Editorials & Other Articles

Here:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-are-the-arguments-for-why-senate-ds-should-vote-yes-and-why-theyre-wrong

Long piece but here's the end:
"The reality here is that this isn’t Democrats shutting down anything. Republicans intentionally crafted a bill that ignores literally every Democratic demand. They’re forcing Democrats to either say no or make an abject surrender.
(snip)

Now, as I said, the Bush administration was a great object lesson in how reality will kick your ass. No truism or motto works in every case. Life is mostly a matter of having half a dozen mutually contradictory truisms or life lessons and knowing which to apply in different situations. But there was more insight in this remark than a lot of Democrats were able to understand. And there’s an important truth here. You need to know how power works and how to use it. Because if you can use power effectively you can change where the pieces are on the board. And if you lack that insight you’re condemned to always working within the lines in ways that are confining and ultimately self-defeating. Are you acting and forcing your opponents to react or is it the opposite. In adversarial situations that’s always more than half the game.

For Democrats the path of keeping their heads down means locking themselves into a pattern of perpetual reaction, at least until the next election, a pattern of never taking the initiative. In other words, a pattern of never taking actions that force the other guys to react. It’s possible to use a lot of brainpower to come up with an argument in which that totally makes sense. But can anyone imagine any scenario where the shoe was on the other foot and Democrats needed seven Republican votes in exchange for literally nothing and they found seven who said, “Okay, sure why not?”

It’s literally unimaginable.

The public is already visibly turning against what’s happening. We have lots of evidence for that. Democrats have this one chance to bring the matter to a head, increase the attention on something the public is already angry about. They need to take a real risk in order to change or at least slow the trajectory of the destruction.