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Whoa! Whoa! Wait a Second, AOC

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | March 1, 2019 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | March 1, 2019 |


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Look, if I had my druthers, the three women in this picture would be running the whole damn country, even if that might mean I succumb to a massive face conflagration.

I love their politics; I love their approach to politics; and I love their attitude about politics. And they are f**king doing it for their constituents — and the country — and not out of some desire to enrich themselves or amass power. They are the future of the party, and I am stoked about that.

With that said, this — from The Washington Post — is a little concerning:

House Democrats exploded in recriminations Thursday over moderates bucking the party, with liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatening to put those voting with Republicans “on a list” for a primary challenge.

I know that Petr and many others will disagree with me — see, e.g. Centrism will be the death of us all — but I also think it’s important to be pragmatic, at least in 2019 - 2020. The Democrats overwhelmingly took back the House last year because of progressives and because a lot of moderate Democrats won very close elections in Republican territory, owing in part to the unpopularity of Donald Trump and the ability of those moderates to win Republican votes. Remember how many of those House races weren’t decided for days, because the margins of victory were so small? I don’t want to give those seats up. Ever.

I would love for progressives to win those seats ultimately, but being primaried by a progressive candidate is the surest way to hand those seats back to Republicans as states are making decisions about redistricting. All things equal, I’d rather have a moderate Democrat in those districts than a Republican, and if those moderate Democrats need to occasionally cross the aisle to keep their seats, I think those are the blows we have to swallow until the current danger — the Trump White House — passes.

Ultimately, I am all for a three-party system, and I envision a future where moderates from both sides peel off into their own party — as they seem to be doing in the UK — and vote in coalitions, but that time is not now. We gotta keep everyone together because we have a President who legitimately may try to either steal an election in 2020 or refuse to give up his office.

That’s the danger of all these potential indictments against Trump. Right now, the office of the Presidency is the only thing that may be keeping Donald Trump from the inside of a prison cell. A guy like that is dangerous as hell, and he’s going to cling to the office with both hands and both feet, because the alternative may be prison. You know, there’s a legitimate scenario where Trump loses the election in November 2020 and resigns in December, giving Mike Pence enough time to pardon him before a Democratic successor takes over. The fact that the Southern District of New York is working up indictments on Trump, however, may take away that ability to pardon Trump, which means we’ll be stuck with the decisions of a 74-year-old man with absolutely nothing to lose and access to the button.

However, the threat of Trump refusing to give up his office only works if he’s got a large enough party behind him to prop up false allegations of election fraud. That’s why moderates and progressives have to stick together. We need the numbers, not only to stop Trump from winning in a three-way race (f**k off, Howard Schultz), but to amass a big enough wall of support to keep Trump from refusing a peaceful transition of power. And if that threat sounds alarmist to you, you clearly haven’t been paying attention these last two years. This is a man who claimed that hundreds of thousands of people in Massachusetts “poured” over the border to New Hampshire to vote for Hillary Clinton, and he managed to get his entire party to go along with that.

On the other hand, I’m impressed that, less than two full months in office, AOC is already making lists, and from the looks of it, Nancy Pelosi is taking AOC’s side.



Header Image Source: Getty Images