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Dear Friends ...

8/1/2018

1 Comment

 
​The World According to Trump

Like all of you, I am feeling a bit whiplashed by the dizzying pace of unusual foreign and domestic policy developments issuing from our nation's capital.  Facebook is now saying that it is seeing some of the same kinds of attacks being perpetrated against our midterm elections as it saw during the 2016 election cycle.  

Following a NATO Summit where the President ruffled our allies’ feathers, he followed up with a two-man summit and photo op between himself and Putin in Helsinki.  Missing in all this is a rational foreign policy coordinated through the resources of our Federal Government.  The follow-up Putin visit to Washington that was announced for this Autumn now seems to have sunk without trace, after a day of inarticulate obfuscation by the President.   

More Trump missteps ...  Now that he has dumped all over the Iran agreement, he is evidently ready to meet with Iran’s President at any time.  Meanwhile, reports are emerging that North Korea could be building new missiles.   And the President says he is ready to shut down the government over border security though Messrs McConnell and Ryan say they are not interested in a shutdown. I suppose it would be churlish at this point to remind you the President blithely claimed during the campaign that Mexico was going to pay for the wall.

Rudy Holds Forth

Trump’s representative Rudy Giuliani gyrates through the airwaves daily with a song and dance about the Mueller investigation, spinning this way and that ... there was no collusion, but even if there were, it wouldn’t have been a crime ... there may have been another meeting before the Trump Tower meeting or not, but if there were, the President definitely didn’t attend it ... nothing will happen in the Manafort trial that can hurt the President ... nothing lawyer Cohen knows could harm the President.  And so on and so on ...  

All of this begs the question that if the President is such a great judge of character and has so many great people around him, why is this cast of characters dominating public discourse in such a unique way?  

Further Confusion

And we are watching as Trump’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court confirmation, Judge Kavanaugh, is set to undergo his confirmation hearing facing very divided public opinion, with a lower public opinion approval levels than Harriet Meirs.  After countries like Mexico, Canada, and China implemented retaliatory tariffs, the Administration is offering up a $12 billion agricultural aid package.  But, the dairy industry alone has lost $1.8 billion in the last several weeks; the U.S. has the largest cheese surplus in our history; dairy farmers will likely face volatile prices; and there is no guarantee that lost markets abroad can be regained.  California Attorney General Becerra’s office has now filed 38 legal actions (the number was only 24 last December) against federal agencies or opposing new administration policies.  

What's Our Answer?

We have all heard that old Will Rogers saw, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”  Humor has its place, but my thoughts are being drawn more to 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who noted that “a majority is always better than the best repartee.”  The majority we need to be focused on is attaining a majority in the House, for which we need 24 additional Democratic seats.   The odds that we will take the House appear to have improved over the past month. On Tuesday, the University of Virginia’s Crystal Ball changed its ratings in 17 House districts…all in favor of Democrats.  The Democratic lead in the generic ballot of RealClearPolitics polling average has shifted from 3.2 percentage points to 7.1 points.  

Democrats have been outraising Republicans in a number of competitive districts.  In fact, for the second quarter this year, in House races, Democrats outraised Republicans. Democrats outraised 56 Republican incumbents while only three Republicans outraised Democratic incumbents, $146 million to $102 mil (Politico).  But, as we all know, the only poll that counts is the voting that takes place in our General Election on November 6, so let’s stay organized and focused. 

On August 2, the day of our next Club meeting, we will be 96 days away from the election. For those of you who want to make an active contribution to Democratic efforts the time is nigh ... voter registration, canvassing, phoning, helping with mailing, donating to campaigns.  And remember that, 52 percent of voters in Ventura are vote-by-mail (VBM). Those ballots will be arriving at homes around the first of October, so the opportunity to influence those voters falls away as election day approaches.  

Local Elections

For those of us in the Democratic Club of Camarillo, who are interested in helping to flip a House seat, the nearest available opportunity is CA-25, where Katie Hill is running against Republican incumbent Steve Knight.   Ryan Valencia, the First Vice Chair of the Ventura County Democratic Central Committee will be attending our Thursday meeting to update us on that campaign and tell us how we can help.  More below ...

Hollywood is Calling!

Are any of you interested in being an extra in a Democratic PAC film being produced in Santa Paula? Producer Tye Alexander is looking for about 100 enthusiastic extras to be in Santa Paula on Sunday, August 5th. He may also be looking for a few cameo speakers.  If you are interested, contact Tye at (914) 441-8311 or email him at theiririshman@prideofgypsies.com.  Also upcoming is the Ventura County Fair, where our club will be staffing the booth on Wednesday, August 8th.   We are still looking for volunteers, so please call me at (805) 689-8108) if you are available any time from 10 am to 10 pm.

Our Club Meeting

We have a full agenda for our Club meeting.  As noted above, Ryan Valencia will speak about Katie Hill’s CA-25 congressional campaign; he will also address Christy Smith’s California Assembly campaign.  In addition, CSUCI Adjunct Professor of Political Science Tim Allison will speak about the propositions that are going to be on the ballot in November.  

​I look forward to seeing you there,
1 Comment
Barb Hensley link
8/29/2018 08:42:45 am

Dear Friends: On the document Michigan Law Review below I left off the citations due to space requirements. These things need consideration. Thank you. Barbs Hensley
............................................................................
The Republic In Long-Term Perspective
Richard Primus*
Introduction
Every system of government eventually passes away. That’s a feature of the human condition. The United States has been an unusually stable polity by the standards of world civilizations, and for that stability Americans should be deeply grateful. But no nation is exempt from the basic forces of history. It is not reasonable to think that the constitutional republic we know will last forever. The question is when it will meet its end—in our lifetimes, or in our grandchildren’s, or centuries later. Given the stable conditions that living Americans were socialized to expect, the dominant intuition is probably something like “A very long time from now, long enough that we can’t imagine what life will be like then.” That was my own confident view until recently, and it may still turn out to be right. But the recognition that no system of government lasts forever should make us realize that this one, too, will one day run its course. Once we face that reality, we can perhaps think with open minds about the possibility that the end will come sooner than we expected.
Since President Trump was elected, some serious observers have concluded that the American Republic is in serious peril.[1] Others have thought that warnings about the possible fall of the Republic are exaggerated rhetoric.[2] The difference between those perspectives is partly a matter of people’s having different understandings of the Trump Administration. But it is also partly a function of different views, usually unarticulated, about what it would mean for the Republic to fall. So one important step toward thinking clearly about the challenge before us is to specify more carefully than is usually done what it means for the Republic to be at risk.
One possibility—call it a Type One threat—is that the fall of the Republic means the formal end of government under the United States Constitution. Perhaps the country might devolve into an actual dictatorship with a long-term strongman dictator, a politicized military, and the official abrogation of basic and long-recognized rights like the freedom of speech. If that is the going conception, then talk of the fall of the Republic is probably hyperbolic. Whatever Trump threatens, he probably doesn’t threaten that. But there is another way to understand the fall of the Republic, and perhaps a more helpful way. The Type Two threat is the prospect that although the Constitution will not be officially repudiated, the Republic will become corrupted, impoverished, and damaged to the point where it is a lot less worth having than it used to be. To analogize, a disease that might kill the patient is a threat to the patient. But so is a disease that will leave the patient alive and in a debilitated condition.
The Republic is now at risk in the Type Two sense. The threat arose from internal pathologies, including the mismatch between a politics of ideologically antagonistic parties and a Constitution designed without political parties in mind. If worse comes to worst, historians will one day say that the system carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. To be sure, the worst-case scenario might not materialize. The Republic has faced challenges before, both homegrown and external. But the present threat is unusually potent. To put the risk in perspective, I’d say that the Republic now faces a greater risk of self-destruction than at any time since the 1870s. To explain why, I will first lay out a conception of what the Republic is and what makes the Republic valuable. Then, beginning with a broad historical lens and narrowing to the present, I’ll describe the threat that the Republic now faces.
Crucially, the analysis also looks at the question of what happens next, after President Trump. If a broad American consensus reacts to the Trump Administration by repudiating what Trump represents, we could be launched in a better direction. Think of the good-government reforms that followed Watergate. But it would be a mistake to assume that what comes next will be better. Indeed, a continued downward path is perfectly plausible. The Trump Presidency is not just a disaster while it lasts, though it is surely that. It is also the product of unhealthy background conditions that did not exist at the time of Watergate and that are likely to keep making trouble even after Trump is gone. More acutely, the Trump Administration is proof of a concept: a self-interested, unprincipled, out-of-control bully can run for President of the United States and win. Once everyone knows that, it seems plausible that other self-interested bullies will want

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    Tiffany Lewis is the President of the Democratic Club of Camarillo.  Look for her blog every month.

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Democratic Club of Camarillo
P.O. Box 348
Camarillo, CA  93011-0348

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