Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is facing a potentially serious challenge to his hold on power as momentum builds behind Chris Van Hollen, with the Maryland senator now reportedly open to a run for majority leader.
A movement to draft Van Hollen to challenge Schumer is gaining steam, according to Politico Playbook, which reported Monday that two people close to the effort said it was underway.
A person familiar with Van Hollen’s thinking told the outlet that the senator has “received an outpouring of calls and is now in active listening mode.”
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries need to go. If they remains, an awful lot of people who voted democrat will feel stabbed in the back - and with good reason.
The first and biggest hurdle is that you need people who are not only able but willing to do the job. Not many people want it.
That and the very serious consequences of challenging and failing. Schumer is a neoliberal conservative. They are as petty and vindictive as any other conservative. Failing can mean no committee positions or draft cosigners until they are gone.
Conservatives like Schumer are pure evil, even when they have a D next to their name. The risk sounds pretty intimidating. You have to know you have the votes before committing.
That, to me, is the bar. If someone wants to lead, wants power, wants to be famous etc, they are unqualified. Because it means they really did not understand the job.
Google says there’s only ever been 1 president who was speaker and 1 who was senate majority leader. Accepting these roles seems like a career death sentence.
Wait, if there’s only one president who was speaker that has to have been Gerald Ford, who was never elected to executive office, he just replaced vice president Agnew then president Nixon after each stepped downNevermind, Ford was house minority leader.Looks like the speaker was James K. Polk, and the majority leader was Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson makes sense as he was brought in for vice president to get the south on board with Kennedy.
Many career politicians do not want to run for nor be president. Senate or House leader is a peak political position
Unless you’re the sort of person who isn’t satisfied with being senate majority leader and swinging “Jumbo” around
Our politicians are chosen to be weak, the corporos fear the left, somehow not so much the right, despite history, preferring the total ruin of dictatorship and ultimate military rule to moderate reform. Such as it’s always been. From the late roman republic, to germany with the nazis, to now.
Plenty of people want the job, of senator, but any white populist is simply not welcome and will be character assassinated if not killed in the cradle, because they can challenge the leadership, where the inner city minority populists cannot.
That’s the fucking truth.
Nice barely veiled racism
That is too stupid to refute, unless you describe how that is racist, and whom it is racist against, white people? Praytell!
agreed. If they stay we lose the voters then the presidency and congress again in 2028.
I, for one, would never vote Democrat again. If they leave the masked goons hunting us in the street, if they continue to enable genocide, any of the centrist bullshit currently being floated around, they are fucking dead to me.
The reality of the US political system is that the only way to move left in America is via the Primaries. Until there’s another Tea Party to break up the right vote, the only way to keep the status quo or move the window is to primary in DSA candidates and break the hold of the apparatchik in the Democrat establishment.
Yes - but I’ll also add that the left can be much more effective in electoral power by refusing the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” nonsense. Openly and proudly state that we can and will make the Democrats lose power if they cross us.
Not only is this what the right wing of the GOP does (successfully), it’s what the right wing of the Democratic Party does, and how they’ve held power for 40 years.
That’ll stop the fascists.
A lot of folks feel like OP.
The dems won this time, but the folks who voted for them are in essence holding a gun to their heads: they’d better get their act together and deliver, or else.
The minute the dems step out of line, the voters will turn on them faster than you can say “Traitors… Hold my beer” and vote MAGA en mass as a violent epidermic reaction. And keeping fucking Schumer and fucking Jeffries around would be the first sign of treason.
Nobody, NOBODY likes the dems. The only reason they won is because people like lying demented orange billionaire grafter pedophiles even less.
Yes, I’m of the opinion that if Dems don’t perform, the government won’t be the only one ignoring “Due Process”.
Probably not, but moving to another country will.
Because supporting moderate democrats has stopped the fascists so well?
Don’t vote shame people bro. You are wrong.
MAGA thanks you for your vote. Socialist > DSA > Dems > Reps
So stick with the status quo centrists because thats such a winning thing, is what you are saying eh habitualcynic.
So bold. Because centrism was winning so hard, right.
Vote for progressive candidates in the Dem primary. Help them win, and you don’t have to vote for centrist fucks. But if the progressives doesn’t win, vote the dem anyway because it’s less damaging.
Precisely. They either don’t understand strategy or they are Russian trolls supporting the fascists.
You’ve been running that strategy for 40 years.
It doesn’t work.
The reason is easy enough to understand, once you realize that in a 2-party system, the most marginal voter determines policy.
So when they take your advice, the left becomes captive, and suddenly has no leverage over any politician. Meanwhile, the mythical moderate Republican (all 20 of them) becomes the battleground for the election.
This, of course, ignores the effect that this centrist nonsense has on turnout, as shown in 2024, but since non-votes aren’t counted, it doesn’t enter the electoral math. Which is why you saw Harris swing to the right with Liz Cheney. How’d that work out?
So vote in the Democratic primaries. And if you lose, vote 3rd party to register your disgust.
Do you care more about personal strategy or the well being of an entire nation? Long term thinking prevents democratic votes more than anything.
The truth is Democrats aren’t going to do shit to “save democracy,” and anyone who thinks or thought they were is delusional.
Notice, the Democrats never ran on how exactly they were going to save democracy. The reason they didn’t is that saving democracy is incredibly unpopular. If you actually want to save democracy, you have to pass very unpopular laws.
Mainly, you need to strip the presidency of all the emergency powers Congress has given it over the years, dismantle the post-9/11 security and surveillance state, and disband ICE.
Here is the problem. Doing any of these things will literally get Americans killed. If you dismantle the unconstitutional mass spying apparatus, inevitably, eventually, there’s going to be some terrorist attack that occurs that that spying could have prevented. If you disband ICE, inevitably some person who happens to be an illegal immigrant is going to kill some white woman, and it will be found out that ICE would have deported them before it happened.
In these cases, I would argue that the deaths are worth it. I am absolutely willing to trade some safety for freedom. Freedom is worth fighting for; it’s worth dying for. It’s worth seeing innocent people die for it.
That’s the core problem. The tools of a dictator are also the tools of ordinary law enforcement. If you strip away the dictator’s toolkit, you also disempower law enforcement, which means some otherwise preventable crimes will happen. And your political opposition can latch onto those few rare cases and crucify you with them.
This is why Democrats cannot save democracy. Ultimately, they are complete cowards. Saving democracy requires courage and conviction. It requires a politician to look the voters dead in the eyes and say, “some of your children are going to die because of this bill I am proposing, and that is an acceptable loss I am willing to pay to ensure our children get to live in a democracy.”
I’ve never seen a Democrat running on that kind of message. But that’s what it would take to actually save democracy. And this is why it will not be done.
Oppressive measures are seldom effective at their stated purposes: people are not safer in totalitarian states than they are in those with human rights. They’re just unsafe for different reasons. Being at the mercy of a well-resourced mob of armed goons with official backing is not better than being preyed on by a number of small, disorganised non-state groups.
Look at arming police in the US. The end result is thousands of people per year being killed or maimed by those police. And yet crime rates are no lower than in countries where the police are less homicidal.
Similarly, pervasive surveillance captures a vast volume of largely irrelevant information, leading to the use of automated threat detection systems that invariably generate false positives that cause innocent people’s lives to be ruined. Yet there is no protection from threats from state actors and their collaborators who act with impunity.
It’s a false tradeoff. Adoption of increasingly authoritarian measures is not a free lunch and has the potential to kill even more children for other reasons. The costs of operating a surveillance society, with all its IT, weapons and snitches, have to be paid somehow. Typically that money comes from dismantling services that actually protect people’s lives and health. They’re sure as shit not going to take it from the military or the police.
Most people rejected his message. They hated WoodScientist because he told the truth.
To be honest, I think there’s a serious possibility, if a president attempted to dismantle the “national security” apparatus, the NSA would stage a false flag attack themselves to discredit them and protect their positions. Even if the president had hard evidence that they had done so, it’s doubtful that Americans would believe it or care. There’d be back to back media coverage talking about how the move puts Americans at risk and warning of an attack, then an attack happens, people’s minds would be made up in an instant, and any pushback would be seen as both treasonous and blindly loyal to the president.
Look at the Cold War and how many times the CIA manipulated elections or overthrew democratically elected leaders, just for the sake of bananas being a little cheaper from a minor country half the world away. Do people really think they didn’t have contingencies in place for the possibility of a socialist president being elected, or just one who interfered with their aims? Why? Did they just have so much respect for democracy? Or did they somehow lack the capability to interfere, when they so easily did so abroad? And if they had contingencies then, what happened when to actually break that power?
The last time a president really acted against the aims of the intelligence community was when JFK fired Alan Dulles, months before he was assassinated. Dulles somehow ended up on the investigative committee into the assassination. Whether he was behind it or not, he was treated as above suspicion despite having the clearest motive.
Even if you somehow avoid getting assassinated and stop them from orchestrating a false flag, it’s likely they have connections in the media they can use against you. Try to suppress that, and you’re an evil authoritarian tankie. Basically any tool that the president, or that any head of state around the world, can use to survive when US spies are trying to get rid of them, is “authoritarian,” which in turn can be used to justify acting against them more openly.
The innocent lives lost to criminals should be weighed against the innocent lives lost to these law enforcement groups enabled by the spying apparatus.
That’s not something any Democrat would ever do.
Such a childish statement.
the amount of lies being spread about these heroes is quite phenomenal
the old commie/russia/islamist propaganda machine is really keen to ice these capable politicians
shame you guy don’t matter any more and these 2 are a shoo-in lol
This is a bit, right? Otherwise, how are you posting from 2002?
Don’t feed the troll.
I got curious and looked and that guy’s every other comment has the word “commie” in it lol