Americans Hate Both Political Parties
Just before going off to Palm Beach to plot out their legislative agenda, House Republicans passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an anti-choice bill that every Republican voted for and every Democrat, except one, voted against. The “except one” was Henry Cuellar, who had, a week earlier, been one of just 2 Democrats— the other being another south Texas conservative, Vicente Gonzalez— to vote for the GOP’s bill to target transgender women in sports. Cuellar has a long history of being a Democrat the GOP loves. Back when he was a state legislator, he was known as “Gov. George W. Bush’s favorite Democrat.” He supported Bush when he ran for president in 2000 and he was appointed to serve as Secretary of State by Gov. Rick Perry in 2001. He kept that sobriquet when he moved into Congress. Long one of the House’s most blatantly corrupt members— never disciplined, always supported by top Democrats— he was recently caught taking foreign bribes and will face trial on March 31 and is expected to be pardoned by Trump (who has already defended Cuellar, suggesting that the charges were politically motivated due to Cuellar's MAGA-aligned stance on the border.
When Trump pardons Cuellar (and NYC Mayor Eric Adams), they won’t be the first corrupt Democrats embraced by America’s most corrupt president. He also commuted the sentence of corrupt Illinois ex-Governor Rod Blogojevich and of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
Long before Trump was active in national politics— and just bribing corrupt Democrats in New York and New Jersey— corrupt Democrats were gravitating towards the GOP. The Blue Dog coalition in Congress was always a stepping stone for corrupt right-wing Democrats into the GOP, especially among the corrupt Democrats in the Deep South, like Billy Tauzin (LA), Jimmy Hayes (LA), Rodney Alexander (LA), Nathan Deal (GA), Greg Laughlin (TX), Ralph Hall (TX), Virgil Goode (VA), Gene Taylor (MS), Parker Griffith (AL) and/or recently Artur Davis (AL) and Jefferson Van Drew (NJ).
Notorious Wall Street whore Phil Gramm was a conservative Democrat-turned-Republican who switched to the GOP in 1983 and became a key architect of deregulation policies that fueled corporate greed. Originally a conservative Democrat, Rick Perry switched parties in the late 1980s and went on to become Texas’ longest-serving Republican governor. A longtime conservative Democrat in the Texas House, Ryan Guillen switched to the GOP in 2021, citing the Democratic Party’s move leftward. However, his switch was widely seen as opportunistic, given that his district was becoming more Republican-leaning. A former Democratic state representative who flipped to the GOP in 2010, Aaron Peña benefited from Republican redistricting efforts and later worked as a lobbyist, cashing in on his connections.
More recently, super-corrupt, far right fake Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin never fully switched parties but did become independents. On Wednesday former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, angling for a pardon after his 11 year prison sentence was handed down, said, outside the courthouse that “President Trump was right. This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.”
And speaking of cesspools, the two most controversial Trump nominees— not counting over-the-top, even for Trump, Matt Gaetz— are former Democrats: Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, Jr. Neither is assured confirmation.
Yesterday, some Democrats felt bolstered— if not giddy— by Trump’s historically low approval numbers:
The Democratic Party, however, is doing even worse. Yesterday, Aaron Blake took a look at their brutal poll problem yesterday. “A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday,” he wrote, “had this stunning finding: While Americans were about evenly split in their views of the Republican Party (43 percent favorable to 45 percent unfavorable), negative views of the Democratic Party outpaced positive ones by 26 points— 31 percent favorable to 57 percent unfavorable. That’s not only a huge imbalance but also an unprecedented one. In fact, Democrats’ 57 percent unfavorable rating is their highest ever in Quinnipiac’s polling, dating back to 2008, while the GOP’s 43 percent favorable rating is its highest ever.”
A recent CNN poll featured some more-detailed questions that point to Democrats’ problems rallying the troops:
Fully 32 percent of Democratic-leaning voters say the last few years in politics have made them feel “less like a part of the Democratic Party.”
Nearly 6 in 10 Democratic-leaning voters say the party needs either “major changes” or “to be completely reformed.”
Just 49 percent of Democratic-leaning voters expect the party to be at least “somewhat effective” in limiting GOP policies it opposes. Only 7 percent expect it to be “very effective.”
“This,” he wrote, “doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that Democrats will be in the wilderness for years to come… Two things are compounding problems for Democrats. One is that they seem to have considerably less fight in them or leadership than they did after the 2016 election. The second is that the Republican Party, having made significant gains with groups like Hispanic voters in 2024, is suddenly looking like a more viable option for voters. That doesn’t mean it will always be thus. But it does suggest that Democrats have their work cut out for them.” And the new House leadership— party hacks Hakeem Jeffries and Pete Aguilar particularly— are absolutely not up top the task and never will be.
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