The President as a Distraction from his Administration and the Congress
b'The President as a Distraction from his Administration and the Congress\\n\\nTed Harvey has decided to make it his business defending President Donald Trump. He came to the work in an odd way. He explains in our interview that he was a Rand Paul supporter when the GOP primary season began. He shifted to Ted Cruz after Paul abandoned his campaign. He jumped to Trump after the hotelier and reality show star emerged as the Republican nominee.\\n\\n\\nFormer Colorado state Senator Ted Harvey.\\nHarvey\\u2019s embrace of Trump came easily as for two years he\\u2019d headed the Stop Hillary PAC. His brother serves in the diplomatic corps and Harvey says the infamous Benghazi incident in which four Americans were killed cut close to home for him. Despite the fact that years of House Republican investigations could prove no lawbreaking on the part of Secretary Clinton\\u2019s part, the fact that she had ultimate responsibility for the events in Libya (coupled with what he says are \\u201cdecades of corruption\\u201d involving the Clintons) was enough to set him off on his anti-Clinton quest.\\n\\nThe first tumultuous month of the Trump presidency has seen the presidents Republican allies in the U.S. Senate approve every person he\\u2019s nominated for a cabinet post \\u2014 at least all of those who have stuck around for a Senate vote.\\n\\nSince the election, a lot of energy and anger have been spent trying to manipulate the Constitutionally established election process to overturn the results. There was a massive march on Washington the day after the inauguration accompanied by many in cities across the country. There have been many new avenues to activism created by veteran activists and those new to it, including the Indivisible movement created by now unemployed congressional staffers.\\n\\nAs the results become evident, all of this has been mostly ineffective. Trump is president. His administration is embarking on policy changes that aim to remake the United States into a safety-net free society that has not existed since the Great Depression. This rush to repeal the 20th Century will shift the fights to the courts. The good news is that the systemic inertia that we found so frustrating in the Obama years might well buy us some time to enable us to survive the blitzkrieg of legislative and policy initiatives coming from the administration and the Republican Congress.\\n\\nThe Democratic Party bears a large share of the responsibility for this mess. Sure, the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign to block Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. But, where have the DNC and the state party organizations been for the past three decades while Republicans and conservatives were gerrymandering the party nearly out of existence in state houses across the country?\\n\\nThe party \\u2014 at the state and federal levels \\u2014 has been so busy chasing corporate cash that it forgot that its basic work is politics. They have been asleep at the switch, ignoring fundamentals on the ground (like redistricting) while Republicans boxed them in.\\n\\nThe opportunity to change the election maps and math won\\u2019t really happen until after the 2020 Census. The good news is that there\\u2019s time to educate ourselves and organize around that issue. The bad news is that non-corporatists start from a stark disadvantage that extends from state houses to the Capitol. Legislatures redistrict themselves and they redraw congressional district maps. Louisiana will elect a new Legislature in 2019 and there will be significant turnover in the Senate due to term limits. But, there is the problem of the maps of those districts which were designed to lock-in conservative majorities.\\n\\nDon\\u2019t expect much change in the 2018 off-year federal elections as the maps of House districts will be the same ones that have locked in Republican majorities in that chamber since 2012. There are few districts that are or can become competitive because of the way in which they were drawn.'