Old Dems, who are much farther left than their predecessors, and that includes the previous versions of the fossils who are still cluttering up the dusty corners of Congress, are faced with newer Dems who are even further left.
It is the natural evolution of the progressive project to find Communism the way water seeks level, and the grassroots Left is eager to help. But no one in power wants to be replaced, and the existing leadership is no exception.
Don Leonard, the Democrat who just won Ohio’s 15th District, says senior House Democrats warned him what happens if he won’t back Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker:
“Making my life a living heII for the next two years here in Washington as well as being sure to lose my election.”
He says they “expect you to wear the team jersey” and “be a good team player.”
They don’t want representatives, they want obedience.
Not one damn thing is new about this, so if you are surprised, you probably don’t understand the uniqueness of the Trump counter-revolution and why the Republican Congress, in a few rare cases, was equally calcified.
They don’t want the change either.
My first true experience with this involved Frank Guinta. The Manchester, New Hampshire, mayor unseated then-incumbent Carol Shea-Porter. Back then, we were changing House Reps in CD 1, to quote Katy Perry, the way a girl changes clothes. Guinta’s problem was what I have long called the Georgetown Flu.
You send a principled new member who was good locally and ran on all the right things, but the moment they get plugged into the system, it wrecks them. We had access to the DC office and the ear of the Congressman, but the first thing he was told was that if you don’t toe leadership’s line, you don’t get good committee assignments, and they would bury everything you tried to advance.
If you want to make a difference, you have to line up and embrace what you said you came here to oppose. And it works. Add lobbyists and the declining center-left culture of the bureaucracy that poisons the air, and you start bragging about how much laundered money you brought back to the district.
If the inside-the-beltway institutional stagnation had a tagline, it would be ‘This Is The Way.’
Guinta became a cog in the machine, and his base abandoned him. Shea-Porter won the seat back, and two years later the base offered him a second chance, got the same results, and then gave up on him. Democrats have held that seat ever since because they will rally behind a bad Democrat; they don’t like to keep a Republican out of office.
Republicans aren’t wired that way.
Typically.
2024 saw some pushback on squaddies who lost their seats and a few more who got primaried out for 2026, but the midterms have landed more radical Dems into the arms of the machine than ever before. The machine is geared for this, and while they may not have the numbers or the influence to bend new reps like Don Leonard into supporting them, getting a Democrat to vote for a bad idea is as easy as getting a cheating spouse to cheat again.
You may have thought you voted for a guy, a gal, or something in between who thought they were going to DC to try to make life more affordable, but the machine doesn’t do that. It only knows how to collect power and money, and it feeds on naivete.
Not only are democrats incapable of proposing anything that would make life more affordable, but Congress isn’t too keen on it either. A Democrat-led Congress is the least likely organ of government to consider anything beyond the narrative needed to win office.
Government, as I’ve noted before, is the single biggest threat to affordability in the human experience, and the only thing standing between it and an even less affordable life is Donald Trump, and here in New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte and the ninth state senator are preventing both chambers from having a supermajority.
If you didn’t know any of this, then you are not alone. Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t. It took a major terrorist event to get me to ask questions and look for answers that led me to discover that the education system, run by the government, hadn’t taught me much and certainly not what I needed to know.
Nothing about that has changed, except where the people have embraced educational freedoms. Taking homeschooling from Morpheus, trying to free those trapped in the Matrix, and moving it into the mainstream. Freeing minds. But the new majorities will move quickly and decisively to undermine that and so much more.
Texas Dems have proposed a raft of anti-Second Amendment legislation. None of it has anything to do with affordability, and there will be scores of other low-hanging rotten fruit like it at every level of government, no matter who leads the caucus.
The old Dems are as bad as ever, and the new ones will encourage them to be worse.
Watching them fight over it ought to be at least mildly entertaining, but it’s more like two jihadis arguing over who gets to set you on fire, and the only fire extinguisher is two years away.
