Ryan Grim Profile picture
13 Dec, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Real question that will help me engage with folks on here who I do think are coming from a good place: Why is a vote on the House floor for M4A considered so obviously better than other demands? What’s so useful about the floor? We already know who backs it and who doesn’t...
Ok I think I get it: people think the cosponsor list is fake but a vote would be real.

Sorry to say but that’s wrong: A vote on a bill that won’t pass the Senate is just as symbolic as the act of cosponsoring. They’re both posturing. So if you have leverage, get something real.
Biden could give everyone who had Covid Medicare by executive action. That could end up being 30 million people or more. They could try to extract a commitment from Pelosi to demand that in exchange for govt funding bills. Whatever. Real things are possible.
Also we’ve seen this tried: The GOP put Obamacare repeal on the floor 50 times and passed it when they knew Obama would veto it. Then when they got power they couldn’t repeal it; the floor vote had been theater for their gullible base.

To demand similar treatment is confused.
The funny thing is that a handful of Democrats could band together and actually block Pelosi from becoming Speaker. You’d think the tough demand from the left would be to do that, not to capitulate for a theatrical vote on the floor.

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More from @ryangrim

11 Dec
People on here, including, apparently, lurkers like @BarackObama, are confused about the 20th Century party realignment, and that has led them to a confused understanding of politics today. The myth is that LBJ signed Civil Rights and said, well, there goes the south /1
He may have said some version of that, but that's beside the point. In fact, the realignment goes back at least to the New Deal. In the '30s, the GOP was still the Party of Lincoln and Dems were the bigger racists, but the New Deal was very good for everybody. And so in 1936 /2
for the first time that we have a reliable record, a majority of Black voters went Democratic. Elite columnists thought it was absurd that Black voters could ever side with the legacy of the Confederacy which was still dominated at the congressional level by white supremacists./3
Read 8 tweets
6 Nov
For people wondering why House Democratic leaders would be launching an attack on the Squad out of the gate, consider the math and the new power balance:

Dems will have a much smaller majority in 2021, maybe 8 or 9 seats. Think about what that means:/1 theintercept.com/2020/11/06/ele…
Pelosi always loses one or two @JoshGottheimer types on every vote. That means that about seven (!) Dems have veto power over the caucus. And the Squad has been buttressed by @JamaalBowmanNY, @CoriBush, @MondaireJones & @Marie4Congress

That’s 8 right there
And that’s before you get to Progressive Caucus leaders like @RepJayapal, @MarkPocan or @RoKhanna

Dem leaders know progressives have real power in the caucus now, and are trying to shame them into not using it, is my read.
Read 4 tweets
6 Nov
Dems gave @AOC 60 seconds at the convention and iirc the rest of the Squad nothing. Defund the police was a slogan that came from the protests. The Squad could vanish from the earth tomorrow and none of the centrist complaints about messaging would be assuaged.
Spanberger would have gotten the same attack ad. And she’s going to get it again in 2022. If she has something to actually run on to counter it, maybe she’ll be ok. Worth a shot, no?
That’s different than saying that any particular slogan is effective or not. The purpose of a slogan is to win mass support for your cause. If it’s working, it’s good, if it’s not, it’s not, and people need to be hard headed about that.
Read 5 tweets
29 Oct
.@ggreenwald is a good friend and that'll never change, but The Intercept remains committed to doing powerful, adversarial journalism.

Support our work by becoming a member: join.theintercept.com/donate/now/
Glenn and I actually started out writing this Hunter article together, but he wanted to get deep into Burisma and media criticism and I wanted to focus on the China element, so we decided to write separate pieces. His piece was still in the edit process when all this blew up.
I was hopeful he’d be able to work out his differences on the piece with his editor and I’m still convinced that could have happened. This, as he says, has been brewing for a long time and was about more than just one story.
Read 6 tweets
1 Oct
lol Cruz must figure he’s politically better off in the Senate minority when it comes to launching another presidential bid, happy to kneecap his vulnerable colleague to make that happen
Trust the process
To walk folks through the logic of how this politically benefits Cruz and other ambitious senators on the right, like this guy below, consider two worlds. One has Rs in the majority but Biden in the White House. That could produce a tough vote on some compromise bill every week
Read 9 tweets
27 Sep
Obama taking a full month to nominate Garland was such an Obama move all around
My argument at the time was he should appoint himself and give them a chance to vote him out of the White House and on to the court.
No law against it. I wasn’t really being serious, though the idea had some merit. If they refused to hold hearings it might piss off enough partisan Obama supporters that they’d have bothered to vote
Read 4 tweets

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