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And to prove why this ISN’T the right time and I’m not on the right cylinders, here’s the correct name of the previous article and url. Sigh.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/02/are-the-dems-committing-suicide.php

Are the Dems Committing Suicide?

by Steven Hayward

FTA:
...
Beyond the media, there is an entire theory from the academy and coffee houses of Cambridge, Berkeley, and Madison to the effect that Democrats have been too far to the right for a long long time. Maybe my favorite example of leftists determined to brew up the Kool Aid for the 2020 campaign comes from The New Republic, a former magazine, where Alex Sheppard writes of “The Overdue Death of Democratic ‘Pragmatism.’”

Now I’d be the first to celebrate the death of capital-P “Pragmatism,” on the grounds that it doesn’t work, but what Sheppard really means is the kind of “moderation” under people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair that is now despised on the left as “neoliberalism.” This paragraph strikes me as especially wacko:

The party’s rightward drift began in the mid-1970s, when the so-called “Watergate Babies” began to replace New Deal Democrats, but proceeded in earnest in the 1980s due to Ronald Reagan’s two landslide victories. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the wake of Walter Mondale’s defeat in 1984, pushed Democrats to embrace balanced budgets, welfare reform, and other centrist policies. The argument was that the Democratic Party must meet American voters where they were. This neoliberal turn also led Democrats to embrace technocratic policy as an engine for social change: markets, not governments, would solve the major challenges of our time. The kind of imagination and ambition that drove the New Deal and the Great Society became passé.

First of all, losing 44 states in 1980 and then 49 states in 1984 does have a way of concentrating the mind about how to win an election, and high-octane leftism didn’t seem like the way.

But it is this sentence that really jumps out: “The party’s rightward drift began in the mid-1970s, when the so-called “Watergate Babies” began to replace New Deal Democrats. . .”

Sheppard has it exactly backwards. The so-called “Watergate babies” of 1974 marked the beginning of a major step change to the left for the Democratic Party, as I explained in volume 1 of The Age of Reagan:

Watergate had provided the impetus for organizing and accelerating the generational transition within the Democratic Party. Seventy-five of the 292 House Democrats—a quarter—were freshmen; half of the Democratic caucus in the House had been elected since 1970. The “Watergate babies,” as they became known, were infused with a liberal and in a few cases radical reformist zeal formed in the crucible of the antiwar movement and tempered by the convulsion of Watergate. The official Democratic Party magazine, The Democratic Review, estimated that the incoming representatives were more than twice a liberal as the Democratic members they replaced. A Washington Post survey asked the incoming Democrats, “What nation, if any, do you consider a threat to world peace?” The largest plurality, 27 percent, thought the United States was the leading threat to peace, with only 20 percent naming America’s principal adversary, the Soviet Union, along with Israel.

I hope (and expect) that liberals will continue to indulge their revisionist history and slouch toward a suicidal campaign, even as I stock up on popcorn.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/how-house-republicans-are-making-life-difficult-for-democrats-pelosi

How House Republicans are making life difficult for Democrats, Pelosi

Chad Pergram

FTA:
House Republicans are driving Democrats crazy, and driving a major wedge through the majority party.

GOPers are using a garden-variety procedural tool to goad Democrats into taking challenging votes on the floor – and risking the defeat or alteration of legislation which is on the verge of passing.

The parliamentary gambit is called the “Motion to Recommit,” or MTR as it’s known in congressional shorthand. MTR’s must be “germane” and tied directly to the legislation at hand.
...
Most MTR’s resulted in party-line votes until 2007. That’s when Democrats again won control of the House after 12 years in the wilderness. Democrats captured the House with victories by moderate Democrats in battleground districts in the 2006 midterm elections. Seeing an opportunity, Republicans began crafting artful MTR’s, written in a way to put the squeeze on vulnerable Democrats. Democrats took pains to protect their new members and leaders granted them leeway to vote against the brass and in line with their district on some MTR’s. In the end, this created havoc for Democrats on the floor – even though they were in the majority.

The best example came in March 2007. Lawmakers debated a measure to award the District of Columbia a seat in the House. Republicans concocted a motion to recommit that would have repealed Washington’s ban on handguns. The MTR was germane because the bill dealt with the District of Columbia, and it made many conservative, pro-Second Amendment Democrats jumpy. In that instance, those Democrats had to choose whether to vote with the Republicans and the firearms proposal or against the philosophies of their districts and side with leadership.
...
The GOP prevailed a few weeks ago, tacking on provisions via an MTR condemning anti-Semitism to a measure designed to halt U.S. action in Yemen. This week, a GOP MTR added language requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) be told about undocumented persons purchasing weapons to a background check bill.

Twenty-six Democrats joined Republicans in the effort, inflaming many Democrats.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., insists that Democrats should oppose motions to recommit as a matter of policy. Other Democrats believe leaders should give vulnerable Democrats more latitude. There is some chatter that Democrats could try to change the MTR rule.
...
House Republicans would blow a gasket if Democrats revoked the MTR, curbing what little power the minority has in the House. Yet ironically, many House Republicans want to curb the power of the minority in the Senate (where Republicans hold the majority) and eliminate the filibuster.

McCarthy wouldn’t directly respond to the juxtaposition of those positions when pressed by Fox.