Democrats

California senator Dianne Feinstein, eighty-nine, whose mental decline has long been an open secret, announced her 2024 retirement last week. This comes on the heels of a stinging Sacramento Bee editorial withholding endorsement for her replacement and an accelerating race for her seat. Senator Feinstein has no public plans to resign. She says she will serve out her full term, preventing an appointment by Governor Gavin Newsom. Efforts to force her out of office early will persist. When Feinstein ran for the Senate in 2018, she obtained just 54 percent of the primary vote against fellow Democrat Kevin de León, a widely despised figure in California politics, now clinging to his Los Angeles city council seat after being exposed as a cutthroat diversity fraud.

Earlier in the week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy gave an evening address about the urgency of raising the debt ceiling and cutting federal spending. Technically, the government has already taken on the amount of debt it’s allowed to carry. The Treasury Department is employing “extraordinary measures” to shuffle money around to service the national debt and make government payrolls. But these measures can’t keep the government afloat forever. Hence the need to raise the debt ceiling or risk catastrophic default some time in the summer. The timing of the speech — one day before President Biden's third State of the Union address — was conspicuous.

Cassandra was a Trojan princess with the gift of prophecy — or the curse. For while she could foresee the downfall of her city, she could not make anyone believe her. She wound up enslaved to the conquering Greek Agamemnon, but he too disregarded her warnings and met his own grisly fate when he returned home to find his queen and her lover prepared to kill him. America’s Cassandra was a Frenchman. His fate has been less cruel but more ironic. Alexis de Tocqueville and his family survived the French Revolution, for aristocrats like them an event nearly as calamitous as the sack of Troy. Like Cassandra, Tocqueville could see into the future, in his case through acute reason rather than supernatural gift.

A great deal of the conversation about abortion in America is based on lies about who occupies the more extreme position. For the media and their Democratic allies, the idea is that any limitation on abortion, at any point in a pregnancy, for any reason, is tantamount to fascistic Handmaid's Tale-style misogyny. Of course, there is no basis for this whatsoever. For decades, a plurality of Americans have consistently supported limits on abortion that grow more popular the further along the unborn baby is to birth. Overwhelming opposition to taxpayer funding for abortion here and overseas has been just as consistent, as has been opposition to ending abortion exceptions for rape, incest, and health threats to the life of the mother.

For the second consecutive time, the opening of a congressional session has been mired in chaos. In 2021, the certification of the presidential election was the issue. In 2023, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is being denied the speakership after waiting in line for well over a decade. Some of McCarthy's detractors make the case that this is simply his comeuppance, the natural consequence of appeasing the rightmost flank of his party during the Trump years. There's an element of truth to this. Too often, he has gone out of his way to placate the demands of the fringes in an attempt to secure their support, only for recalcitrant right-wingers to continue to see him as part of the establishment.

The midterm bloodbath conservatives were salivating for devolved into, at best, a red tide. The Democrats held the Senate and have only a seven-seat deficit in the House. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is now hoping to grant citizenship to every warm body in the country and perhaps even others on their way here, while Senator Elizabeth Warren is more determined than ever to cancel the student debts of millions of bankrupt liberal arts majors. And an emboldened President Biden is threatening to run for re-election, whether anyone wants him to or not. But amidst all the liberal revelry lies an uncomfortable, little-reported fact: Democrats lost the House popular vote by three points. Remember the popular vote? The popular vote!

How well Republicans fared this time around with Native American voters is hazy. Brookings reports that Native Americans “remained solidly Democratic in their voting preferences in 2022, though slightly lower than we observed in 2020.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that support from Democrats’ “diverse voter base… slipped across the board,” and “a majority of voters who are American Indian or Alaska Native favored Republicans this year.” Regardless, Native American voters have always been a tough demographic for Republicans to crack.

“Ballot harvesting.” To some, it’s a creepy term, conjuring images of hulking party machines plowing through passive fields of citizens, threshing their votes and delivering them to the ballot box. To others, the whole thing seems practically a conspiracy theory — a catch-all for sore losers who can’t understand how voters could have rejected their team. Feelings aside, ballot harvesting is a reality for much of the country. In twenty-seven states, your ballot can be returned by someone other than you. Further, only twelve of those twenty-seven have any limit at all on the number of ballots a person can turn in, meaning an eager harvester can show up with dozens or hundreds of ballots.

Elections are an opportunity for us to deliver messages to political leaders most of us will never meet. We can’t send Donald Trump a text, nor can we talk about inflation over an extravagantly expensive Jeni’s ice cream cone with Joe Biden. The best we can do is to vote and hope that in our collective numbers we can make ourselves clear. Yet early indications are that the leaders of both parties are poised to learn absolutely nothing from the midterm elections. Let’s examine some of their delusional reactions. The White House hasn’t commented on whether Joe Biden played the recent $2 billion Powerball drawing (which CNN recently accused of being systemically racist), but if he didn’t buy a ticket, he should have.