LITTLE SNAPPERS November 16, 2018

Summary: Cathedral City’s adoption of an ordinance banning single-use plastic straws, while doubtless well intended, is nothing more than grandstanding. A statewide prohibition will go into effect at the new year, leaving Cathedral city’s ordinance little more than a piece of “feel-good” legislation. Councilmember Mark Carnevale and outgoing Mayor Stan Henry were right to vote against it.

A federal district judge in Washington City ordered the White House to reinstate CNN’s Jim Acosta’s “hard pass” after a hearing this morning at which the Justice Department lawyers made absolutely nonsensical arguments. Today’s order is a victory for the free press, but the war against the regime is by no means won.

-------------------------------------

Cathedral City, November  16 –- at its Wednesday night Council meeting, the Cathedral City city Council adopted an ordinance banning the use of so-called single-use plastic straws in Cathedral City.

The ordinance, while well intended as a gesture of conscientious environmental stewardship, nonetheless comes across as unfortunate political grandstanding. The state has adopted similar legislation which goes into effect on January 1, 2019. Why Cathedral City should have felt it necessary to burden its municipal codebook with a duplicative and probably pre-empted ordinance is unfortunately no mystery.

Cities throughout California, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, West Hollywood, and Palm Springs, have a history of what may be called statement legislation. The legislation itself is usually intended to cover matters that are already covered, or will be covered, by a statewide Act of the Legislature. But, by jumping the gun, cities with histories of “statement legislation” can feel good about having made a statement or taken a stand about a particular issue before the Legislature did so.

Now, fortunately, the damage that local jurisdictions can do with “statement legislation” is pretty much limited to the geographic boundaries of the jurisdiction. Unfortunately, from a Democratic partisan perspective, the ammunition that such “statement legislation” gives to Republicans and cultural conservatives of every stripe cannot be measured.

While of course, there is no good reason to take issue with limiting the use of plastic straws. (Who can forget the heartbreaking YouTube video of rescuers trying to extract a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nose, having to make an election between leaving the straw in and potentially killing the creature, or extracting it and causing the creature excruciating pain in the process?) There is ample reason indeed to limit the use of plastic straws, even ignoring the plight of the random sea turtle.

However, trying to steal a march on the Legislature through “statement legislation” does not strike one as a compelling justification for grandstanding. Sacramento has been known to take a fairly dim view of local legislation that it sees is trampling upon the prerogatives of the Legislature, whose powers, where not limited by the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States, are, after all, coextensive with the powers of the Imperial Parliament of the United Kingdom. That includes the authority to pass pre-emptive statewide legislation on any subject within the Legislature’s competence. And the Legislature has been known to be more than a little territorial on occasion.

Thus, while the Cathedral City ordinance in question was doubtless well intended, it was the kind of political grandstanding that in the end should be rejected as politically ill-advised because it not only pisses off the Legislature, but also because it provides ammunition to haters.

Cathedral City’s plastic straw ordinance will probably prove to have been an unforced error on the part of the city Council. Were I still on the Council, I would have voted “no.”

* * * * *

The Trump administration took another black eye this morning when federal District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, ironically a Trump appointee, ordered the White House to reinstate CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s “hard pass,” thus reinstating Acosta’s ability to cover the White House for “the little network that could.”

Just about every American by now has learned the history of the Trump/Acosta confrontation last week that resulted in a petulant president ordering Acosta’s hard pass revoked. Just about every American also knows that the Trump administration attempted to justify its conduct with the usual outrageous lies, buttressed by a doctored video supplied by Alex Jones’s InfoWars website. Those lies, together with a doctored video, were quickly fact checked by numerous media outlets. Those same media outlets, including Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, rallied to CNN and Acosta’s defense.

And CNN and its colleagues in the media have prevailed. Gospodin Trump’s effort to impose a media regime on the White House that would reduce coverage of the President to that which is fawning and sycophantic, has — at least for the time being — failed, and American democracy lives to survive, and fight, another day.

But what was so problematic about the Trump/Acosta imbroglio was that the Justice Department, in oral arguments before the District Court, argued that the White House had essentially unfettered discretion to keep any journalist off the White House grounds for any reason whatsoever. Reporting on CNN.com, CNN’s Brian Stelter framed the larger issue in these ominous words:

While responding to a hypothetical from Kelly, [Justice Department lawyer James]Burnham said that it would be perfectly legal for the White House to revoke a journalist's press pass if it didn't agree with their reporting. "As a matter of law... yes," he said.

 Fortunately for the Republic, Judge Kelly did not see the matter the way Mr. Burnham would have liked him to see it.

A President does not have the right to contravene either the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, or the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees due process as against the federal government, on his mere ipse dixit, simply because he dislikes or disagrees with the reporter or the media outlet in question. 

Of course, Donald Trump, who has a rather imperial concept of presidential power, including the power of his mere ipse dixit, won’t like the results of this morning’s hearing one little bit. Like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who, according to bombshell New York Times reporting earlier this week, also has a rather thin skin, Donald Trump can be expected to let fly with one or more rage tweets. We should expect something along the lines of “Disgraceful decision by Democratic so-called judge! Outrageous! Will appeal! Terrible for the country! Sad!”

Already, a number of media outlets are describing a sense of siege within the White House. A Politico.com headline describes Trump world as “preparing for the worst.” CNN’s victory in court this morning can only have reinforced the ominous feelings within Trump world. Will that world come crashing down? Will Trump world go the way of Atlantis or Pompeii? All the auguries indicate that the Trump organized crime family is becoming uncomfortably aware that it is dancing on a volcano.

WOMEN HOLD UP HALF THE SKY; DON'T FORGET IT!

Summary:  The Democrats appear to have done rather better in the midterm elections then a lot of the pundits and handicappers had thought possible. It was, after all, Aotsunami, a blue Tidal Wave, rather than just Aonami, a little blue ripple. Though the dust has yet to settle, the Democratic margin of control in the incoming House of Representatives appears to be widening. Kyrsten Sinema’s victory in heretofore deep red Arizona gives Democrats throughout the country hope for recapturing the upper chamber in 2020.

 But Democrats, true to their reputation for foolishness and fecklessness, are talking seriously about ousting Nancy Pelosi, the architect and field marshal of their victory. It’s too early to say whether the mutiny against the incoming leader of the majority is a fruit of sheer misogyny, or whether it is part of the ongoing Sanders effort to destroy the Democratic Party from within. Either way, the rebellion should be squashed without mercy.Women hold up half the sky, and the Party needs to remember that immutable truth.
------------------------------------------------------

When I posted in this blog on November 8, I suggested that  “Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped.” I may have been premature. As votes are counted, particularly in California, which seems to take a perverse pride in the slowness of its election returns, it appears that Aonami really may have been Aotsunami after all.

While we did not recapture the Senate, the defeat of Nevada’s Dean Heller and the victory of Kyrsten Sinema in heretofore ruby red Arizona suggests that Democrats may be well-positioned to recapture the upper chamber in 2020, when the electoral math and map for Republicans will be even more unpromising than the senatorial electoral math and map of 2018 were for Democrats.

Withal, the last week has been a very good week for The Democracy and a very bad week for Gospodin Trump and the un-American Republicans. Democrats should be celebrating the extent of their victory and laying plans for 2020.

Unfortunately, the Democrats are displaying once again their traditional fecklessness and foolishness. In the House, there seems to be a revolt brewing against Nancy Pelosi, the once and hopefully future Speaker of the house.

Unfortunately, feckless and foolish Democrats seem intent on penalizing success and rewarding failure. The anti-Pelosi revolt, spearheaded by Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, and encouraged by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocacsio Cortez, seems to come straight out of either a deep cesspit of misogyny, which tried to find expression in the insurgency of Kevin de León against Dianne Feinstein, or it comes out of a conscious effort by the so-called Bernie Sanders "wing" of the Democratic Party to destroy the party from within.

Either hypothesis bodes ill for the Party’s hopes of being victorious in the long game against the Muscovite Republicans in 2020.

If the Party is taken hostage by a kind of reflexive ageist misogyny that postulates the unsuitability of either Dianne Feinstein or Nancy Pelosi for public office because they are too old or insufficiently masculine, then the Party will be setting itself up for long-term defeat.

The Party ought to have realized that the coalition originally set in motion by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his four victorious presidential campaigns was a Coalition of Others. It was a coalition of women, Native Americans, Labor, and most of all, people of color. The Roosevelt coalition was a harbinger, in politics, of what the nation has come to resemble as a whole.

For we are rapidly becoming a minority-majority nation. No single American can say that he or she represents the majority of all voters any longer. To recognize this truth is not to traffic in identity politics, but merely to acknowledge that America has always been a glorious, messy tossed salad of a society. Where voters are comfortable accepting the reality of our “tossed salad” body politic, such voters tend to vote Democratic.

It is equally a matter of political truth that Republicans do well in parts of the country where appeals to threatened senses of whiteness resonate with paler voters. Democrats should realize not only that we are still the coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt called in to being, but that within that coalition itself resides enormous wellsprings of strength and political potential.

Democrats need to realize that in our Party, “women,” as Mao Zedong put it nearly three quarters of a century ago, “hold up half the sky.” And to the extent that women hold up half the sky, they also hold up a considerable portion of our Party and our politics.

Thus, to hear Kevin De León or his followers argue that Sen. Feinstein is “too old” or too “out of touch,” to be California’s senior senator, is to say in effect that “this is a man’s job,” for which the old lady simply isn’t qualified. Add to that the often ill concealed undertones of anti-Semitism that not infrequently emerge from certain quarters of the California Democratic Party, and it is easy to see that there is very little substantive merit in either Mr. De León’s critique, or in that of the critique of the executive board of the California Democratic Party, which saw fit to overrule the delegates at the state Democratic convention, who had opted not to endorse De León, and substitute their own judgment in the place of that of the representatives of the broad mass of the California Democratic Party.

Of course, if misogyny, misplaced identity politics, ageism, or even anti-Semitism were the primary reasons for Kevin de León’s challenge to a sitting senior senator with substantial seniority, it might be easy to understand such behavior.

It’s a lot less easy to understand, and a lot less easy to forgive, the motivations behind the revolt against Nancy Pelosi, the Organizer and the field marshal of our recent victories. Again, the fecklessness of the Democratic Party seems to be asserting itself powerfully. Of course, political parties sometimes get a metaphorical bug up their butt that causes them to turn on incumbents with substantial seniority, without realizing what advantages that seniority brings home to the district or the state, but most party activists with a pragmatic sense of how politics works understand that shivving a senior member of your Party’s own caucus benefits no one but the other side.

One can see in the revolt against Nancy Pelosi two equally objectionable Militant Tendencies at work. The first is raw sectionalism. Many of the rebels against Nancy Pelosi come from the Northeast, formally the most dominant section of the American body politic. One can see in the sullen and mutinous disposition of a Seth Moulton, a Conor Lamb, or an Alexandria Ocasio-Curtez, some sense of loss expressing itself over the diminished role of the Northeast in our national politics.

Time was, in living memory of many with current seats in Congress, that states such as New York and Pennsylvania had the largest House delegations of any. Though California has had the largest population of any state in the union since 1962, and New York has fallen to fourth among the states in terms of population, there is still a certain sectional bias in favor of the Northeast and against California. 

Add to the that the fact that Nancy Pelosi represents the 12th Congressional District of California, which is comprehended entirely within the City and County of San Francisco, and it’s not hard to understand why there should have been a Republican propaganda against Nancy Pelosi for so very many years.

But for Democrats to subscribe to that propaganda, and to the larger Republican propaganda against state of California as a whole, is simply inadmissible.

The other Militant Tendency operating within the Party is the Bernie Sanders virus. It is simply inadmissible is for members of the Democratic caucus to be pledging their loyalty not to the Party but to the person of Bernard Sanders, the Independent Vermont Senator who flirts with the Democratic Party when it suits his political agenda to do so, but who stabs the Party in the back on a regular basis.

The various Sanders front groups that seem more interested in helping The Donald then and helping The Democracy include groups like the so-called Justice Democrats, the Our Revolution group, and the Democratic Socialists. Not one of these names bears any semantic resemblance to reality. Instead, they all seem to be dedicated to attacking the Democratic Party, the oldest political party existing anywhere in the world, the party founded by Thomas Jefferson, the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

I have written elsewhere in this blog of the perfidy of Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers, of how they were, and are, nothing more than a fifth column for Donald Trump. Given the perfidious nature of Bernard Sanders and his followers, it is hard to understand why any person identifying as a Democrat would give him -or them- the time of day or the courtesy of a hearing.

The Sanders game plan seems to be to attack the unity of the Democratic Party from within so that it can be vulnerable to attack from without. We do not yet possess sufficient evidence to link Sen. Sanders to Gospodin Putin, but it certainly does seem, at a gut level, to warrant further investigation.

But while we are doing so, we cannot afford the Democratic Party to be subverted from within by revolt led by people such as Messrs. Moulton and Lamb and by Ms. Ocasio Cortez. If, as appears likely, Nancy Pelosi becomes the new speaker of the Democratic House come January, the rebels should find themselves stripped of any significant or responsible committee assignments, and consigned to the darkest, dankest office accommodations available on Capitol Hill. And they should expect to be primaried in 2020 if they don’t straighten up and fly right.

Democrats need to stop being nice to the traitors and subversives in their midst. We need as always, to be guided by the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:

        They pull a knife,
        we pull a gun;
        they send one of ours of the hospital,
        we send one of theirs to the morgue!
 
After all, women hold up half the sky.