Defeat

As Ezra Klein and others have said, there’s no question that the Republicans have totally defeated the Democrats on all issues sequester. Caving on the FAA was politically almost inevitable and will probably set the stage for Republicans to roll back other parts of the sequester that affect rich people, but what’s so depressing (other than the defeat itself) is how little the Democratic Party was willing to fight for the poor on the sequester or leverage the FAA at all. Theda Skocpol:

Just an observation. I am so often disappointed by Congress, including Democrats, that you would not think the sequester exception for the FAA would matter — but this one is still bothering me days later, even though I fly a lot (too much given how miserable it is nowdays) and the exception personally benefits me.

It just so brazenly pro-elite and upper middle class an exception, unaimous from Senate Democrats who go on and on about caring for ordinary Americans and ask for votes and money in the name of “fairness.”

I teach an undergraduate seminar about Inequality and American Democracy and we go over all the new resarch — especially from Martin Gilens — showing definitively, statistically that government responds to the preferences of the privileged and pretty much ignores everyone else, including the middle-income citizenry as well as the poor. I know all this abstractly, but this particular Senate vote makes it concrete in a hit-you-in-the-gut way. Given the chance to, say, propose exceptions for BOTH Head Start kids and elite travelers, to use one to leverage the other, they just said to hell with it an went for the elites, instantly and unanimously, leaving all others to rot. Elizabeth Warren, too.

Hard to take.

Hard to take indeed. In fact, it is one of those things that make this left-leaning Democrat really shake his head at the future of the nation.