Pressure on Democrats: Resist!

Blue State Democrats have Lost Political Flexibility.

Chant from a printed "chant sheet" in Brooklyn

Loud and Angry Crowds demand their Senators take one path only: 

Resist Trump at every turn.

Dispatch from Brooklyn:   There are angry crowds in front of the home of Chuck Schumer, NY Senator and the Democratic Minority Leader.   They are carrying signs.  They are angry and are hoping to cause trouble, politically.  The crowds are motivated and they have brought their kids.  This is an event, and the energy is firing one another up.

"Thousands of protesters urged the senator. . . ."

These aren't Republicans.   The crowds are Democrats, demanding that Schumer avoid talk of "working with the president" or "helping him when he is reasonable and opposing him when he is not."  They don't want him to OK some nominees and to reject others.  

They have a point of view:  They want him to oppose everything.  

"Serious Doubts" won't be good enough

These crowds are very different from the crowds I witnessed for Hillary.   Hillary's crowds were orderly and they wanted the processes of government to work.  She spoke, they attended, they would vote, she would win, then government; that was the plan.  The shock and dismay of the Trump win has turned the crowds from small to big, from orderly to angry.  

One school of thought is that Democrats--as the party of good government rather than the party of less government--ought to encourage those instincts of Trump's which in fact serve to make government stronger than businesses.  The might look to Teddy Roosevelt the "trust buster", and be part of a progressive charge.  There might be areas of common cause and that Trump might be better aligned with Schumer than with Paul Ryan and the libertarian Ayn Rand type conservatives.

Democratic crowds are closing off that option.

Meanwhile, in Oregon:

I held multiple pre-election campaign events at my home in Medford, Oregon prior to the election.   Nothing I witnessed before the election had the energy and enthusiasm of what I witnessed after the election, this past week, at a Democratic Central Committee meeting held in Medford.   It was a routine business meeting.  There was no speaker.  There was no "draw."  It was people lining up to sign up to get involved.

There was a packed, overflow crowd.  There was standing room only and no parking.  The meeting ran late and ran long since the parking and space could not accommodate the crowd.   People were motivated to oppose Trump in a way they were not motivated to support Hillary Clinton.

Overflow at Democratic meeting, southern Oregon

Democratic Senators Wyden and Merkley have seen the sentiment.   Both Senators hastened to get out tweets hastened to get out tweets  saying that they absolutely opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch and that his beliefs "harken back to the time when politicians restricted people's rights on a whim." 

Ron Wyden also noted his opposition "to legal death with dignity as it is practiced in Oregon is couched in the sort of jurisprudence that justified the oppression of one group after another in our first two centuries."

Wyden Tweet

Jeff Merkley's statement also came out within minutes of the announcement, saying:

"The most fundamental thing thant must be understood about tonight's announcement is that this is a stolen seat.  This is the first time in American hisorty that one party has blockaded a nominee for almost a year in order to deliver a seat to a President of their own party.  If this tactic is rewarded rather than resisted, it will set a dangerous new precedent in American governance.   This strategy of packing the court, if successful, could threaten fundamental rights in America, including workers' right to organize, women's reproductive rights, and the rights of ordinary citizens to have their voices heard in election rather than being drowned out by the corrupting influence of dark money from the riches Americans."

   
There has been a debate in Democratic Party circles.  Should we cooperate with Trump when he does things we more or less like, or at least think are within the normal bounds of a president, or should we confound him at every step forcing him to fight even for the things we like in an effort to portray him as a failure?  Democrats had the lesson of the tremendous electoral success of the Republicans in opposing Obama.  It marginalized him and made him a partisan president rather than the bipartisan healer he said he planned to be in the campaign and his inauguration.  

Chant sheet

But Democratic office holders may not have a choice here.  Their own constituents and electoral base know what they want.  Fight! Resist!  Nothing less will be tolerated!