Bring Your Brooms: Democrats Are A Mess
Democrats have had a rough day.
- Longtime Democratic Congressman John Conyers is under an ethics investigation over illicit payments to his chief of staff.
- The DNC is not only amid a “fundraising crisis”, but is also fending off charges of being “dictatorial, arrogant, pompous, and tone-deaf” from a group founded by Bernie Sanders.
- Former head of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is under fire for her delay in firing an employee under federal investigation for an equipment and data scam.
- Not to be outdone, state Democratic parties in California and New York are facing serious internal divisions.
In short, the Democratic Party is an absolute wreck.
The House Ethics Committee said Wednesday it is extending an investigation of Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the longest-serving member of Congress, over payments to his former chief of staff.
He said in April 2016 that he suspended longtime staff chief Cynthia Martin after she pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property, a misdemeanor. Martin was placed on unpaid leave while he reviewed the matter, Conyers said.
But the ethics office said Martin was paid $13,000 a month through August 2016. She was fired in October, although investigators said they were told as early as June 2016 that Martin no longer worked in the office.
There’s one problem for the Democrats: The party has a serious fundraising crisis.
Over the first six months of 2017, the Republican National Committee pulled in $75 million—nearly twice as much money as the Democratic National Committee, which raised $38 million. The predicament isn’t simply that there is a funding gap between the parties; it’s what kind of money they attract. Republicans have quietly taken a decisive edge over Democrats when it comes to small-dollar fundraising.
During that same six-month time span, the RNC raised $33 million in small contributions—money from people who donate $200 or less over an election cycle—while that same class of donors gave the DNC just $21 million.
“Dictatorial.” “Arrogant.” “Pompous.” “Superficial.” “Tone-deaf.” “Tone-dead.” “Out of line.” “Insulting” — “absolutely insulting.”
These are the words that Nina Turner, president of the group founded by Bernie Sanders to further his “political revolution,” used in an interview to describe the Democratic National Committee.
Wasserman Schultz is again on defenseafter steadfastly refusing to explain why she continued to employ Imran Awan, an IT staffer who was under a federal investigation for an alleged equipment and data scam in the U.S. House since February. She finally fired him on July 25, one day after authorities arrested him on a seemingly unrelated mortgage fraud charge. He was at the airport leaving for Pakistan, after wiring $283,000 there.
“We wish she would go away and stop being so public by doubling down on negative stories,” said Nikki Barnes, a progressive DNC member from Florida, who believes Wasserman Schultz left the national party “in shambles” while chair, culminating with the hack of DNC servers and the release of embarrassing internal emails by WikiLeaks in the 2016 campaign. As for Wasserman Schultz’s defense, Barnes said “none of this makes sense. It doesn’t sound like racial profiling … there must have been something for her.”
But in recent weeks, California Democrats have emerged as something else: a cautionary tale for a national party debating how to rebuild and seize back power. Even at a time of overall success, state Democrats are torn by a bitter fight for the party leadership, revealing the kind of divisions — between insiders and outsiders, liberals and moderates — that unsettled the national party last year and could threaten its success in coming years.
“What we are seeing in California is similar to what we are seeing on the national level,” said Betty T. Yee, the Democratic state controller. “If we don’t do our work to really heal our divide, we are going to miss our chance to motivate Democrats.”
For five years, a group of renegade Democrats has enabled Republicans to control the State Senate, even though they are in the minority.
Reunification was the agenda of a strategy session last month in Mr. Cuomo’s Midtown Manhattan office, attended by nearly two dozen Democratic state senators. When the discussion turned to how to best win elections, Mr. Cuomo suggested to the assembled lawmakers — many of them from New York City — that the leader of eight breakaway Democrats, Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, had a better understanding of the suburbs than they had.
That was all Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Senate minority leader who represents the suburbs of Westchester County, needed to hear.
“You look at me, Mr. Governor, but you don’t see me. You see my black skin and a woman, but you don’t realize I am a suburban legislator,” Ms. Stewart-Cousins said, according to the accounts of five people who were in the room. “Jeff Klein doesn’t represent the suburbs,” she said. “I do.”
Mr. Cuomo reacted in stunned silence.