Significant resistance to Donald Trump is not going to come from Democrat leaders, Glenn Greenwald warned on Twitter earlier today.
I really hope nobody is expecting actual #resistance from Democratic Party leaders. It’s going to have to come from elsewhere.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 26, 2017
Greenwald had earlier tweeted a link to a Daily Kos story highly critical of Democrats who seem to be talking up the resistance game but who are through their actions not engaging in a whole lot of resistance beyond the usual grandstanding we hear from establishment Democrats who historically like to talk the talk, but stumble and fall when it comes to walking the walk.
Specifically, the Daily Kos article targets Elizabeth Warren for a recent vote in favor of confirming Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
“Yes, I have serious, deep, profound concerns about Dr. Carson’s inexperience to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Warren said. “Yes, I adamantly disagree with many of the outrageous things that Dr. Carson said during his presidential campaign. Yes, he is not the nominee I wanted.
But “the nominee I wanted” is not the test.
The article brings up the point that Donald Trump’s nominees need only simple majorities for confirmation, so Warren’s contention that Trump might nominate someone even worse if his current picks don’t pass doesn’t seem to make much sense, seeing as Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress. Warren and the Democrats won’t win any favors from Trump for voting for his cabinet picks, so why even bother? The only thing it really seems to accomplish is sending a message to Democratic voters and others on the left, and possibly centrists who are alarmed at the extreme nature of Trump’s governance so far, that the Democrats have little intention to be a true resistance to Donald Trump in any real sense of the word, choosing instead to grandstand emptily as they reforge their brand through identity politics and hopes that Trump is so awful that any alternative to him and his party is seen by voters as a vital change.
A recent article in The Hill portrays Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York as some kind of new champion for the left. This article ignores that many on the anti-establishment left believe Chuck Schumer perfectly represents the kind of Democrat politicians the anti-establishment left routinely rejects as wolves in sheep’s clothing. An article in The Intercept from last November called Schumer the “ worst possible Democratic leader at the worst possible time,” shortly after Schumer was named as the new Senate minority leader following Harry Reid’s retirement. The article mentions Schumer’s corporate ties, his support in 2002 for the Iraq war, support for the Patriot act, and a laundry list of other troubling reasons why he’s not a “champion to the left” by any stretch of the imagination.
“Schumer’s done more than anyone except Bill and Hillary Clinton to intertwine Wall Street and the Democratic Party,” Jon Schwarz of The Intercept writes. “He raises millions and millions of dollars from the finance industry, both for himself and for other Democrats. In return, he voted to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and voted to bail out Wall Street in 2008. In between, he slashed fees paid by banks to the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay for regulatory enforcement, and eviscerated congressional efforts to crack down on rating agencies.”
Many on the left would argue that corporate ties and pro-war and anti-civil-liberties positions are some of the reasons why Hillary Clinton failed to beat Donald Trump in the 2016 election. If establishment Democrats continue along as a party that answers to corporate America at the expense of the people, and they continue to be a resistance-in-name-only to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, they may not be able to count on the support of people who are tired of business-as-usual from the political establishment in Washington D.C. Groups like the newly formed Justice Democrats, focused on getting big corporate money out of Democratic Party politics, are busy working on finding their replacements.
[Featured Image by Andrew Burton/Getty Images]