Hearing Set for Class Action Lawsuit Against DNC

After deliberating since October 2016, a federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has recently issued an order for appearance to the lawyers representing the DNC and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the plaintiffs representing Bernie Sanders supporters, Jared Beck and Elizabeth Lee Beck. The hearing is set for 1:30 p.m. on April 25, when the judge is expected to announce the court’s decision in response to the DNC’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was initially filed in June 2016 in response to the mounting evidence that Wasserman Schultz used the DNC to tip the scales in Hillary Clinton’s favor during the Democratic primaries. Wasserman Schultz and her staff overtly violated article four, section 5 of the DNC Charter, which stipulates, “The Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.”

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So far in court, the DNC’s lawyers haven’t refuted that the primaries were rigged, but in their motion to dismiss, they argued that some Sanders supporters cited in the class action lawsuit posted on social media during the primaries that the Democratic Party was favoring Clinton. The lawyers have also argued that neutrality is just a political promise that the DNC should not be bound to keeping.

Whether the lawsuit moves forward or not, its process through court has vindicated Sanders supporters, who the Democratic establishment still attacks and scolds.

Nina Turner:

The Democrats’ hypocrisy fest: Disingenuous attacks on Bernie Sanders persist — and his popularity climbs

If there is one thing that Hillary Clinton’s loyalists can never resist, it is a chance to sully the name of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who continues to be a thorn in the Democratic establishment’s side. Last week it was no different, when Democratic partisans seized on an opportunity to vilify and paint the Vermont senator as a cultural reactionary who is willing to sacrifice women’s reproductive rights if it means advancing his populist economic agenda.

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Last year Hogue — along with most liberal Democrats — had a far more more forgiving attitude toward Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who, like Mello, is personally pro-life. “I am okay with people having a different moral system than I do as long as they don’t legislate that on me or anyone else,” said Hogue in a statement last July, adding, “7 in 10 Americans support legal access to abortion and some of them are like Senator Kaine, who feel personally opposed but still believe that it’s not for a politician to determine for anyone else. . . . I believe [Clinton] chose Tim Kaine because she trusts the guy, and I trust her.”

Of course, Kaine wasn’t just personally pro-life; like Mello, he also had a history of supporting anti-abortion measures as governor of Virginia. As ThinkProgress reported in July (around the same time as Hogue’s statement), while in office in Richmond Kaine had “pushed for adoption over abortion, promoted abstinence-only education, passed a law that required parental notification for minors wanting an abortion, and banned late-term abortion.” ThinkProgress noted, “He even signed a bill to use state dollars to create ‘Choose Life’ license plates, which funded state ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ — facilities whose sole purpose is to dissuade pregnant women from getting an abortion.”

So this entire Heath Mello incident appears to be a thinly veiled sectarian attack against Sanders, driven by bitterness and resentment.

100 days of Democratic rage

“We have a new energy but we don’t have a new brand,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who gained national attention in November for unsuccessfully challenging House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for her leadership role. “I would think that if the Democratic Party had a halfway decent national brand or an exciting, affirmative agenda, that we would have been able to get at least a couple more percentage points in the Georgia [special election where Democrat Jon Ossoff fell just short of 50 percent last week]. We had a great candidate and great energy running under a very negative brand.”

The brand is only part of the problem — the party’s central infrastructure itself is in need of an overhaul. Democrats got dragged back into a redux of the presidential primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders during the first month of Trump’s presidency in the race for the DNC chairmanship between former Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison. That divisive fight appears poised to resurface in May, with the beginning of the DNC’s “Unity Commission” meetings to reform the presidential primary process, featuring representatives hand-picked by Clinton and Sanders themselves.

While many individual Democratic officeholders are cash-flush — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, brought in more than $5 million from January through March on her way to building out a campaign account of more than $9 million — the national party itself raised just $23.6 million in the first three months of the year. Compare that to the RNC’s $41 million-plus, powered by Trump. And while new DNC Chairman Perez is criss-crossing the country trying to restore trust in his institution and heal the raw wounds from 2016’s presidential primary, party leaders acknowledge that their rebuilding project — both at the DNC and at the state level — needs to be a comprehensive one after November’s shocking losses and the down-ballot massacre of the previous eight years.

For our Spanish speakers 🙂

https://youtu.be/saPuTbXzkIk

Will Dem Leaders Be on Board with Bernie’s Big Tent?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is campaigning for a pro-life Democrat in Nebraska, and while congressional Dem leaders weren’t ready to condemn his big-tent push they were quick to defend an abortion-rights platform.

Sanders has been stumping with Omaha mayoral candidate Heath Mello, a state senator who attracted the former presidential candidate’s support on the DNC’s unity tour focusing on red and purple states.

NARAL Pro-Choice America slammed Sanders and DNC Chairman Tom Perez for spending time with Mello, saying it was “not only disappointing, it is politically stupid.”

“Today’s action makes this so-called ‘fight back tour’ look more like a throw-back tour for women and our rights,” said NARAL president Ilyse Hogue.

Sanders countered that it’s politically smart to engage different wings of Democrats if they don’t want to count out the red states.

“If we’re going to become a 50-state party, if you’re going to go to Omaha, Nebraska, which has a Republican governor, two Republican senators, all Republican congresspeople, Republican legislature, you know what? And if in Omaha, 5,000 or 6,000 people come out to a rally led by Jane Kleeb, their new Democratic chairperson, who is doing a great job, and if you have a rally in which you have the labor movement and the environmentalists and Native Americans and the African-American community and the Latino community coming together, saying, we want this guy to become our next mayor, should I reject going there to Omaha?” Sanders told CBS on Sunday.

Why Was Heath Mello Thrown Under the Bus?

 An Omaha native first elected to Nebraska’s unicameral legislature in 2008 at the age of 29, Mello successfully led the fight to overturn Republican Governor Pete Ricketts’ veto of a bill permitting young people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to obtain a driver’s license. Last year, he again put together a coalition that managed to reverse Ricketts’ veto—this time of a bill allowing young undocumented immigrants to apply for professional or commercial licenses. In Nebraska, which resettled more refugees per capita in 2016 than any other state, that kind of leadership stands out. As does Mello’s outspoken emphasis—unusual in a state dominated by Big Agriculture and which still gets most of its energy from coal—on fighting climate change and protecting the environment. Likewise his record on LGBTQ issues, including a call for a law to ban discrimination in housing and employment. With strong union support from firefighters, teachers, and city workers, the Sierra Club’s enthusiastic endorsement, and the backing of array of Democratic heavyweights from former Senator Ben Nelson to former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Mello was beginning to look like the party’s best chance for a win after disappointments in Kansas and Georgia.

Especially since his opponent, Stothert, ousted her Democratic predecessor in 2013 by promising to repeal an unpopular restaurant tax—and never kept her promise. With registered Democrats in the city actually outnumbering Republicans—while Donald Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in Nebraska, Hillary Clinton carried Douglas County, which includes Omaha, by over 3,000 votes—the arrival of the Democratic “Unity Tour” on Friday was supposed to provide a final burst of enthusiasm to carry Mello across the finish line on May 9.

Instead, on April 19, the Wall Street Journal ran a story noting that Mello, a practicing Catholic, is pro-life. The story also falsely claimed Mello had co-sponsored a bill “requiring women to look at ultrasound image of their fetus before receiving an abortion.” A similar error was made by the Washington Post, which claimed that Mello had “previously backed a bill requiring ultrasounds for women considering abortions” and then again the following day by David Nir, political director of Daily Kos, who announced the site was withdrawing its endorsement of Mello—a move applauded by Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, who’d launched a 12-part Twitter storm linking to the WSJ article and accusing Sanders and Perez of kicking off their tour with the message: “shame women; we’ll support u anyway.”

Trump signals delay on border wall funding to avoid government shutdown

Donald Trump has indicated he is willing to delay his demand for funding of his Mexican border wall to avoid a shutdown of the federal government.

Trump, in a private meeting with conservative media outlets, said he might wait until Republicans begin drafting the budget blueprint for the fiscal year that starts on 1 October to seek government funds for building a wall along the US-Mexico border, the White House confirmed.

The border wall spending is fiercely opposed by Democrats and also unpopular with many Republicans.

Trump, whose approval ratings have steadily declined since he took office, is facing a deadline on Friday for Congress to pass the spending bill funding the government through to September or risk marking his 100th day in office on Saturday with a government shutdown.

The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who has a key role providing Democratic votes to pass the legislation, welcomed Trump’s reported shift on the wall.

“It’s good for the country that President Trump is taking the wall off the table in these negotiations,” Schumer said late on Monday.

American Dream in Freefall: It’s This Bad

Whither the American Dream?

It may not be totally dead, but a new study suggests that it is certainly on life support.

Published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal Science, the team of researchers led by Raj Chetty and David Grusky of Stanford University used data from federal income tax returns and U.S. Census and Current Population Surveys to look at trends of this “absolute mobility,” or earning more than one’s parents.

What they found was a dramatic decline over the past several decades. While nearly all—over 90 percent—of children born in 1940 were able to earn more than their parents, that figure drops to 50 percent for children born in the 1980s.

The authors write that the decline was particularly acute “in the industrial Midwest,” states like Michigan, and hit the middle class hardest, though they note “that declines in absolute mobility have been a systematic, widespread phenomenon throughout the United States since 1940.”