Notes from the Silly Season: COVID and Trump's weird gait
Trump's plague ship of state runs aground on the sand bar of the DNC platform committee because intra-party division may yet disrupt party solidarity.
A month out from the Democratic National Convention, the party continues to be pulled in opposing directions by its progressive and corporate wings. While presumptive nominee Joe Biden and the party establishment charts a course of cautious centrism, rejecting policies like Medicare for All and key planks of a Green New Deal, progressives and supporters of Bernie Sanders are attempting to push Biden as far left as they can.
With the party platform due to set the agenda for both Biden’s campaign and presidency, Sanders allies have sought to shape the finished product through a set of unity task forces, which on Wednesday unveiled recommendations that both encouraged and disappointed progressives. While the task force recommendations called for a shortened timeline on climate policy and a host of criminal justice reforms, for instance, they don’t go as far as to ban fracking or legalize recreational marijuana. And while they would expand healthcare access with a robust public option, they don’t advocate a single-payer system.
Those recommendations will now be kicked to the party’s platform drafting committee, a further sieve through which these recommendations must filter before becoming official Democratic Party policy. It remains to be seen if they will.
[…]
The drafting committee is only one part of the journey of the Democratic platform, potentially shaped by everything from the Biden-Sanders unity task forces, to the DNC staffers tasked with writing the actual document, to voting at the full platform committee’s meeting before this year’s convention. But if the finished product ends up looking watered down and unambitious, much of the blame may well lay at the feet of the corporate-friendly drafters the party has again put in charge.
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 13, 2020
— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) July 12, 2020
— madeline lane-mckinley (@la_louve_rouge_) July 12, 2020
— Molly Jong-FastðŸÂ¡ (@MollyJongFast) July 13, 2020
— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) July 13, 2020
— Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) July 13, 2020
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) July 11, 2020
— Suzanne Saubers King (@SuzanneSaubersK) July 12, 2020
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) July 12, 2020
— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) July 12, 2020
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@RVAT2020) June 25, 2020
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 12, 2020
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