[Orig to FB]
Imma up this #2 (🎩 Jay Kuo):
It’s a catastrophic mistake to say [that getting elected is] the minority party’s only job or even its primary job. There’s no question that matters, of course. But it means that, outside of electoral processes, the party has no job; and, compared to many parliamentary systems, where it maintains a clearly defined and active shadow cabinet, the minority party could even be said to not exist for many purposes. Or, rather, it means that the minority party consists of a disaggregated bunch of isolated actors: Harris (the notional head of the party, who was on a book tour promoting her memoirs while DOGE and RFK Jr were running rampant), Schumer (who’s overseen the rubberstamping of Supreme Court justices who, it’s clear, are profoundly corrupt), Jeffries (who was “looking for leverage”), Ken Martin (who refuses to release the 2024 post mortem because looking forward), and a handful of other figures who almost no one’s heard of (like DLCC Chair Andrea Stewart-Cousins — who?!?!).
I understand, respect, and commend the role you play and the voice you’ve established — as a positive commentator intent on providing accurate info and promoting the Dems. I also implore you to look up from that and consider a more strategic view. We only just a year and some into Trump’s term, and already he and his minions have structurally demolished many of the US’s greatest post–WW2 achievements. By the time they’re done, this country will resemble the post-collapse USSR and early CIS than the US in, say, 2012. The Dems can sweep every election they like, but the landscapes they’ll face — civil service, foreign service, military — will have been eviscerated, and much of what remains will be corrupted. A hundred Congresses operating at their best (which will not be the case) wouldn’t be enough to investigate all this damage, and the glacial time scale required for those efforts will take far longer than we’ll have before the next round of midterms or whatever. And, as we’ve seen, Trump’s OLC has opined that it’s affirmatively unconstitutional to require an admin to deposit its papers. That means that when the Dems do assume power again, Trump & Co will have ransacked the place and deleted everything they couldn’t abscond with. And every single thing the Dems do will be besieged with frivolous litigation and subject to manipulation and cancellation by plainly corrupt judiciary.
We need a Democratic Party now that’s strategically planning and publicly stating how it will address this. So your statement of minority party’s job may have been accurate or adequate in normal times, these — as you’ve no doubt heard — are not normal.