. Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen of New York, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzales of Texas, Don Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez of Washington.
Do the math. With party-line discipline, Democrats could have taken the bill down. At least on that day.
Earlier in the week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had made a big show of pretending to oppose the bill. He and his leadership team announced their collective intent to vote no the day before the bill came to the floor. But they also pointedly declined to whip their membership.
So if you knew what you were watching, you could see the fix was in. They gave away the game, same as the numbers do.
The Associated Press captured this picture of the top Democratic appropriator, Rosa DeLauro, celebrating the completion of the full bundle of appropriations bills—including for DHS—with her Republican counterpart Tom Cole. She went on to “vote no,” like Jeffries, but the clear intent was to ensure passage.
Now Alex Pretti is dead, murdered in the streets of Minneapolis by an agent or agents of Customs and Border Patrol, and the foolishness of all this kabuki theater is laid bare gruesomely.
Senate Democrats were prepared to take the same dive, but (in the most macabre sense) they were beneficiaries of good timing.
They will now filibuster the DHS bill, along with any other appropriations Senate Republicans attach to it, and we’ll finally have the political fight over Trump’s gestapo tactics that we should have had in March or September of last year. The Senate Democrats who were prepared to enable Trump again, until the most predictable thing happened, will have to live with the knowledge that they are collaborators at heart. Several of them have been living with that knowledge for months.
But for the seven House Dems, and the leadership team that colluded with them, the consequences will be more severe. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it proves to be career-ending for some of them.
HATE THE PLAYERS NOT THE GAME
Sports metaphors in politics are uniformly terrible, but one of the most common and annoying happens to be apt here: Skate to where the puck is going.
American politics is not a solved game, anymore than hockey is. It’s obviously not a game at all, though our news media treats it as one. But some aspects of politics are game-like in a mathematical sense. It just isn’t a game that a player can win predictably by making an optimal set of moves.
Jeffries and the surrender seven thought they knew the optimal move: Avoid conflict pertaining to anything other than your best issues. Don’t do anything consequential unless it polls well. And though the violent federal occupation of Minneapolis does not poll well, certain timeless rules still apply—particularly to those who represent swing districts: fund the police; support immigration enforcement; etc.
The frontline Democrats feared the politics of voting no, and the politics of another government shutdown. The leadership wanted to protect them. They voted in a manner designed to portray cowardice as independent thinking. Look at us, bucking our party and our leadership! We’re not like those Democrats.
There is a lucrative industry devoted to constantly reinstilling this type of advice in the minds of frontline Democrats. The industry should be burned to the ground.
It exists to repeat the same observations over and over again: moderate candidates perform better; the ones who adhere more strictly to principle—even when it means supporting policies that poll so-so—perform worse. The surrender seven? They’re electoral overperformers! They must know something the rest of the party doesn’t. And that thing is: vote with the polls.
Of course, many of the Democrats who voted for the Iraq war were electoral overperformers, too. But as much as it rankles to hear endless appeals to moral nihilism, when we know it can lead to grave political errors, the more maddening thing is that the guidance stems from a misunderstanding of the game.
IT’S TIME FOR SOME GAME THEORY
There are 435 House districts.