And Time For The Democrats To Find Leadership That Suits the Crisis
When Trump or Musk stumbles onto a good idea, Bernie thinks we should support it. During a campaign rally in Nassau County last year, he promised to cap credit card interest rates at 10%, something Bernie and MAGA Missouri Senator Josh Hawley have introduced in the Senate as a bill this week. The average current rate is double that. Bernie: “When large financial institutions charge over 25 percent interest on credit cards, they are not engaged in the business of making credit available. They are engaged in extortion and loan sharking. We cannot continue to allow big banks to make huge profits ripping off the American people. This legislation will provide working families struggling to pay their bills with desperately needed financial relief.” Hawley: “Working Americans are drowning in record credit card debt while the biggest credit card issuers get richer and richer by hiking their interest rates to the moon. It's not just wrong, it's exploitative. And it needs to end.” Trump: crickets… and no, he hasn’t endorsed the bipartisan legislation.
Democratic congressional leaders keep wringing their hands and whining that there’s nothing they can do to stop Trump’s onslaught. That’s true— because they don't have the disposition to do anything out of the ordinary; Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are the wrong leaders for this existential moment in our country’s history. Yesterday Mica Soellner, Max Cohn and John Bresnahan reported that when protestors gathered for a USAID rally their chants of “Do your job” drowned out Schumer and other senators trying to appear attached to the grassroots energy and opposition to Trump’s illegal activity.
Meanwhile, House Dems are starting to realize that Jeffries’ and Aguilar’s glide path into leadership was a big mistake, on the level of Kamala’s glide path to the party’s nomination. “Numerous House Democrats from across the ideological spectrum,” wrote the trio, “are questioning whether Jeffries’ cautious, low-key approach is the best antidote to Trump’s bombastic attacks. ‘Our constituents are going to continue to call and ask for us to do more and we shouldn’t be insulted by it,’ said Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), a Congressional Progressive Caucus member. ‘We can’t have Congress business as usual… I certainly am going to be talking to our leadership about what we are able to demonstrate not just in our caucus, but to the general public.’… Behind the scenes, the criticism is even sharper, with rank-and-file Democrats complaining that Jeffries isn’t hitting Trump hard enough and is shutting out complaints during caucus meetings.”
He’s trying to step up his rhetoric against Trump, but that isn’t who he is. There are virtually no Republicans in his D+26 Brooklyn district. He wins reelection with between 70 and 90% of the vote. He doesn’t know how to be the kind fighter Democrats need. Jeffries and his allies insist that his calm composure and discipline are positive counters to Trump’s recklessness. Meanwhile, Aguilar, for a different set of reasons, is much, much worse and barely a Democrat at all, having started his political career as part of the Jerry Lewis machine.
Schumer is at least just as bad— and, at 74, too old for the job. Even more so than Jeffries, he is the ultimate, comfortable establishment figure. When he tries to channel grassroots anger, he’s laughable, pathetic and “cringe-inducing.” Like Jeffries, he’s an icon of what Democrats can’t accomplish— and a button-down expert of not trying, while Trump and Musk rush headlong into tyranny. Yesterday, Norm Ornstein wrote they’re a “clear and present danger to the fabric of our democracy.”
He expressed what many grassroots Democrats feel: “unprecedented times demand unprecedented approaches by Democrats in Congress, minority status or not. Last week, I advocated for Senate Democrats to use every rule and weapon at their disposal to bring the Senate to a halt, or at least put big-time speed bumps in the way for them to act, hold hearings, and confirm Trump’s executive nominees. But given just what we have seen since I wrote that piece, we need more. Trump and Elon Musk are not tiptoeing the United States toward autocracy, one step at a time. They are racing there, using Steve Bannon’s approach of muzzle velocity to flood Washington with radical and illegal acts, including unilaterally freezing congressionally mandated spending, seizing control of top-secret information and shutting employees out of their buildings , claiming the demise of agencies protected by law, illegally firing federal employees protected under civil service laws, trying to undermine the FBI and CIA, firing agency and regulatory commission chairs and members despite that they have fixed terms set by Congress, taking security from individuals Trump dislikes, even those facing death threats from actions they took at Trump’s command during his first term, and threatening retaliation against those Trump and Musk don’t like. Musk, for his part, is ignoring the ethics requirements of his temporary governmental status, saying he will decide his own conflicts of interest and allowing an army of young, inexperienced and highly questionable techies access to our most sensitive secrets and personal information, and to alter the source codes of key programs.”
Trump and Musk are counting on the overwhelmed, intimidated and captured press to be incapable of blowing the whistle enough to raise larger public outrage, as Bannon accurately predicted. While an army of lawyers is challenging the illegal acts, Trump, Musk and their allies think the courts either will turn a blind eye to the illegality, operate slowly to enable the actions to be effective even if they ultimately are overturned, and, with a pliant Supreme Court, to expand presidential authority way beyond immunity through the so-called “unitary executive” theory. If all else fails, Trump will just ignore court edicts and orders, as he appears to be doing after an injunction blocking his sweeping freeze of spending on federal programs.
Then there is Congress. Violate the most precious congressional power, the power of the purse, by blowing up mandated spending, wreaking havoc and damaging countless lives? … In response to my call for Senate Democrats to use their power within the rules to do as much obstruction as possible, I have gotten two kinds of pushback. The first is that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York wants to protect his vulnerable members who are up for reelection in 2026. My response to that has been that if you do not go to the mat to highlight the Trump/Musk depredations, there might not be elections in 2026. The second is that I have misread the rules, that they cannot actually stop Republicans from what they want to do. It might be true that Senate Democrats can mostly just disrupt, putting up big speed bumps instead of actual roadblocks. But in fact the filibuster can work for most legislation, and if Republicans eliminate it, so be it. And it is true that confirmations can be done, in the end, by simple majority votes.
But using the rules means that each one, of the hundreds, would take up a lot of Senate time and energy. If Senate Democrats suddenly had discipline, backbone and a willingness to stay on weekends and often at night, to deny unanimous consent for all or nearly all executive nominations, and to put on blanket holds, it could keep a large number of the second- and third- tier nominees from being confirmed, at least adding to their difficulty hijacking the agencies and departments, and limiting their ability to use the Vacancies Act to fill top posts. Of course, Senate Republicans might well change all the rules, radically reducing the power of the minority. But if we do somehow manage to get through this and maintain our democracy, we will not have to worry about a couple of recalcitrant senators, like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to alter the rules; they will already be in place. And Democrats can decide which ones to use to implement their own agenda.
So what to do? It is time for House Democrats, especially, to use their biggest power, their votes in a body that is closely divided and with a Republican majority incapable of uniting on its own to pass budgets and spending bills and to raise the debt ceiling.
I admit this is different from what I wrote two weeks ago here at The Contrarian. My 40-year history of decrying the anomaly of the United States, unique among significant economies, requiring periodic increases in our debt ceiling via votes in Congress, has included regular efforts to eliminate, bypass or neutralize the requirement. It is deeply dangerous to play with the nation’s standing and its credit. I wrote that Democrats should use their power, when Johnson, unable to get the votes from his Freedom Caucus radicals, begs for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s help, to demand a debt ceiling fix.
Two things have changed my view. First, the past 14 days I have seen the march to autocracy accelerate at warp speed. Second, the emerging threat to the full faith and credit of the United States is in the reckless policies of Trump, Musk and their billionaire buddies. Stiffing groups and contractors from the money they are legally owed by the federal government is already damaging the credibility of the U.S. Threatening big tariffs can trigger a trade war-driven combination of recession and inflation, further risking our solvency. And if Trump buys in at all to the cockamamie idea from tech billionaires to buy tons of bitcoin or its brethren with dollars and Fort Knox gold, it could devastate our reserves and damage the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
So House Democrats should say right now that Republicans have the majority in the House, Senate and White House, and are in charge— and they will get no votes from Democrats to bail them out on budgets, spending bills, continuing resolutions to avert government shutdowns, or extensions in the debt ceiling… I wish it were not needed, that we could go back to the messy process of give-and-take, where Democrats could use their leverage in this closely divided House to bargain with Johnson and Trump for concessions in return for their votes to save them, and the country, from disruption. But we are in desperate times, and they need dramatic and unusual actions. This is not in the normal wheelhouse of congressional Democrats who have compromise in their political DNA. It is way past time for that to prevail.
And as Brian Beutler wrote on Monday, “Musk has dragged the country into its worst legitimation crisis in decades— maybe ever— and impels Democrats to shift into a different gear of opposition. That starts at the top. At a recent, private meeting, Hakeem Jeffries reportedly told Silicon Valley donors that Democrats plan ‘to retake the House in 2026 [by] reaching toward the center, while Trump will swing harder right.’… [T]his is not a plan that matches the circumstances. It can be an addendum to such a plan. But if Democrats respond to the subversion of the Constitution with normal ‘median voter theory’-style politics they may well wake up in the autumn of 2026 to find that the federal government no longer tolerates fair elections. Whatever policy gestures they make, Jeffries and his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer need— as a top priority— to be procedurally aggressive. Not even that aggressive! But enough to insist that their role in the constitutional system be upheld.”
Beutler continued apace: “Consensus-oriented and swing-state Democrats—the ones who have been treating this as a normal confirmation process—could make clear that they’ll resume voting for most of Trump’s nominees once legal governance is restored, but only then… These Democrats have already seen their confidences violated. They voted overwhelmingly for Marco Rubio to helm the State Department, only for him to abet the lawless Trump-Musk demolition of USAID. John Fetterman voted to confirm Attorney General Pam Bondi, who will forbid prosecutors from enforcing the law against Musk and the people following his orders. That’s why it came as a relief when Brian Schatz announced he’d filibuster ever Trump State Department nominee, and when Senate Dems leaked word that they’d withhold consent to fast-track confirmation votes across the board. But this is all mostly a sideshow. The real and perhaps final test for Democrats in the Trump era will probably come in just a few days, when Republican leaders approach them for help funding the government and servicing the national debt.”
If Democrats provide those votes before the rule of law has been restored, and without locking in any mechanism to maintain the rule of law going forward, they will have in essence assented to the wrecking of democracy. They will have voted for an Enabling Act to raze the American republic. They will etch the words disgrace and surrender into their own party’s epitaph.
We don’t have a parliamentary system, where the person elected to lead the legislature is also head of government, and can be removed rapidly on votes of no confidence.
We don’t have no confidence votes at all, officially.
What we have instead is the impeachment power and, short of that, various incarnations of the spending power.
Dan Froomkin wrote that the media may finally be forced to recognize a constitutional crisis due to Señor T’s “unconstitutional executive orders, his rampant law-breaking, and (new!) his defiance of court orders, he is acting as if he alone is the government. And they will see how the other branches are either unwilling or unable to restrain him.”
Froomkin suggests that they then “fully and intentionally go into crisis mode. That means constant, round-the-clock, top-of-the-homepage coverage until the crisis is resolved… No more euphemisms and passive voice. It’s time for strong words and active verbs. It requires authoritative reporting. No splitting the difference between two sources when one of them is misinformed or deliberately misleading. Accurate information is essential in a crisis. It requires big-picture thinking: What are the consequences of this crisis? Who will it affect and how? It requires profiles of the victims. It calls for regular assessments of the response. Who’s helping? Who’s hurting? Who’s proposing solutions? Whose ideas are just making it worse? It requires digging into the motives of the people who are making it worse… Identifying something as a crisis is the opposite of accepting it as the new normal— and that’s entirely the point. This can’t become the new normal. Our democracy won’t survive.”