Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Democrats!
If you think the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court last year upset the left, that is nothing compared to their reaction to President Donald Trump naming a replacement for the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy to the high court which has sent them over the edge of sanity. As a result they want to take revenge on the Republicans for the high crime of winning the presidency in 2016 in addition to maintaining control of Congress.
Although the Democrat leadership wants to project an image of stability, many of their members are so embittered that they are advocating playing dirty if they ever regain power.
Political theorist and former congressional speechwriter Rob Goodman is among the play dirty liberals to the extent of advocating the packing the Supreme Court (to override the conservative justices appointed by Trump) as well as granting statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C. as well as to split California seven ways in order to pack the Senate with over a dozen new Democrats. Somewhere, Maxine Waters is proud.
It is surprising that Politico, despite being quite liberal, would publish such a deranged diatribe from Goodman on July 4 titled, “Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair Is for Suckers.” The subtitle is equally as unhinged: “Court-packing! Puerto Rican statehood! Votes for felons! Why—and how—the next Democratic majority should play dirty” [emphasis mine]:
...the most detailed case against the Return to Normalcy—let’s call it the Normal Is Over side of the debate—is advanced by the political scientist David Faris in his new book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics.
Faris’ response to the Normalcy program is that there is no value in conserving a burning house. The endangered state of American liberal democracy, he argues, calls for emergency steps from Democrats and the left. They should take advantage of legal and constitutional silences to “transform American politics in a lasting progressive direction,” Faris writes. “Doing so will require party leaders to pursue policy changes that will be ridiculed by their opponents as outrageous affronts to democratic decency and received by their own voters with puzzlement or even shock. They need to do it anyway.”
The list of those changes is dizzying. Grant statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, and break California in seven, with the goal of adding 16 new Democrats to the Senate. Expand the Supreme Court and the federal courts, packing them with liberal judges. Move to multi-member House districts to roll back the effects of partisan gerrymandering. Pass a new Voting Rights Act, including nationwide automatic voter registration, felon enfranchisement and an end to voter ID laws. Grant citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants, creating a host of new Democratic-leaning voters: “Republicans have always feared that immigration would change the character of American society. Democrats should reward them with their very worst nightmare.”
And free stuff for everybody! However, for this to work, Goodman must not let the public know about his secret plan for extreme Democrat revenge. Got that, Rob? Tell no one or else the Democrats will never be voted back into power [again, emphasis mine]:
All of these steps, Faris points out, could be achieved without amending the Constitution. They would rely on new legislation, but more important, on Democrats abandoning any lingering commitment to a norm about power: That legislation cannot have the explicit goal of securing a lasting partisan advantage.
Shhhh! Be sure to tell no one:
Yet each turn of the spiral depletes our reserve of unthinkables. And after enough turns of the spiral, the last unthinkable is violence. Americans shouldn’t imagine we’re exempt from the logic that turns cold civil conflict hot.
Anticipating violence, Rob, while you angrily punch your pillow every night due to reality encroaching upon your shrunken realm? Okay, sure:
This means that a strategy of Democratic norm-breaking is justifiable only if it can be reasonably expected to result in a lasting political realignment—to break the cycle rather than escalate it. It must so thoroughly disempower the other side that it forestalls serious reprisals. Put simply, the strategy that Faris and others on the left are proposing had better work—because the tit-for-tat conflict that would result from a halfhearted or incomplete attempt would be even worse than the status quo.
Translation: Conservatives must be permanently removed from power no matter what it takes to accomplish this:
Realignments are nothing short of revolutionary events. Democrats should begin a norm-breaking program only if they are willing to complete it. And they can complete it only if they are willing to tune out the very civil, very serious, and very wrong voices that will demand half-measures at every step.
The main thing is that Rob Goodman and those of his deranged ilk keep all this secret from the public or the Democrats will not be voted back into power for at least another generation.
