Season 2️⃣ Launch: Dems keep control of Senate; AIPAC lights money on fire to trample democracy
Things look... better than expected?
Welcome to the Season 2 premiere of the humble Glen Cote Newsletter, where covid scares, precarious employment situations, and a lack of caffeine may hinder production for a time, but we 👏🏻 come 👏🏻 roaring 👏🏻 back! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Maybe it’s less of a roar and more of a thoughtful meow with political analysis, but hey, we get up and try.
The country didn’t completely explode, thank God
Voting has concluded for the 2022 midterms, but vote counting has not. But this much is clear: Democrats performed much better than expected considering historical trends, where the incumbent party in power almost always gets crushed in midterms.
Democrats are now set to control the senate in a 50-50 split with Vice President Harris casting tie-breaking votes. It’s possible Democrats will win the runoff election between Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a Dec. 6 runoff in Georgia, which would give them 51 votes.
Democratic control of the senate means that they will be able to unilaterally confirm Biden’s judges and executive branch nominees. This matters a lot, especially since President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell appointed more than 200 judges to the federal bench when they were in power, including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as President Obama appointed in eight. These judges were mostly young and ultra-right, packing the judiciary for a generation. And they will be ruling in cases that matter, like on abortion access, climate change, voting rights and more.
So it is critical that President Biden and Democrats move to appoint judges that can act as a counterweight to Trump and McConnell’s radical right-wing judicial insurgency. Since Biden took office, Democrats’ pace of judicial confirmation has been largely on par with that of Trump’s. Democrats so far have confirmed 84 judges, have 57 judicial nominees pending and 117 announced vacancies. Now the party won’t have to scramble to confirm more Biden judges during the upcoming lame duck session.
Remarkably, even control of the House of Representatives has a chance of continuing to be held by Democrats (as of writing midday on Sunday Nov. 13). If Democrats continue to hold the House, that would mean they can continue to pass legislation, like codifying abortion rights. If Republicans win the House, they would effectively block all progressive legislation with a stone wall of obstructionism, and launch investigation after investigation against the Biden administration over things like Hunter Biden and the border.
We’ll have to wait and see just exactly how much of a mess this will be.
AIPAC does it’s best to burn democracy down, gets beaten back for now
The powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the US’s largest pro-Israel lobby group, and has long enjoyed a large amount of influence in Washington. But the famously bipartisan Israel lobby has been increasingly siding with Republicans to go after progressives who stand up for Palestinian human rights. AIPAC has backed dozens of racists, homophobes, and election deniers running for Congress in the 2022 midterms because they have pledged to defend Israel against stiffening criticism of its oppression of the Palestinians.
“[AIPAC’s] actions have made clear that they view pro-Israel, pro-peace progressive Democrats as threats – and Trumpist Republicans as allies. That worldview could not be more out of touch with the vast majority of American Jews,” said Logan Bayroff, a spokesman for J Street, a group campaigning for Washington to take a stronger stand to end the occupation of Palestinian territories.
Earlier this year, the Israeli foreign ministry director general, Alon Ushpiz, said protecting bipartisan support for the Jewish state in the US was at the top of a list of Israel’s diplomatic priorities amid wider government concern about the impact of a series of international human rights reports that it is practicing a form of apartheid over the Palestinians.
AIPAC’s protection of “bipartisan support” has in practice often meant supporting the electoral campaigns of right-wing extremists against progressive candidates who voice any support whatsoever for the human rights of Palestinians.
AIPAC’s backing of extreme rightwing Republicans follows its $27m advertising campaign during the Democratic primaries to defeat candidates who spoke up for Palestinian rights, mostly with attacks over issues that had nothing to do with Israel.
One of AIPAC’s targets include congresswoman-elect Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, a would-be member of the growing progressive Squad in Congress who was able to overcome AIPAC’s massive spending spree in support of her right-wing extremist opponent. The United Democracy Project, the political action committee for AIPAC, spent millions of dollars in attack ads in a failed attempt to take down Lee in the general election.
Lee, a rising Democratic star, has not said much about Israel in her short political career. Virtually all the criticisms of her from pro-Israel figures stem from a single tweet thread where she compared Palestinians and Black Lives Matter protesters, decrying the justifications offered for the indignities suffered by marginalized groups. In an interview following the tweets, Lee said aid to Israel should be conditioned on progress toward a peace deal with the Palestinians. That was too much for AIPAC, which then proceeded to pour in money into Lee’s district to support her right-wing extremist opponent.
By the end of the 2022 primary season, candidates supported by AIPAC had won 77 percent of the time — a win rate that most electoral support organizations can only dream about. And the win rate only tells half of the story. In other races, candidates running on otherwise progressive platforms made significant changes to their stances on Israel-Palestine, in apparent attempts to avoid becoming the target of the AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel spending binges. This silencing effect could ultimately be the goal of all this outsize spending. By making any level of support for Palestine a major liability in election season, AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel may succeed in blunting the rising tide of pro-Palestinian sympathy within the Democratic Party and among members of Congress.
While congresswoman-elect Summer Lee was able to overcome AIPAC’s spending spree, AIPAC continues to have an outsized influence on the United State’s Israel-Palestine policy. Americans must stand up for Palestinian rights. We cannot let the human rights of Palestinians be ignored, no matter how much money and power AIPAC has. Organizations such as Massachusetts Peace Action have the goal to change US policy to end US financial and political support to the Israeli occupation and apartheid of the Palestinian people.
That’s all for now, thank you for reading. Subscribe, comment, and share if you like what you read!