Critiquing my own side

This is Joseph.

Sometimes it can be healthy to point out places where your political party falls short. Smart self-reflection is the basis for positive change, after all. So lets talk about the senate and entitlement. Hopefully this is a retrospective, set for being published in the future, and the events discussed are over by now.

The Democrats have the president and 51 senators. One of them has been in the hospital for depression for 44 days. One of them came down with Shingles in February and does not have a return date in mid-April.  Two others are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, meaning that they both now hold the ability to defect and give the opposition a majority, just by not voting. 

Now I think the insane push to put democrat aligned judges on the bench is playing into the Republican supreme court gambit, but I recognize that there is a lack of consensus on better ideas, Why there is this lack of consensus is fair enough -- a diverse party will struggle with organization and strategy. 

"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." -- Will Rogers

So execution of strategy is important. The senator with shingles is on the judiciary committee, so her absence blocks forward progress. The Republicans have blocked a measure to substitute her out. She is 89 years old and is within 18 months of leaving the senate. 

So far, so good. What scares me is the defense of this process. See here. See more from Talking Points Memo here:

Senate Dems Look Moronic 

The most generous interpretation of Senate Democrats’ ineffectual effort to get Republicans to help them sideline Dianne Feinstein so they can resume confirming Biden judges is that they needed to go through these motions and have them fail before they could prevail on Feinstein to resign her seat.

I could barely type that without screaming into the void. Because of course that’s too generous by a lot.

Senate Republicans lined up yesterday to declare they’re not going to lend Democrats a hand. Of course not. It was silly to pretend they were going to help, both because this is the modern Republican Party and because … why should they really?

So we’re back to where this all started a week or so ago. Until DiFi resigns her seat, the Judiciary Committee is hamstrung and new Biden judicial nominations will be stalled. It’s true that Senate Democrats can’t make her resign, but the song-and-dance routine of the past week doesn’t inspire confidence that they really get what’s at stake or have coalesced around an effective path forward.

But this defense is shocking: "They all deserve a chance to get better and come back to work. Dianne will get better. She will come back to work.” To quote Unforgiven: "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

We saw the same issue with Ruth Bader Ginsburg who stayed until the very end and switched the median vote on the supreme court from John Roberts to Bret Kavanaugh. People talked about how tragic it was that she was participating in the court from a hospital room, ignoring that it was her decision to stay in office during the preceding 8 year democratic presidency. 

The role of an elected official is to represent their people and to advocate for them. Elite offices are not a prize to be won but they are a solemn responsibility to the constituents to be an effective advocate and representative. It is the office that has respect and not at all the person in the office.

I think we should look at these issues through this lens -- how do we ensure that people are properly represented. I think it is obvious that allowing the judiciary to keep being stacked when one side is in power but not the other is a poor strategy and likely to cause issues in the long run.