The Chickenshit Club is dangerously busy

Will Democrats learn to stand up? Do they want to?

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

Funny story: I was supposed to have the day off today for some doctor appointments and other tedium, but then Amazon workers went on strike in seven cities, which meant I was suddenly on the clock. By late afternoon, I got confirmation that Starbucks workers would be announcing their own mass picket line this evening, which kept me on the clock past dinner time.

All in all, I worked until 9 pm on my “day off,” because that’s the life of reporter. These movements are going to be bright spots over the next four years, so whatever I can do to document them, I’m in. Starbucks workers hit the pickers tomorrow morning, so I’ll include a report on the two strikes in the next subscriber-only news roundup post, out tomorrow night. It should be a big one, focused on state and local politics, policy, and labor.

As for tonight, we’re looking at the mess in DC and a concerning trend that Democratic voters need to start making noise about before it’s too late.

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It’s boom times at the Chickenshit Club.

Originally a term for federal prosecutors who avoided difficult fights against the rich and powerful, the Chickenshit Club, through Jesse Eisinger’s book of the same name, became shorthand for officials and politicians who failed to hold Wall Street executives accountable for the 2008 financial crisis. Now, as Democrats limp out of office once again, the cowardice and confused careerism of prominent party figures and outside powerbrokers is turning the Chickenshit Club into a mass membership organization.

For all the time we’ve spent closely examining what caused the Democratic coalition’s collapse this cycle, all it’s really required is casually following the news out of Washington since Election Day. For the past six weeks, headlines have documented a rudderless party being sunk by various self-interested factions: efforts to obfuscate blame for catastrophic losses, deference to outmoded process, petty meddling, and capitulation to the people who they called dire threats to democracy just months ago.

Democrats were correct in calling Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their foot soldiers in Congress existential threats to this country and this planet. The far right is geared up to install a theocracy, further enrich billionaires and the world’s wealthiest corporations, and guts workers’ rights and environmental regulations… and Democrats, despite still holding control of two-thirds of government, are helping them get a head start.

Legitimizing the terrorists

One of the big mistakes that both the media and Democrats tend to make is believing that because Donald Trump has won a couple of close elections, Americans have embraced — or at the very least don’t mind — his most extreme policies and nominees.

In reality, surveys have repeatedly shown that one of the factors in many voters’ decision to back Trump is that they did not believe he would carry out many of the batshit and frequently unconstitutional ideas that he trotted out during the campaign.

The support for mass deportation for one has been vastly overstated — exit polls on election day found that offering established undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status was 15 points more popular with all voters than mass deportation. And yet, Democrats told ABC News this week that they were “open to cooperation on a range of issues, including immigration, federal spending and entitlements.”

“We can't rely on the truth or the facts to get us through this”

They’ve been more explicit, too: Here in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul and NYC Mayor Eric Adams have indicated that they will cooperate with ICE on deportations, inviting chaotic raids from federal police. Adams, desperate for a pardon from Trump, has repeatedly defended the president-elect, and his NYPD coordinated with Amazon to act as Pinkertons against striking Teamsters in Queens today. Two workers were arrested and illegally detained before being released without facing charges. The party of working people, indeed.

Incidentally, Adams wasn’t at that fiasco because he was busy giving Luigi Mangione the coolest photo shoot in perp history. Both he and Hochul have come down immensely hard on the 26-year-old folk hero, vowing to use every ounce of their power to bring him to justice without ever acknowledging the reason why so many people (Mangione has a +9 approval rating with voters 18-29) have reacted to his alleged crime with more condemnation of the health insurance industry than anything else.

Again, there’s no need to praise Mangione, but treating him like a Batman villain and charging him with terrorism for a single murder when white supremacists mass murderers like Dylan Roof, who killed nine people at a Black church, avoided such a charge is an egregious display of oligarchical privilege. Kathy Hochul’s proposed hotline for scared CEOs couldn’t scream “elitist” more loudly if it had a golden megaphone.

Democrats have also capitulated to the right’s cynical transphobia, voting en masse to approve a defense funding authorization bill that limits gender-affirming care for the transgender children of service members.

They could have easily framed it as the federal government overreaching and punishing the the families of active American servicemen and women, but instead passed the first bill to restrict the rights of LGBTQ+ people in decades so that they could get credit for bipartisanship while controlling two-thirds of the federal government.

"Congress has passed the NDAA on a bipartisan basis for over six straight decades, and this year will be no different," Sen. Chuck Schumer, the outgoing majority leader, said yesterday. "We're passing the NDAA and that's a very good thing."

Trump’s presidential transition actually has a positive approval rating, in large part because Democrats have largely either remained silent or even praised his nominees and pronouncements.

“I’ve heard him say a lot of things that are absolutely right,” Sen. Cory Booker said of RFK Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead Health and Human Services. “I have concerns, obviously, about people leading in our country who aren’t based in science and fact… but when he speaks about the issues I was just speaking about, we’re talking out of the same playbook.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis reacted with even more delight to RFK’s nomination, praising him for his work on vaccine mandates and expressing excitement about working with him on a host of issues. Polis is rumored to be considering a bid for the presidency in 2028, and his comments here were designed to make news, even if they provided dream talking points for the Republicans who want to confirm the anti-vax conspiracy theorist who has already wrought so much damage on public health.

Even more pitiful has been some Democrats’ embrace of Elon Musk and his make-believe DOGE project. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a one-time disaster coordinator for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has led the charge, formally joining a caucus designed to gut and politicize the federal workforce and wreck social spending.

Moskowitz, who has been angling for a job in the Trump administration, wound up all but endorsing the world’s richest man days before he forced Republicans to cut $200 million in spending on childhood cancer research.

Also riding Musk’s rocket: Sen. John Fetterman, who praised him for “made our economy and our nation better” earlier this month. Fetterman also called for Donald Trump to be pardoned by President Biden, alleging that his prosecution in Manhattan was politically motivated.

Preserving the institutions

Instead of acknowledging voters’ overwhelming desire for fundamental change, geriatric Democratic leaders are clinging to power and tradition by their fingernails.

Democrats need to fire their leaders

In a scene too on-the-nose to be satire, 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi spent the weekend in a hospital bed in Luxembourg, convalescing from an emergency hip replacement and quelling an effort by younger members to displace septuagenarian and octogenarians as the ranking members of various key Congressional committees.

She was largely successful, most notably saving Rep. Gerry Connolly, a 74-year-old with throat cancer, from being replaced atop the critical Oversight Committee by 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who Pelosi dislikes for petty reasons.

With Trump back in the White House, there has never been a more pressing need for rigorous investigative drive, strong messaging skills, and a massive national platform.

Connolly offers none of things even when healthy, but an overwhelmingly old caucus, concerned most with maintaining seniority, decided to hamstring one of their best tools to hold Trump accountable. They also missed out on an opportunity to promote an agent of change, a terrible mistake for a party that is seen as protectors of the status quo.

Seniority preserved, they also re-elected Maxine Waters (86) as ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, Rose DeLauro (81) atop the Appropriations Committee, and conservative Richard Neal (75) for Ways and Means.

Democratic leaders also failed to intervene when the people around Georgia Rep. David Scott, who is 79 and almost without question suffering from advanced dementia, pushed him to run for re-election. The altercation between Scott, an aide, and a photographer this week is another case of institutionalism crossed with elder abuse. Clearly, zero lessons were taken from the debacles that resulted from propping up Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dianne Feinstein, and Biden himself.

I don’t think it’s been noted yet, but had it not been for a flatlining Feinstein’s long absences from the Judiciary Committee, Democrats would have been able to confirm at least some of the key circuit court judge nominees that an exhausted Dick Durbin surrendered to Republican recalcitrance last month.

The gobsmacking shortsightedness, base cluelessness, and gross self-interest that have become staples of the Democratic Party in recent years prevented the Biden administration from accomplishing many of its most populist goals, opening the doors to Trump’s return to power. Now, the stakes aren’t simply a matter of opportunity cost.

Republicans have descended into disarray these past few days over the continuing resolution to fund the government, and they’ll likely suffer a minor PR hiccup for it — nobody expects them to be anything less than chaotic, so there’s only so much damage it can cause. Their infighting and dysfunction will not last forever, and it is doubtless that they will come together in time to pass laws that severely punish everyday Americans. The only real question is whether Democrats can find it within themselves to get their shit together and respect us enough to mount a true opposition

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