Ed Kilgore: Senate Democrats have no choice on the dirty continuing spending resolution if it passes the House, have only one filibuster to use in 2025, and now's the time

Johnson added conservative sweeteners to the CR, which isn’t “clean” (i.e., a simple extension of current funding levels for everything) as advertised, but instead adds immediate money for defense and mass deportation, and cuts domestic spending by $13 billion. House Democrats already inclined to vote “no” on the CR because it contains no language forcing the executive branch to actually spend the money appropriated (which would restrict the power of DOGE or OMB to unilaterally “freeze” spending, cancel grants or contracts, or fire personnel) now have even less motivation to keep the government open. ...

To kill the CR, Democrats would have to launch a filibuster, and in that circumstance it would be much easier for Republicans to blame the Donkey Party for shutting down the federal government, despite the clear intention of the Trump administration to keep gutting the government if it remains open. If just seven Senate Democrats choose to join Republicans (or all but Rand Paul, who is demanding deeper cuts; he’s effectively matched with Democrat John Fetterman, who’s vowed to vote to avoid a shutdown), the CR will pass.

If Senate Democrats are put to the challenge and subsequently cave, they will have more than likely forfeited any real Democratic leverage for the remainder of 2025 beyond stirring up public unhappiness with Trump 2.0. Appropriations aside, most of Trump’s legislative agenda will be enacted via a gigantic budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered. So the decision not to deploy a filibuster on the one crucial occasion it is available will represent an admission of powerlessness that won’t make rank-and-file Democrats happy. ...

More.

When you have to write articles like this with eight weeks to go lol

 How Kamala Harris Can Prove She’s Not a Flip-flopping Phony

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change (as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to aggressive policing tactics.

 

Is Chris Cillizza, formerly of CNN, WaPo, Meet the Depressed, and PMSNBC cherry-picking?

 

I mean, most of these lists are incomplete because Harris' has left a LONG trail demonstrating her extreme leftism in speeches, interviews, tweets, policy statements from 2019, et cetera, and it's a daunting task to list them all. Any list of them will show an editor's bias about what's important in the editor's opinion.

But the idea from James Carville endorsed by Kilgore that Harris can just say she learned in the White House that spending $800 billion over ten years in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act to reverse climate change was good enough when in 2019 she said it would take $1 trillion PER YEAR for ten years is just laughable.

 

LAUGHABLE.

That's hardly going to fly with the climate change left, let alone anyone else.

 

Ed Kilgore's just pretending that isn't the case. He's an enabler of Harris' silence in the face of the flip-flops.

 

 

 

 

She's toast because the label stuck long ago and they can't get it off

 

How Harris Can Fight the ‘Too Liberal’ Label

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

Duh

 

What the Polls Say: RFK Jr. Hurting Biden, Helping Trump

Ed Kilgore, NY Magazine

Herman Cain's So-Called Abortion Flip Was Nothing of the Kind: He Clearly Endorsed Private Choice For Adoption, Not Abortion.

What it was was a poor attempt to entrap the still too trusting Herman Cain to make it appear that his position on abortion is incoherent.

The transcript of the controversial interchange shows Herman immediately grasped Piers Morgan's attempt to bait and switch when Herman TWICE interjects the comment "you're mixing two things," namely "bringing up the baby as her own" and "abortion."

The media and the left, like Ed Kilgore of The New Republic here, are hoping that if they repeat their lie enough that we'll all believe it.

Piers Morgan starts talking about abortion, and suddenly introduces a hypothetical about raising a child who was conceived in a rape "as her own":

MORGAN: Abortion. What's your view of abortion?

CAIN: I believe that life begins at conception. And abortion under no circumstances. And here's why --

MORGAN: No circumstances?"

CAIN: No circumstances.

MORGAN: Because many of your fellow candidates -- some of them qualify that.

CAIN: They qualify but --

MORGAN: Rape and incest.

CAIN: Rape and incest.

MORGAN: Are you honestly saying -- again, it's a tricky question, I know.

CAIN: Ask the tricky question.

MORGAN: But you've had children, grandchildren. If one of your female children, grand children was raped, you would honestly want her to bring up that baby as her own?

CAIN: You're mixing two things here, Piers?

MORGAN: Why?

CAIN: You're mixing --

MORGAN: That's what it comes down to.

CAIN: No, it comes down to it's not the government's role or anybody else's role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you're not talking about that big a number. So what I'm saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make.

Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn't have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.

MORGAN: By expressing the view that you expressed, you are effectively -- you might be president. You can't hide behind now the mask, if you don't mind me saying, of being the pizza guy. You might be the president of United States of America. So your views on these things become exponentially massively more important. They become a directive to the nation.

CAIN: No they don't. I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn't be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.

MORGAN: That's a very interesting departure --

CAIN: Yes.

MORGAN: -- from the normal politics.

CAIN: Exactly.

There is absolutely nothing controversial here about Herman Cain saying a president has no business telling people to raise such a child as their own.

And Rick Santorum should be ashamed of himself for piling on.

Incidentally, Herman is correct about the relative rarity of the adoption question: statistics show just under 250,000 total children per year waiting to be adopted and adopted, in about equal numbers.

That's because our advanced civilization murders about 1,210,000 unborn children every year.