The Hill: The political pendulum is swinging back from conservative control in so many ways

Last time Nancy Pelosi took office as Speaker of the House in 2007, it was in the last Congress of George W. Bush’s Republican presidency. She came in on a wave election, gaining the Senate and the House after a long exile of Democrats from the Speaker’s seat dating back from 1994. She would hold the seat for a short four years, losing it in 2010 during Barack Obama’s first midterm. 

This time, Nancy Pelosi has done something that Democrats haven’t done since 1930: flip the House and take the Speakership in an opposing President’s first midterm. Within the same period, Republicans have done this 3 times: 1946, 1994 and 2010. The latter two happened during the post-Civil Rights era described in this article. 

Because this is such a rare event, Pelosi is now garnering comparisons to other Speakers of the House who used their bully pulpit to rhetorically oppose the White House within the last century: Democrats like Tip O’Neill, Republicans like Newt Gingrich and John Boehner. But Pelosi will take office in an era closer to the hyper-partisanship of the latter two GOP speakers, and will have the chance to hew herself closer to or distinguish herself from O’Neill, who managed to find ways to work with Reagan and his Republican Senate. By comparison, Gingrich and Boehner fought desperate knife-fights with their Democratic presidents to make them one-term presidents. 

She may have to find a way to use all of those three examples, but her prior experience in the Speakership – with a weakened President on his way out as well as a Senate in her party’s grasp – will be less useful. She has a creepy President who values loyalty, uses his opponents to shield himself from scrutiny, and abuses his authority flagrantly. Can she milk this President, or will she have to get into a knife fight for the next two or more years?

That may be a good measure of how intense the swing away from this party era’s conservatism may be.

Taiwan News: Live-stream debate on marriage equality referendum commenced Nov. 4

If you’re interested in ballot initiatives and their impact on civil rights, there is another referendum on the ballot in Taiwan on November 24. There will be at least 4-5 competing questions regarding LGBT rights, 3 of which will deal with whether or not to legalize same-sex marriage or partnerships, and 2 on whether or not to legalize LGBT-inclusive education in Taiwanese schools. 

This could be as big as #Prop8 in 2008, as one-on-one debates on same-sex marriage have been live-streamed to Taiwanese audiences. One in particular, a debate on Nov. 4 on #Question14 involving a pro-equality member of the Taiwanese Parliament (or “Legislative Yuan”) vs. an anti-marriage equality professor, drew praise from online commenters to the MP for his use of evidence and charts to prove that same-sex marriage does not correlate to declining birthrates. 

All of this only became necessary because the DPP government of Tsai Ing-Wen dragged their feet after Taiwan’s High Court ruled in 2017 that same-sex marriage should be legalized by parliament or automatically within the next two years (despite the DPP campaigning on a platform to legalize marriage equality), and the religious right took advantage of a new referendum law to put anti-LGBT questions on the national ballot during Taiwan’s midterms. LGBT activists put their own competing questions on the ballot before the deadline. 

This is a novel and grandiose idea, but it comes from the same “Pelosi is old and unpopular so chuck her out” narrative that ignores what just happened on Tuesday and that no one is currently challenging Pelosi for the speakership, or Hoyer for Majority Leader, or Clyburn for Majority Whip. In spite of the “move fast and break things” ideology of the White House, seniority and experience still matter in Congress, and the younger, more hardcore or more ambitious Dems are jockeying for Caucus Chair and Assistant Leader. 

Also, it ignores the fact that governorships and control of power in the states is and has long been just as important as what happens at the federal level. The governors hold a crucial bit of power over redistricting of Congress. Don’t dole out the consolation prize while the counting is still going on in Georgia and several other states. 

But I’m really surprised that this article mentions nothing of Stacey Abrams‘ big role as House Minority Leader in the General Assembly. Nowhere in this article! If you’re going to talk about why Stacey should be the next speaker of the U.S. House, how are you not going to mention her own state-level experience equivalent to Nancy Pelosi’s experience???

Lucy McBath for Congress in CD-06 will be the first black woman to represent Georgia in the House since Cynthia McKinney last held CD-04 and turned it over in 2007 to current incumbent Hank Johnson. She will also be only the third black woman to represent Georgia in the House, after Denise Majette and McKinney. 

Also, Maxine Waters of California will likely be the first woman and first African-American to chair the House Financial Services Committee. 

Some history: Yvonne Braithwaite Burke (who currently serves on the board of Amtrak) was the first black woman to chair a congressional committee, twice chairing the Select Committee on the House Beauty Shop in the 94th and 95th Congresses. The other black women to chair House committees were both in the 110th: Juanita Millender-McDonald, who chaired the House Administration Committee, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who chaired the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (now known as the Ethics Committee). 

So #AuntieMaxine will be the first to chair a higher-tier committee, one with impact outside of Congress. It’s not one of the four great committees – Appropriations, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Rules – but if you’re angry about “CREAM” and the excesses of the banking and financial industry, you want a regulator like Waters in charge of this committee. You want the bankers to be scared and to not get away with so much.

Here’s the plan. 

• There’s no going back for the DPG. Because Stacey Abrams has performed so well as a gubernatorial candidate, there’s no turning back on the sort of campaign she waged across the state. Next Dem guv prospect in 2022 must do more of what she did, cannot turn their back on PoC and women voters, and must hit more counties more frequently. The Abrams model mostly works in lieu of a Mid/western-style labor-driven model, and will define us for election cycles to come. 
• No one expected white women here to break with the GOP, even for a woman, and it was lopsidedly 70-20 for Kemp. Right now, I ascribe it to the value system of Colin Woodard’s “Deep South nation”. I need the white women and men who voted for Abrams or ran for office as the #Resistance to find a way over the coming years to help break that value system, by any means necessary, because it’s been a burden on our state and is the reason we can’t have nice things here like strong labor unions and a minimum wage increase. I ask you to help reform our state’s culture to feel more like the Mid/west than the Deep South. Start UU churches, start labor union locals, start more organizations to change your community and challenge authority. 
• Georgia Democrats must come together like never before, more frequently than ever before, conduct more business than ever before, in more hub cities than ever before, with more goals than ever before, with more action than ever before, and at an earlier time than ever before (preferably before the primary). Reform of the State Convention must be a top priority for anyone who wants to reform our party.

tl;dr: Organize, Organize, Organize.

We won some big things tonight. We don’t know if we lost Georgia, but Stacey Abrams overperformed compared to past Dem gubernatorial candidates since 2002. She needs to stay in this fight. Gillum also overperformed across Florida for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate. He needs to stay in this fight, too. Not our dream day here but we both have given the Southern GOP a run for their money tonight. 

I want to see if we break one or two GOP supermajorities in Atlanta tonight. #TeamValerie didn’t win tonight but we’re already planning for 2020. The Eagle’s Landing secession failed. And CD-06 and CD-07 look insanely close. 

But progressive victories abound all across the nation, and I’m not talking about the U.S. House. My favorite ballot initiatives right now – Amendment A in Colorado, Amendment 4 in Florida, Amendment 2 and Prop B in Missouri, Question 3 in Massachusetts – all won. Nonpartisan redistricting initiatives are winning in four states, Medicaid expansion is winning, marijuana is winning, automatic and same-day voter registration are winning, minimum wage increases are winning. And most of the North Carolina GOP’s ballot question power grabs went down in defeat. 

We also flipped several governorships tonight, giving us a somewhat stronger state-executive hand in redistricting for 2020. 

So tonight, we’ve made several progressive changes which will impact the future of the country in the longer term.