monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

This is a riot

The Dem talking points haven't come out yet so we're not hearing from the usual suspects.

So you agree with me that the Dems do not deserve any credit on CHIPs?

The rest of your post is simply nonsense.

Put some more lipstick on that pig.

maporsche, they still don't have to have "Normal Order" and I don't think there will be. The Republicans will write the bill and put it through without any Democrat input and without debate. That isn't "normal Order". Take it or leave it will continue to be the order of the day.

There's something to be said for someone who recognizes when they've been shut down.

Shakespeare couldn't write a more apt script.

the Oprah idea was, admittedly, imperfect. The antitoxin for one rich celebrity president is not likely to be a different rich celebrity president (albeit an infinitely smarter and more humane one). But the alacrity with which America took to the possibility that the former talk-show host and secular deity might be the one to vanquish Donald Trump was not wholly at odds with an actual national phenomenon. Over the past terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad year, an unprecedented number of women have been motivated to dive into politics for the first time, many with the hope of defeating or succeeding men who’ve held the bulk of America’s political power for centuries.

To date, 390 women are planning to run for the House of Representatives, a figure that’s higher than at any point in American history. Twenty-two of them are non-incumbent black women — for scale, there are only 18 black women in the House right now. Meanwhile, 49 women are likely to be running for the Senate, more than 68 percent higher than the number who’d announced at the same point in 2014.

It’s certainly true that the policies that are enacted depend on which women run and win — the country is full of Sarah Palins, not just Elizabeth Warrens. According to the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics, however, so far it’s the Warrens who are getting into the game. Of the 49 women currently planning to run for the Senate (including incumbents, challengers, and those running for open spots), 31 are Democrats. Well over half of the 79 women slated to campaign for governor are Dems, as are 80 percent of the women setting their sights on the House.

This past fall’s elections — in which Danica Roem, a 33-year-old transgender woman, handily beat an incumbent who’d authored a transphobic bathroom bill and dubbed himself the state’s “chief homophobe”; in which Ashley Bennett, a 32-year-old psychiatric-emergency screener from New Jersey bumped off the Atlantic County freeholder who’d mocked the Women’s March by asking whether protesters would be home in time to cook his dinner — showed that improbable wins by improbable candidates are possible, perhaps especially if they can convert anger and frustration at the ways in which they’ve been discriminated against into electoral fuel.

The only truly unifying theme has been that they’ve all felt called, during the crisis of Trump, to do something, anything, to fix the mess.

“When something bad happens,” says Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILY’s List, the PAC that has supported Democratic pro-choice women since 1985 and has become one of the most powerful institutions in American politics, “women want to take action.”

Schriock cited the rise of the tea party as a useful example of how the rage of losing a presidential election — to a candidate you feel doesn’t represent you — can move Americans into politics with intensity and velocity. The swift formation of that political faction was driven in many regions by right-wing white women inflamed by Obama’s victory. Remember the Mama Grizzlies? And it has reshaped — perhaps entirely remade — the Republican Party.

EMILY’s List, meanwhile, nearly tripled the size of its state and local team and doubled the digital staff to handle the 26,000 inquiries they’ve received about jumping into the electoral fray post-Trump. Run for Something — co-founded in 2017 by a Hillary for America alum to enlist first-time candidates younger than 35 — expected around 100 people to sign up the first year; instead, 15,000 did. Sixty percent of them are women, 40 percent nonwhite, and the group so far boasts a nearly 50 percent success rate after supporting 72 candidates in the fall of 2017 — the typical win rate for first-timers is 10 percent, according to co-founder Amanda Litman. Still, she says, resources are stretched thin by high demand: “We need money!”

“I think there’s a disgust,” Vilardi says, “when women find themselves running against a guy who hasn’t changed the photo on his website since the 1990s — these men have been in office for so long.” Then there’s another kind of disgust, increasingly articulated by at least some of the rookie politicians: “There’s disgust very much about the abuse that men in power have systematically been engaging in unchecked, and disgust with the people who continue to keep those men in power.”

Then again, the world does seem to be changing. When Tresa Undem conducted a poll in December 2016 asking if the Trump campaign and election had made voters think more about “sexism in our society,” 40 percent of respondents said yes. In November 2017, when she asked whether the news about sexual harassment and assault made people think more about societal sexism, 73 percent concurred. In December 2016, 52 percent of those surveyed by Undem said that the country would be better off with more women in office; in November 2017, 69 percent gave that answer.

Undem isn’t alone in detecting seismic shifts in attitudes about gender and politics. Recent MTV-PRRI polling of millennials found that young women were far more apt than young men to have participated in political activity over the past year, leaving one writer at Brookings musing that this could be “the first time in American history that an entire cohort of young women reports greater political engagement than their male peers.”

It looks the same to Murray on the ground. “We have a huge number of women who could be elected mayors in major cities. We’ve never seen that before,” she says. In other words, the pipeline could really start to fill, with female mayors and city-council members and school-board officials, who become tomorrow’s state reps, who become 2030’s senators and governors.

That, of course, reflects another sign of hope: that even if this is a bump, an aberration, it is likely to reverberate far into the future. In that Year of the Woman that is now two and a half decades old, four women (just four!) were elected to the Senate; today, there are five and a half times that number. The seat won by Moseley Braun, the first black woman ever elected to the Senate, would go on to be filled by the next African-American to win, Barack Obama, who would go on to become our first black president. Two of the original four women, Patty Murray and Dianne Feinstein, are still in the Senate; Murray has been the highest-ranking woman in the body. Both participated in the controversial but strategically smart, and wholly unprecedented, show of female force that pushed Franken to step down in the wake of groping allegations. Kamala Harris, only the second black woman to be elected to the Senate after Moseley Braun, was part of that clean-your-own-house-first effort. And the senator who kicked off the move against Franken — one that may have contributed to the defeat of Roy Moore, the retirement of Franks and Blake Farenthold, and the public reexamination of assault allegations against President Trump — was Kirsten Gillibrand, who occupies the former seat of the first woman ever elected senator from New York, a politician who also came to Washington, in 1992, as a wife. That woman would go on to run two historic and competitive presidential campaigns, one of which earned her 3 million more votes than our incumbent president; it is, of course, her electoral defeat that helped land us here.

@AriBerman

State & federal courts have now ruled against GOP gerrymandering in PA, WI, NC, TX, FL, AL & VA