Some articles I want to comment on before they scroll out of memory —

Lindy West, “Save Free Speech From Trolls“

West calls out the Right for “weaponizing” the concept of freedom of speech to shout down dissent or criticism, especially when it comes from women.

Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you don’t like is allowed to criticize you.

In other words, they react to people expressing disagreement with them as an infringement on their free speech rights. This is something I’ve written about before; see “First Amendment Primer (for Righties)” from February 2013:

Righties do love their First Amendment rights, but they don’t understand them very well. For example, on the Right it is commonly believed the right to freedom of speech includes a right to not be disagreed with. (This is something I’ve written about before, so for examples, see “This Is Rich,” and “America Has Lost Its Mind.”)

People, read the First Amendment. It says Congress cannot infringe in freedom of speech or the press, and this prohibition has been extended to state government by the 14th Amendment. In a legal sense, this refers to censorship, and censorship is something that only government can do.  A privately owned newspaper or magazine has an absolute right to not publish everything submitted to it, and that is not censorship, either. I have a right to delete comments that irritate me, and that is not censorship, either.  And if somebody expresses disagreement with you, that is so not censorship.

By the same token, if a mob of people somehow prevent you from speaking, or thugs who don’t like your editorials come and smash up your printing press, that’s not censorship, although it would certainly be breaking other laws.

I’m sorry to say that some of this hairbrained thinking has crept into the Left. After Kathy Griffin’s recent, stupid “trump beheading” stunt, I saw a lot of “don’t censor Kathy!” and “stand with Kathy’s First Amendment rights” on social media. But I didn’t see anybody attempting to censor Kathy, nor did I see anybody saying she had no right to publish the dumb photo. All I saw was criticism. Criticism is not censorship. And just because you have a right to smear yourself with honey and sit on an anthill, that doesn’t mean you should.

McKay Coppins, “How the Left Lost Its Mind“ 

After a fight of several years, St. Louis passed a law that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $11 per hour, and after that it would increase with inflation. The first stage, a raise from $7.70 an hour to $10 an hour, went into effect March 5. The $11 per hour was to kick in on January 1, 2018.

A couple of days ago, the governor announced that the state is stepping in and overriding St. Louis. The city’s minimum wage cannot exceed the statewide minimum wage, Gov. Eric Greitens announced. The minimum wage in St. Louis will revert to $7.70 an hour on August 28.

“It will kill jobs,” Greitens said of the increase. “And despite what you hear from liberals, it will take money out of people’s pockets.”

So the state is now going to take money out of people’s pockets. Some employers may choose to not take away the raises, but I’m betting that many will happily cut their employees back to $7.70.

Exactly why it’s skin off anyone’s nose that there might be a higher minimum wage in St. Louis than in the many small towns across the state eludes me. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Gov. Greitens.

Today I read of something similar going on in Texas.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R), citing grave worries about “socialistic” behavior in the state’s liberal cities, has called on Texas lawmakers to gather this month for a special session that will consider a host of bills aimed at curtailing local power on issues ranging from taxation to collecting union dues.

Texas presents perhaps the most dramatic example of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between red-state leaders and their blue city centers, which have moved aggressively to expand environmental regulations and social programs often against the grain of their states.

Republican state leaders across the country have responded to the widening cultural gulf by passing legislation preempting local laws. The best-known example is North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which was partially reversed this year. It was originally aimed at undercutting Charlotte’s efforts to expand civil rights laws to include LGBT people and to prevent cities from setting their own minimum wage.

But states also have gone after cities in more subtle ways. Ohio’s legislature last year attempted to block a Cleveland regulation that requires certain city contractors to hire local residents. A new Arizona law threatens to cut off funding to cities that take actions state officials deem to be in violation of state law.

Gov. Abbott is especially peeved at Austin.

“Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different,” Abbott joked at a recent gathering of Republicans, referring to the county that includes Austin. “And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. It’s the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas.”

Freedom? I don’t think that word means what you think it means, governor.

Austin is suing the state over its draconian “sanctuary cities” law, among other things. Austin is also fighting a developer who plans to destroy hundreds of trees, including some very old and beloved “heritage” oaks that are protected by city ordinance. The governor, naturally, takes the side of the developer, who appears to have won.

A heritage oak in Austin.

I personally think that if Texas doesn’t want to turn into a desert someday as the planet heats up, it had better hang on to every tree it’s got. But they don’t listen to me.

The people of Austin wonder about their rights to shape the quality of their own community. But when money talks, democracy walks.

Happy 4th of July, Republicans. What is it you’re celebrating, again?

Let me begin by saying I have never lived in California. I don’t know exactly how the state government works, and I don’t generally pay close attention to California news. If that’s true for you, too, then let’s explore this together.

A few days ago there were news stories about California possibly moving to a single-payer health care system within the state. There was a bill moving toward passage, the news stories said. Then there were stories about the bill being killed by California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. In progressive circles the death of the bill was attributed to Rendon’s being a corporate stooge who took money from the medical industry. David Sirota wrote in International Business Times,

As Republican lawmakers grapple with their unpopular bill to repeal Obamacare, Democrats have tried to present a united front on health care. But for all their populist rhetoric against insurance and drug companies, Democratic powerbrokers and their allies remain deeply divided on the issue — to the point where a political civil war has spilled into the open in America’s largest state.

In California last week, Democratic state Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon helped his and his party’s corporate donors block a Democrat-sponsored bill to create a universal health care program in which the government would be the single payer.

Rendon’s decision shows how progressives’ ideal of universal health care remains elusive — even in a liberal state where government already foots 70 percent of the total health care bill.

Now, you all know David Sirota’s work, I suspect. I’ve been reading his stuff for years. He’s one of “our” writers. Sirota goes on to say that although the bill had passed in the state senate, Rendon had quashed it before it could go on to the state assembly. Sirota continues,

Since 2012, Rendon has taken in more than $82,000 from business groups and healthcare corporations that are listed in state documents opposed the measure, according to an International Business Times review of data amassed by the National Institute on Money In State Politics. In all, he has received more than $101,000 from pharmaceutical companies and another $50,000 from major health insurers.

In the same time, the California Democratic Party has received more than $1.2 million from the specific groups opposing the bill, and more than $2.2 million from pharmaceutical and health insurance industry donors. That includes a $100,000 infusion of cash from Blue Shield of California in the waning days of the 2016 election — just before state record show the insurer began lobbying against the single-payer bill.

Well, that’s pretty damning, isn’t it? Another reason Dems always lose.

I didn’t think anything more of it until I read this article by David Dayen at The Intercept that gave a different view.

IN THE DAYS SINCE California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon shelved for the year SB562, which intends to establish a state single-payer health care system, he’s been subject to mass protests and even death threats. The bill’s chief backers, including the California Nurses Association and the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution, angrily point to Rendon as the main roadblock to truly universal health care.

They’re completely wrong. What’s more, they know they’re wrong. They’re perfectly aware that SB562 is a shell bill that cannot become law without a ballot measure approved by voters. Rather than committing to raising the millions of dollars that would be needed to overcome special interests and pass that initiative, they would, apparently, rather deceive their supporters, hiding the realities of California’s woeful political structure in favor of a morality play designed to advance careers and aggrandize power.

And I’m thinking, holy bleep, what the bleep is going on here?

Did I mention this is David Dayen? I’ve been reading his stuff for years, too. He’s good. And he is known to be a wholehearted supporter of single payer healthcare.

Having done some digging, I’ve come to think the bill, SB562, was never a serious bill. It was more about grandstanding and legislative theater than actually initiating single payer in California. I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones provides some background.

Funding. Single-payer would cost something like $200 billion, give or take a few billions. This is nearly double the entire state budget, but SB562 blithely ignored it. It included no funding mechanism at all, and simply passed that responsibility to the state Assembly. It’s not surprising that Rendon was reluctant to shoulder this on his own over the course of the next few months.

Prop 98. Like it or not, California has a school funding law put in place years ago by Proposition 98. It’s insanely complicated, but basically requires that 40 percent of the state budget go to K-12 schools. Using round numbers, if the state budget is $100 billion, school spending has to be at least $40 billion. If state spending goes up to $300 billion, school spending has to be at least $120 billion. Aside from being ridiculous, it also leaves only $120 billion for the health care bill. Oops.

As far as I know, there is no tricky way to get around this. It would have to be dealt with by a ballot initiative. That’s obviously not going to happen in this legislative session.

Waivers. This is the issue nobody pays attention to, but is probably the most important of all. To implement single-payer, California would need $200 billion in new funding plus $200 billion in federal money that currently goes to Medicare, Medicaid, veterans health care, and so forth. Without federal waivers to give California access to that money, the plan can’t go anywhere. As Duke University researcher David Anderson puts it, “If there aren’t waivers, this plan is vaporware.” What do you think are the odds that the Trump administration will grant all those waivers? Zero is a pretty good guess.

Along the same lines, Michael Hiltzik points out that self-funded health care plans are governed exclusively by federal law. That means California would need an exemption from the law. What do you think are the odds that a Republican Congress will grant that exemption? Zero again?

Kevin Drum and David Dayen are both Californians, I understand, so they know the ins and outs of how California works a lot better than I do. And if Kevin Drum is right, then even if the bill passed the assembly and were signed into law, it still wouldn’t be implemented. There is language in the bill that would stop it from going into effect if funding isn’t available, and because of all the reasons stated above, it currently wouldn’t be possible for the funding to be available.

So what, exactly, is the point?

If any state could make single-payer work it ought to be California, which claims to have the sixth largest economy in the world. But it appears to be true that SB562 contains no mechanism for funding, and this is one of the reasons Anthony Rendon delayed the bill. This doesn’t strike me as being unreasonable.

Let’s go back to David Dayen:

There’s a reason that every California single-payer bill in the last 25 years — and there have been at least seven, two of which passed the legislature and were vetoed, so we in the Golden State have seen this movie before — never includes a funding mechanism. It’s not necessarily because of fear of voting for higher taxes, or even the two-thirds threshold to increase a tax in the legislature.

It’s because you can’t do the funding without help from the voters, because of California’s fatal addiction to its perverse form of direct democracy. The blame, in other words, lies with ourselves.

To figure this out, you need only turn to the actual legislative analysis of the Senate bill, which passed in early June. It states very clearly what Rendon alluded to in his announcement shelving SB562: “There are several provisions of the state constitution that would prevent the Legislature from creating the single-payer system envisioned in the bill without voter approval.”

 

Those provisions include California’s byzantine, previously mentioned Proposition 98, which Dayen explains in more detail. To make single-payer funding possible Prop 98 would have to be suspended.

Self-appointed experts have countered that the state can suspend Prop 98 with a two-thirds vote of the legislature. This has been done twice in the past, during downturns in the economy. But the suspension can last for only a single year; it would have to be renewed annually to keep single payer going. More important, as the California Budget and Policy Center explains, after any suspension, “the state must increase Prop 98 funding over time to the level that it would have reached absent the suspension.”

So legislators would have to vote year after year to suspend Prop 98, but add more money back to cover it in subsequent years. That backfill would grow with every budget, and over time lawmakers would need to vote for ever-increasing giant tax hikes. If this didn’t return Republicans to power in Sacramento within a few years, some enterprising lawyer would sue the legislature for violating the spirit of Prop 98. Suspension is not politically, legally, or financially sustainable.

So, again, it sounds as if SB562 couldn’t be put into effect even if it became law, a point its supporters stubbornly refuse to concede. And the many unacknowledged roadblocks are also being overlooked by progressive organizations eager to make points about corporate sellouts in the Democratic Party. Certainly the Dems have more than their share of corporate sellouts, but IMO in this case making a scapegoat out of Anthony Rendon is just wrong. Dayen continues,

The California Courage Campaign pleaded with Democrats in an email blast to “fight for single payer today, not next year.” But Democrats can’t pass single payer today or this year; under state law, ballot measures only occur during statewide elections in even-numbered years. [UPDATE: in a separate message to supporters, the Courage Campaign wrote “it’s certainly true that the Healthy California Act needs more work before it can achieve all our goals” and was more circumspect about the road ahead.] Even the chair of the state Democratic Party, Eric Bauman, insisted that “SB562 must be given the chance to succeed,” even though it, um, can’t succeed.

The California Nurses Association, when not posting “stabbed in the back” imagery in reference to Rendon, called his decision “heartless,” “unconscionable,” and “disingenuous.” But there’s nothing more disingenuous in this debate than failing to level with people that SB562 cannot become law on its own.

Did I mention that Anthony Rendon has actually received death threats? And I’ve been an admirer of the California Nurses Association since they took on Arnold Schwarzenegger awhile back. But this is wrong. Everybody needs to chill about Anthony Rendon.

I know everybody’s tired of being told that we can’t have nice things now because pragmatic incremental whatever. But it’s also the case that sometimes things aren’t possible until paths are cleared for them. While, in theory, California’s economy ought to be able to support single payer, it’s not going to be possible until other laws — like Prop 98 — are changed first.  And if you aren’t working on that, you aren’t serious about passing single payer.

I run into this a lot with lefties. Yesterday I ran into a rant that Bernie Sanders has his priorities wrong because he didn’t introduce a Medicare for All bill into the Senate this week. Would somebody explain to these puppies that a snowball has a better chance in hell than Medicare for All has in the current Congress? Because I don’t have the strength. And there’s been this little matter of stopping the passage of Trumpcare, which must have escaped their notice. That’s the priority.

I’m really tired of explaining why there can be no viable, national third party for progressives until we have significant voting and election reform that allows for proportional representation. I’ve tried and tried. They don’t listen to me. And like it or not, it’s way too soon to introduce a serious proposal to impeach Donald Trump into the House. This is not about whether or not he deserves it; it’s about the plain fact that such a proposal would go nowhere. The time may be ripe one of these days, but it isn’t now. And introducing unserious proposals now might make it harder to introduce a serious one later.

Bottom line, I fear that David Dayen is right on this, that SB562 was not a serious attempt to establish single payer in California, but instead was just legislative theater designed to aggrandize power within the progressive movement. Let’s stop doing this, people.

By now you’ve heard about the infamous Bleeding Mika tweets —

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

…to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

The so-called president has tweeted a lot of outrageous stuff, but this seems to have set a lot of the Beltway types over the edge. Maybe it’s because Joe and Mika are people they know.

If you watch Ana Navarro’s epic rant, be sure to not miss Wolf Blitzer’s face as he tries to maintain composure.

I’ve read one commentary after another today quoting people on Capitol Hill — including some Republicans — saying these tweets were out of bounds. I honestly think we’re seeing a turning point here. Trump is proving even to Republicans that he is utterly worthless as a president. If he were just incompetent but could put on a good act of being presidential that’s one thing, but he can’t even manage that.

Paul Waldman wrote today,

Republicans knew exactly who he was when they all lined up behind him in 2016, even if many harbored the naive hope that he would be changed by the office. But they also assumed that with total control of the government, they would pass a boatload of bills, he’d sign them, and his personal weaknesses wouldn’t much matter. It turns out, however, that it isn’t so simple. As we’re seeing in the health-care debacle currently underway, when you’re trying to accomplish something complex and politically perilous, you need the president. You need him to be a persuasive public advocate for your policy, and you need him to help resolve internal differences and forge consensus.

But Trump fails on both both counts. He can’t be a persuasive advocate because he doesn’t understand the policies he advocates for, and he has focused so relentlessly on telling his base what they want to hear that people outside that base just don’t believe him. When he gives an interview or makes a speech about what Republicans are trying to do, he’s likely to say something that contradicts or undermines their case. And internally, he’s rapidly losing whatever respect he had from Republicans.

I’m going to be really surprised if he finishes his term …

I’m calling them mini-bombs, because I suspect they will turn out to be less significant than they seem right now. First, SCOTUS agreed to review Trump’s “travel ban,” and in so doing they allowed a watered-down version of the ban to go into effect. This is from SCOTUSblog:

The lower courts had considered the hardships that the ban would create for the named plaintiffs in the case: two men with family members who want to come to the United States from the affected countries; and the state of Hawaii, whose state university had admitted students from those countries. But, the court explained today, the lower courts’ orders barring enforcement of the ban “reach much further than that,” because they also apply to people living overseas “who have no connection to the United States at all.” When those people are unable to come to the United States, the court reasoned, their constitutional rights are not violated – because they have no right to come to the United States – and their exclusion from the country does not harm anyone in the United States.

The justices therefore upheld the lower courts’ orders blocking enforcement of the ban with regard to the named plaintiffs and others like them – people who “have a credible claim” of a genuine relationship with someone or an institution in the United States. When that relationship is with an individual, the court made clear, it must be a close family member. And when the relationship is with an institution, the relationship must also be a genuine one, rather than one created just to get around the travel ban.

So, if someone has close family already here, or a job, or some kind of documented reason to be here like an invitation to lecture someplace, he or she cannot be blocked from entering the country. People from the Muslim-majority countries named in the original ban who have no prior relationship to anything or anybody in the U.S. will be unable to get visas, however, at least for the time being. Here’s the actual decision.

Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented, stating that they would have just reinstated the ban, period, without regard to a prior relationship in the U.S.

Whether this action today has any bearing on how the Court eventually will rule, nobody can say.

The other mini-bomb is Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, in which the Court ruled that tax funds to fix up a playground could not be denied just because the playground is on church property. I’m going to have to look at this more carefully when I have time, but all along I haven’t been able to see why this case represents any departure from established case law. There is long precedent for tax money going to church organizations who are using the money in a not-religious way.

The three-part test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1970), as to whether something violates the establishment clause, basically calls for the law or policy to have a secular purpose, that it neither promotes nor inhibits religion, and that it does not foster “excessive government entanglement with religion.” Seems to me that a state grant to pay for improvements to a playground used by children in a neighborhood kind of fills that bill. I have yet to see what the big deal is about this case.

However, Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ginsburg, wrote a long dissent that I haven’t had time to read. So I think I may be missing something. I’ll get back to you later when I figure out what it is. Here’s the decision.

Let’s start on a positive note, which is a campaign advertisement for Randy Bryce, who is running as a Democrat for Paul Ryan’s House seat:

I like this ad, and I like this guy. He seems authentic. He makes me think of my dad, a machinist, and a lot of his friends who were blue-collar guys. I hope he intends to wrap Donald Trump around Paul Ryan’s neck.

Compare/contrast to the recently defeated John Ossoff, who ran a hyper-cautious, centrist campaign for a House seat in Georgia against far-right wackjob Karen Handel. This is from Paste:

I mean, when the New Yorker wrote about him, the piece was titled, “Jon Ossoff, With Election Day Looming, Explains His Cautious Politics.” The entire piece is cringe-inducing—this is a man who refuses to say anything with any passion or real belief, a bloodless suit mindlessly mimicking Barack Obama‘s gestures—but my favorite part came when he refused to attack after his opponent ACTUALLY UTTERED the following sentence at a debate: “I do not support a livable wage.” …

… The strategy here was clear—Georgia’s sixth is a moderate Republican district, Mitt Romney country, and Ossoff tried to win by running as a moderate Republican. Which, again, is right in line with what the ruling corporate wing of the Democratic party has been doing since the ’90s. But it’s stupid, and you know why?

There’s already a Republican party.

You cannot out-flank these people from the right. If there’s a mantra the left should internalize, it’s this: Republicans beat centrist Democrats. Always. And the crazy thing is, moderation never saves the Democratic candidate from being portrayed as America’s answer to Che Guevara. Ossoff is basically a Republican, but look at the ads they ran against him! They either paint him as Nancy Pelosi’s no. 1 San Francisco latte butler or imply that he’s Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command. There’s a wonderful irony here—the further you drift from any appearance of socialism, the more viciously Republicans will smear you as the reincarnation of V.I. Lenin.

I’ve made this speech before, but here it is again: The Republicans are now an ideologically right-wing party. The Democrats, however, are not an ideologically left-wing party. Instead, they seem to be trying to broker interests among a lot of constituencies, including urban minorities and the business community.  They are perpetually threading fine policy needles so as to not anger any particular group, but in doing so they becomes champions of nobody. 

Yes, Democratic policies, on the whole, are at least sane and generally beneficial to most Americans, which is not something you can say about Republican policies. But too often when a Democratic politician tells voters “I’ll fight for you,” what that means is something like “I’ll save you some leftovers.”

Paul Kane’s article in WaPo is headlined “Ossoff chose civility and it didn’t work. How do Democrats beat Trump?”

In Ossoff, Democrats hoped they had found a potential new path to defeating Republicans with a message of peace and civility. They calculated that the fiery rage, often associated with supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), would not win over moderate Republicans and centrists, whose support Ossoff needed to have any chance to win a district that Tom Price, the six-term congressman who is Trump’s health secretary, won by more than 20 percentage points in November. …

… This was the beta test for the DCCC’s theory of the 2018 case that well-educated, suburban voters who swung away from Trump last year would reject GOP candidates for Congress.

What they don’t get is that there’s a big difference between inchoate rage and fire in the belly. The latter is what’s missing from too many Dems. It’s not enough to put up pleasant candidates who at least don’t scare the chickens. The electorate isn’t in the mood for “safe.” Bleeping stand for something, Democrats!

Maybe, once in a while, ask “What would Harry Truman do?” Would Truman have let a line like “I do not support a livable wage” pass without remark? I don’t think so. They didn’t call him “Give ’em hell, Harry” for nothing.

What would Truman say about the current state of the Dem party? Nothing good, I don’t think.

Will Bunch wrote,

Jon Ossoff was a very sincere candidate, and he seems like a nice young man. Running for office in today’s climate is a brave thing. But I listened to an interview that he did with NPR on Tuesday morning, and by the end I practically wanted to gouge my eyes out. It was the some of the most insipid, focus-group-tested-and-consultant-approved meaningless happy talk I’ve ever heard from a Democrat, which is saying a lot. He wanted to bring tech jobs to Atlanta, and cut wasteful spending. Health care needs to be — somehow — “affordable.” Ossoff and the Democrats couldn’t have run a more effective “show about nothing” if Seinfeld’s Larry David had been their show-runner. No wonder voters curbed their enthusiasm.

Why can’t Dems grow a spine? Paul Waldman wrote this about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (emphasis added) —

When I asked Jeff Hauser, the director of the Revolving Door Project and a former Democratic operative who has been critical of the DCCC, to lay out this case for me, he argued that the organization shapes how individual races play out, especially in their early stages. Here’s part of the email he sent in reply:

• The DCCC recruits candidates and influences primaries by signaling who is viable or not to donors and state and local party actors.
• Mega-donors and independent expenditure groups take cues about which races matter and which messages work from the DCCC.
• Young but experienced political staff are often directed to campaigns by the DCCC — there are a lot of arranged staffing marriages where candidates and staff, even campaign managers, barely know each other.
• And candidates pick and choose messages with an eye toward being in line with the DCCC’s thinking, as they know direct contributions and independent expenditures go to campaigns in line with the DCCC.
• When Ossoff went wholly bland and didn’t run on Trump, Russia, or almost anything else readily identifiable as an issue, that represented a campaign following DCCC directions.
• If you are a Democrat and think Ossoff blew an opportunity and fear more of the same in 2018, you need the DCCC’s theory of the electorate to improve.

Hauser said that as important as those broad national factors are, “the difference between a great and poor DCCC could easily be 20 seats won or lost.” If that’s true, it’s the difference between not taking the House and taking the House.

In short, the donors, “expenditure groups” and lobbyists pick the candidates. But the problem with that is that the donors and lobbyists have their own agendas that don’t exactly match what’s going on in real-world America. Lee Fang writes at The Intercept that several people who were behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign last year are now trying to cash in on the Trump agenda:

Lobbying records show that some Democratic fundraisers, who raised record amounts of campaign cash for Clinton, are now retained by top telecom interests to help repeal the strong net neutrality protections established during the Obama administration.

Others are working on behalf of for-profit prisons on detention issues, while others still are paid to help corporate interests pushing alongside Trump to weaken financial regulations. At least one prominent Clinton backer is working for a health insurance company on a provision that was included in the House Republican bill to gut the Affordable Care Act.

While Republican lobbyists are more in demand, liberal lobbyists are doing brisk business that has them reaching out to fellow Democrats to endorse — or at least tamp down vocal opposition to — Trump agenda items.

Again, these are the people who help pick the congressional Democratic candidates.

I can just about guarantee that the DCCC will fail to support Randy Bryce in Wisconsin next year, while Ryan will have all the cash he wants from the GOP and Wall Street. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the DCCC tries to kneecap Bryce in the primaries to run a nice, pleasant, centrist candidate who looks better in a suit in the general election against Ryan. I hope I’m wrong.