Democrats can’t flush their credibility with silence

If Republicans want to protect a real predator, they can also

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

I was working on a news roundup for tonight when two big news stories got in the way and took me in another direction. I’ll have a modified version of the roundup soon, along with a reported story on some wild things happening in Texas. But for tonight, all eyes are on DC.

Note: This is going to be a long four years — and perhaps much longer, if Donald Trump and his newly empowered Republican Party accomplish their goals.

As right-wing media metastasizes, billionaires use outlets as tools of appeasement, mainstream media fails, and corporations sell off news divisions, we need independent media to step into the breach. Please make Progress Report and make this work possible — just $5 a month makes all the difference.

---

---

Democrats can’t flush their remaining credibility

Republicans today blocked the publication of a House investigation into Matt Gaetz’s sex-trafficking of underage girls.

Republicans also blocked a trans member of Congress from using the right bathroom because they… uh… care about protecting women from sexual predators.

It’s long felt moderately pointless to point out Republican hypocrisies, especially those that illustrate the vast gulf between their righteous rhetoric and moral depravity, and Donald Trump’s resurrection all but confirms it. But it would be too nihilistic to ignore the cruelty and disgusting duplicity on display today, not only out of principle, but because it’s setting an ominous tone for the coming few years.

Rep. Nancy Mace, who once pitched herself as an LGBTQ+ ally, spent several days publicly campaigning for House leadership to ban people from using bathrooms in the Capitol that do not align with their “biological” gender. Speaker Mike Johnson issued the ban on Wednesday, leveraging his enormous authority to pick on incoming Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, who will be the first trans person to serve in Congress.

A cheap and nasty way for Republicans to further push an issue that they relentlessly exploited during the election, the ban may be largely unenforceable, but it portends real trouble on several fronts.

Whether or not it factored into her thinking — this is a woman who wanted to get punched in the face on Jan. 6 in order to score points with MAGA voters, so there’s reason to question her long-term strategizing — Mace’s stunt is also the sort of low-hanging fruit that continually causes Democrats to face plant.

Democrats were caught flat-footed when Mace first introduced her proposal on Monday. By Tuesday, party leaders, including Hakeem Jeffries, were calling it a distraction, which is how McBride herself described Mace’s resolution.

“This is what we're doing? This is the lesson that you've drawn from the election in November?” Jeffries said on Tuesday when asked about the new ban. “This is your priority, that you want to bully a member of Congress, as opposed to welcoming her to join this body so all of us can work together to get things done and deliver real results for the American people?”

It was hardly a condemnation, though Jeffries isn’t exactly known for protecting his members when they are under fire (just ask anyone targeted by AIPAC or crypto money).

Reports have suggested, per mostly anonymous members of the caucus, that Democrats were following McBride’s lead, and that may well be true; McBride did not focus much on her gender identity throughout her time in the Delaware legislature or during her campaign for Congress, preferring to make her reputation on bread and butter issues. But you also couldn’t blame her if she shied away from sticking up for herself, having watched more than a few Democrats spend the past two weeks blaming trans people for the party’s election debacle.

Deafening silence

Republicans and their financial backers spent more than $300 million on ads bashing Democrats, especially Vice President Kamala Harris, for supporting trans health care and integrated high school sports. Some focus groups found subjects 2.7 points less likely to vote for Democrats after they viewed them, but it may be that the ads ultimately have a far bigger impact on the psyche and decisions made by professional Democrats than actual voters.

Democratic lawmakers like Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton have been explicit about blaming trans issues for the party’s losses, as have plenty of cowardly party operatives who have remained anonymous so they could call trans people “the freak show party.” Pseudo-tough guys like Rahm Emanuel have also been on a Blame Trans Kids kick, as if we needed to hear from him ever again.

Many other Democrats have been only slightly more oblique, including Michigan Rep. and incoming Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who on Tuesday urged Democrats to stop taking their language from the “faculty lounge” and said that “identity politics need to go the way of the dodo.”

McBride has no doubt heard these comments from an array of other Democratic lawmakers, old pundits, and off-putting internet columnists. With friends like those, and plenty of regular death threats even before this national spotlight, going out on a limb to defend yourself right off the bat doesn’t seem like a particularly comfortable thing to do.

For a party that prides itself on its place in the Civil Rights movement and defender of minorities, this rapid abandonment is an act of dehumanization; a tacit agreement with Republicans who argue against the existence of transgenderism as anything more than a perversion, illness, or cloak for predators.

There are any number of very safe Democrats who could have spoken out against Mace and Johnson’s despicable maneuver. As far as I can tell, Rep. Robert Garcia and Sen. John Fetterman of all people, are the only ones who have done so.

Miscalculated risk

Instead of pushing back and trying to change public opinion, which has moved away from trans peoples’ rights since 2017, Democrats are acquiescing to cruelty, with likely little political utility. Despite the fuselage of conservative ads, the issue ranked dead last among the issues that mattered to voters this year. Instead, just about every exit poll indicated that the cost of living is what actually influenced voters.

Kamala Harris’s decision to ignore the crisis for a more Wall Street friendly message undoubtedly backfired — the more Senate and House candidates leaned into economic populism, the more they outperformed the vice president — but it’s far more convenient and lucrative to blame the party’s middling support for trans kids.

This is not an appeal for Democrats to go all-in on gender identity or other so-called “woke” issues, because as I’ve written more than a few times here, they do tend to come off as elitist scolds a lot of the time, and that’s never helpful for a party’s brand or reputation. It isn’t a matter of promoting my professional interests, either; I spend most of my day covering labor and working class issues, and deeply believe that the path to a healthy society, not to mention power, runs through remaking the economy in a progressive, populist manner.

But I also know that total capitulation is pathetic, both morally and politically, and that the only way to create a more equal society is by standing with people against the bigots who bully them. Just ignoring mistreatment won’t solve the problem or provide any political relief, because this Republican Party is voracious in its appetite for carnage. Lack of pushback on her treatment of McBride has already emboldened Mace to pursue further acts of transphobic malevolence in the form of a bill that would impose bathroom bans on all federal property.

The Democratic coalition is unraveling in part because the party often talks a big game about supporting different minority communities and then inevitably disappoints them, and leadership’s instinct to abandon constituencies for political expediency never works out as they intended (see Black and Hispanic voters’ shifts in 2024).

We’re headed into what is likely to be a dark and scary next four years, and Republicans will continue to attack minority groups, vulnerable populations, and every other group they can reclassify as less than worthy of full citizenship. Staying quiet for the sake of political expediency will not be an option.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!