Are There Any Democrats Left Who Are Not Fully On Board With The Agenda Of The Radical Left?

May 31, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

A phenomenon of politics on the Left as practiced today is that new and ever more radical orthodoxies continually pop up and demand adherence from all members of the faith. No longer is the common agenda just a simple commitment to more government spending to enhance perceived justice and fairness in society. Instead, a list of new demands for government actions grows ever longer and more extreme. Examples: de-funding of police and reducing prosecution of many crimes to decrease conviction and incarceration rates of criminals; forcibly transforming the generation of electricity, and then the transportation system, and now agriculture, in the name of the weird pagan climate cult; promoting Critical Race Theory, including the concepts that our society is “systemically racist” and pervaded by “systems of oppression,” and that all persons of the white race are racists and oppressors by reason of their skin color; promoting gay and trans sexual practices to elementary school students; and many more such.

Many long-time Democrats of my acquaintance consider themselves political moderates, although generally supportive of government efforts to uplift the poor through spending and programs. But the internal councils of the Democrats are now dominated by radicals demanding complete loyalty to the full agenda. Thus the question is, if you vote for any Democrat for public office, do you inevitably get someone who will go along with every single element of the most radical agenda of the Left?

I think that the answer is yes.

Consider a few examples.

At the federal level, the approval of last year’s badly mis-named “Inflation Reduction Act” is instructive. With respect to the items of the radical Left agenda, the IRA mainly dealt with “climate”-related matters, containing some hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and tax benefits to promote things like wind and solar electricity generation, batteries and other grid-scale energy storage, hydrogen, and many more even crazier and untested energy ideas. None of this has any chance of making a new energy system that can eliminate the use of fossil fuels, let alone of reducing world temperatures by even the infinitesimal tenth or two of a degree that could actually be measured. And thus none of it makes sense other than as an expression of complete loyalty and devotion to the radical climate cult at the core of the Democratic Party.

So how did last year’s vote in Congress go? From ABC News, August 12, 2022:

Every House Democrat on Friday voted to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) over uniform Republican opposition. . . .

And in the Senate (from CBS, August 8, 2022):

The plan, called the Inflation Reduction Act, cleared the upper chamber by a vote of 51 to 50 along party lines, with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaking vote in the evenly divided Senate.

So every single Democrat was on board in both houses, without a single dissent. That included the supposedly independent-minded Senators Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona. Yes, Manchin was said to have achieved some changes to enable faster permitting of certain projects. The Biden Administration has since ignored those changes and made Manchin look like a fool.

But the Inflation Reduction Act was a large and complex piece of legislation, and perhaps not the cleanest test of the proposition of whether all Democrats will always be on board with whatever the radical Left wants. Therefore consider the case of the nomination of Rachael Rollins to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. In today’s Washington Examiner, Byron York has a piece tracing Rollins’s nomination and confirmation to that office, and subsequent rapid downfall.

President Biden nominated Rollins for the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney post in July 2021. At the time, Rollins was the DA of Suffolk County, Massachusetts (basically, Boston), having won that office in an election November 2018 and assumed office in January 2019. York outlines the Rollins agenda in her new job:

Early in her term, [Rollins] published the "Rollins Memo" that listed 15 crimes in which the "default is to decline prosecuting" — that is, in which her office would not allow its attorneys to prosecute unless a supervisor gave special permission. Here is the list: 1) Trespassing, 2) shoplifting, 3) larceny under $250, 4) disorderly conduct, 5) disturbing the peace, 6) receiving stolen property, 7) minor driving offenses, including operating with a suspended or revoked license, 8) breaking and entering into vacant property, 9) wanton or malicious destruction of property, 10) threats excluding domestic violence, 11) minors in possession of alcohol, 12) drug possession, 13) drug possession with intent to distribute, 14) resisting arrest when the only charge is resisting arrest, and 15) resisting arrest if other charges are on the list of nonprosecutable offenses.

The “Rollins Memo” was issued on March 25, 2019, so the year 2020 was the first full year that it was in effect. What were the results? From York:

In 2020, the first full year in which her policies were in force, Boston's violent crime rate surged, drug overdoses in Suffolk County rose, and murders skyrocketed by 38%. . . .

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put on a big push to stop Rollins’s confirmation. The nomination failed in the Judiciary Committee by a tied 11-11 vote, but of course Majority Leader Schumer brought the nomination to the floor anyway. The result:

[Rollins’s] final confirmation vote was a 50-50 party-line tie. [Vice President] Harris then broke the tie for confirmation, and Rollins became U.S. Attorney on a 51-50 vote.

So once again, every single Democrat, including Manchin and Sinema, lined up for a clearly radical candidate.

The dénouement of the Rollins saga is that she resigned the office on May 19 in an ethics scandal. York:

On May 19, after just one year and four months in office, Rollins resigned when two investigations, one by the Justice Department Office of Inspector General and the other by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, outlined extensive misconduct. Basically, the reports showed that Rollins abused her power for political purposes in the supposedly nonpolitical position of U.S. attorney.

The misconduct included clearly documented lying to the investigators. Read York’s piece in full for many more details.

As a final example for today, consider the results of the recently concluded Minnesota legislative session. As background, Minnesota government has been divided between the parties for many years, with Republicans often controlling either one house of the legislature or the governorship. But in the 2022 election, the Democrats (known in Minnesota as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) turned the State Senate from a 34-33 Republican majority to a 34-33 Democrat majority. With that one-vote flip, the Democrats now controlled all three bases of power in the state; but they could enact radical legislation only if they could achieve complete unanimity in the State Senate. National Review today has a report on the results of the legislative session. A few highlights:

• The state will mandate 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2040. . . .
• The legislature made drivers’ licenses and state-funded health care available for illegal immigrants.
• [Minnesota schools] are dictated to teach “the history of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples . . . including the genocide, dispossession, and forced removal of the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk.”
• Minnesota . . . declared itself a “refuge” for transgender surgeries and therapies for minors. . . .
• The state passed a new “ethnic studies” mandate for public and charter schools at the elementary, middle, and high-school levels. . . . School boards are mandated to adopt curricula that are “antiracist and culturally sustaining,” and to offer training to teachers and administrators in the “knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to be antiracist and culturally sustaining.” [“Anti-racism” being code meaning “racism,” for those who aren’t keeping up with the latest lexicon.]
• Minnesota schools are mandated to collect race and ethnic classification data even with regard to recess detentions in order to ferret out “institutional racism.”
• The DFL also went on a massive budget spree, blowing in a single session Minnesota’s $17.5 billion surplus. . . . The state’s $72 billion budget increases spending by 38 percent over 2022 levels.

And there’s plenty more, on issues like gun rights, voting rights, and abortion (up to the moment of birth).

The reasons why every single Democrat votes radical Left when called upon could be simple or complex. Undoubtedly, there are various forms of “party discipline” in play, like plum committee assignments or premium pay perks in the legislature. Also, if you don’t play along you are likely to get primaried by a radical leftist in the next election cycle, and the primary electorate is dominated by the most radical elements of the party.

But whatever the reasons, the lesson is clear: every single Democrat in a legislature will vote for whatever the radical Left wants.