Tag Archives: Election 2026

Uncategorized

CHRISTMAS IN REVERSE

The way it usually works, kids make wish lists for the holidays and then get the shiny new toy.

Tuesday’s election reverses that. Democrats found the toy early the next morning. And now, they have a wish list of what they want to do with it.

I felt pretty sure the Democrats would take the House; they only needed three flips. I hoped they would take the Senate with maybe 52 seats so that the possible defection of Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman wouldn’t matter.

But like most Democrats, I dreaded Election Night. Kamala Harris was certain to win. So was Hillary Clinton eight years before.

Instead, the Trumpian dystopia.

The actual results felt like I got the bicycle, the baseball mitt and the video game console, instead of just the console.

The Democrats gained at least 24 House seats and are predicted by NBC News to gain 41.They’ll hold something in the vicinity of 258 seats; the Republicans have been bullying people with just 220.

They took control of the Senate with a minimum of 54 seats. Two races, not yet called, are leaning their way.

Those margins loom large. Donald Trump can’t pass anything or get anyone appointed to the executive or judicial branches without carving out something around 40 Democratic votes in the House. Given what the electorate said about his policies, that ain’t likely.

So what can we do with this thing?

The kind of sweeping legislation to expand healthcare, reverse the Supreme Court abortion decision and other Democratic priorities doesn’t seem possible. Trump already indicated he’ll veto stuff willy nilly.

But Democrats can’t fear that. If there’s legislation to undo the healthcare cuts that go into effect as a result of the tax cut passed in the current Congress, go for it. Let Trump veto a bill to lower Americans’ costs. That’s the campaign poster for 2028.

If there’s legislation to help get gas prices down, let Trump veto it. And, as it stands, not funding the idiotic war against Iran probably helps that cause.

A push on ethics reform would also go over well. Ban stock trading by members of all three branches of government. Ban gifts worth more than $200 to anyone in government. Limit lobbyists’ influence. Again, if Trump vetoes, make ethics issues an ad subject in the next election.

There’s always a chance surviving Republicans now see the light and want to show they understand that affordability isn’t a hoax. $4-a-gallon and $6-a-gallon diesel are the primary reasons for Tuesday night. Not the only ones, but likely the biggest ones.

It is a Democratic tradition to let bygones be bygones. My saying is Democrats want to govern, Republicans want to rule. Governing means you do litigate the past in order to get your priorities done.

That’s over. The Merrick Garland memorial deliberate speed on investigations needs to join Garland in retirement.

Investigations into what most of us believe are serious crimes against the nation are fair game. Theft of our tax dollars, sweetheart contracts to political cronies, the enrichment of the Trump family and all the other crap we’ve dealt with since January 20, 2025.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Legislate for the good of the American people. Investigate for the justice Americans crave.

I don’t impeaching Trump serves a purpose. He’s 80 years old, he’s a senile bat and, most of all, there aren’t enough votes to convict. Making him a martyr for the fourth time – two prior impeachments and a questionable assassination attempt – isn’t a good idea.

But, by all means, haul the Trump kids – yes, even Barron – and Jared Kushner before Congress. Make them testify. If they don’t, find them in contempt. Yes, eventually Trump will pardon them – and lots and lots of other people. But put their perfidy on the public record – and help the state attorneys general develop cases that Trump can’t wash away.

And, there are people who might be worth impeaching. Pete Hegseth mismanaged the precious resource of the world’s strongest military, firing generals and admirals who didn’t meet his political or bizarre masculinity standards.

I love that one of the Democrats who appears to have won in South Carolina is Nancy Lacore, a vice admiral Hegseth forced into retirement. Another is my congresswoman-elect, Cait Conley, who spent 16 years in the military and worked protecting national security. Let’s see how macho Hegseth is when these veterans go at him.

There’s even talk that a Hegseth impeachment might take place in the lame duck Congress. That would be a sign that some Republicans learned a lesson.

Another impeachment candidate is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary. His tenure includes such amazing accomplishments as the return of measles, lettuce that gave people exploding diarrhea and the encouragement of vaccine skepticism that endangers large swaths of the population.

There are Republicans who would happily throw Kennedy under the bus – which he might actually think of as a fitness regimen.

What Democrats can’t do is business as usual. Their model for how they should operate is 250 miles north of the Capitol.

Zohran Mamdani won election as New York’s mayor a year ago. He spent that year doing a lot of the stuff he was going to do – along with creating an image of NYC as a place of joy and striving. If Democrats follow his path and do things that make life more affordable and maybe even fun, their shiny new toy will last a lot longer than the ones under the tree.

Standard
Uncategorized

SHOW OF HANDS

I love writing a blog like this, expressing my viewpoint on our world for your consideration.

I donate money to candidates. It heartens me to know I possess resources to help people who deserve public office achieve it.

But nothing, nothing gives me political satisfaction, nothing makes me feel as if I’ve accomplished something, like voting.

Which I did yesterday.

To be sure, there were about 50 people who did the same thing at Clarkstown, New York, Town Hall. I can’t speak for their level of accomplishment. And I suspect the majority of those in the room did not vote for the same people I did.

Doesn’t matter. I did it. I exercised my right as a citizen of the United States to help determine who represents me and who provides the services I pay for with my taxes.

And thanks to that ballot, the opinions expressed in this blog gain more credence. I put my franchise where my typing fingers sometimes take me. I stood on a line, filled in the circles on the ballot and made my views actually count. When the votes get counted Tuesday night and the numbers change on TV and computer screen, one of those will be me.

We live in one of those dysfunctional political thrillers of the past. What would happen if the President of the United States went insane? What would happen if a foreign power gained control of our government? What if, after more than a century, we turned on our devoted allies in an insulting and disgusting manner?

Too many of us still believe that it doesn’t matter. That it doesn’t affect them. That politics is only about people with the means and there’s nothing we can do to change that.

It might be easy to be cynical after 72-1/2 years. I never believed this country would actually restore Donald Trump to the White House after what he did in his first term. COVID. Stupid tax bills. Kissing up to Putin. Refusing to concede defeat when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

It remains a mystery how he won in 2016. A miserable failure in most everything he did. A miserable, unhappy human being who stiffed his contractors, displayed loyalty to no one but himself and anyone who paid him, played on racial and religious and sexual stereotypes. Treated women like objects for his pleasure.

Should have known better. This country elected Ronald Reagan, twice, in the 1980s. It elected Richard Nixon twice, It has elected men and women to Congress with the morals of a shark and the brains of a rock.

But I cling to the belief that I can change the world. That there is something I can do to stop the Titanic from sinking, to keep the runaway car from going off the cliff. To preserve a country I still believe is worth preserving.

And the bad guys believe it too. Yeah, a few hundred million dollars is something Elon Musk might find in an old jacket pocket. But he’s been spending it trying to preserve the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. His money is littering the roadside in nonsensical yard signs that will take until Christmas to remove. In nonstop TV ads that question the patriotism and humanity of people who want affordable healthcare and a sustainable environment.

So much crap has happened since January 20, 2025 – hell, since that day the orange fool rode down the escalator as his New York lair. And the way to begin – again, the word is begin – to clear this crap from our lives is to vote. To vote early if that’s more convenient. To vote Tuesday if that’s easier or the only way.

To stay in line if it’s late. To resist intimidation and misleading information. To report to someone you trust anyone – including people from this administration – who tries to intimidate voters or fellow citizens.

I can spew whatever thoughts I have for as long or as short as I want. I could write a masterpiece of prose that might make you cry or laugh.

But nothing is as powerful as the show of hands you, me and every other responsible American makes culminating Tuesday.

Go get ’em!

Standard
Uncategorized

SEEKING LAWLERLESSNESS

When the midterm election rolls around, midway through a presidency, most Americans ignore the 434 House seat elections that don’t affect them directly.

But a handful of races garner national attention. Maybe because they’re seen as bellwethers for the electorate as a whole. Maybe they’re a reflection of closely watched demographics. Or they’re seats that always seem to be battlegrounds.

Which brings me home.

I live in New York’s 17th Congressional District. Its southern boundary is less than 10 miles north of New York City, but it reaches all the way up the Hudson, on both sides, for about an hour’s drive north.

Two of the counties in the district – Rockland, where I live, and Westchester – are among the most affluent in the nation. Bill and Hillary Clinton – the 42nd and should-have-been 45th Presidents of the United States – live in Chappaqua, in the heart of the district.

This year, the race is a donnybrook. The Republican incumbent is Mike Lawler, a former political operative seeking a third term. The challenger is Cait Conley, a 16-year military veteran and the former counterterrorism director on the National Security Council.

Polls go both ways in this one. Some show Lawler ahead, although there is some skepticism about the tilt of the polltakers. Others show Conley in the lead. Five points either way would be a landslide here.

The economic issues causing Republicans to cower across the country hit this middle-to-upper class district hard. The price of gasoline is well over $4 a gallon, with some $5 readings in isolated parts. Utility bills surged in the wake of the COVID outbreak and never really came down. Food prices in the New York area rank among the highest in the country – and these parts are no exception.

So that would make you think that this district is ripe for a flip. But there’s a catch.

That catch is the Bloc.

Western Rockland has one of the largest Hasidic and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States. Hebrew is as common as English, if not more so.

The area’s voting patterns are so bizarre that national Democrats thought they had proof of voter fraud in 2024. They didn’t. One precinct in the town of Ramapo, where these folks live, came in Trump 512, Harris 0. For Congress, it was Lawler 505, Democrat Mondaire Jones 1.

Those are Mayor Daley/Boss Tweed type margins. And the thing is they’re not fake news. People in these precincts vote in a monolith.

Which is why Lawler, unlike other embattled Republicans this year, brought Trump to the district. His audience was in the Hasidic area and they got to hear what they wanted – a ringing endorsement of Trump’s buddy Benjamin Netanyahu and support for Israeli actions in Gaza.

The war in Gaza and Trump’s support of Netanyahu is the wild card in New York-17. It’s why Lawler and local Republicans try to spread an image on their New York bogeyman, Zohran Mamdani, as an anti-Semite who endangers Israel and Jews everywhere.

For the rest of the district, Lawler tries to present himself as a reasonable moderate. Hell, he’s got a beard, how could be MAGA?

One of the things he’s trying to sell is the idea that he fought to raise the property tax limit that homeowners can deduct from their federal income taxes. One of Trump’s first punitive moves against states that didn’t vote for him came when his Republican buddies enacted the SALT (state and local taxes) cap at $10,000 a year. The states where property taxes are that high are reliably blue: New York, Massachusetts, California.

Lawler claims he got the cap raised to $40,000, which would alleviate the tax bill for the lower  income end of the population. What he doesn’t advertise is that the boost is limited to three years – it’ll go back to $10,000 about the time Lawler gets interested in trying to unseat Chuck Schumer in the Senate.

What’s hilarious is the signs that say “Thank you Mike Lawler for SALT.” That ignores the fact that SALT itself is a bad thing, that his Republican colleagues are hoping to get back to draining blue states as soon as they can.

Conley wasn’t my first choice to run against Lawler. She’s a little too conservative. For example, she supports restoring much of what was cut from the Affordable Care Act, but she does not support Medicare for All.

But I liked the way she handled herself in the Democratic primary debates. The early favorite came across as mealy-mouthed and a traditional local hack. This race needed a fighter – and despite my vote for a more progressive candidate, Conley won.

She’s rewarded Democrats with a social media-worthy debate performance against Lawler. When the issue of violence against women – in the wake of the Cornell gang rape allegations – came up, Lawler tried to talk over Conley as she advocated strong sexual consent laws.

“I do not need you to mansplain to me what domestic abuse and sexual assault against women is and the appropriate response,” Conley warned Lawler. “Don’t start. Sit over there.”

I think she fights pretty well.

Since I moved here in 1987, most of the House races haven’t been close. For the first 14 years, Republican Ben Gilman dominated. He was what we in New York call a Rockefeller Republican – somewhat moderate. In 2026, assuming he didn’t bend the knee to Donald Trump, he’d be called a RINO – Republican in name only.

Then, after the 2000 census, the redistricting left us with a Democratic stalwart, Nita Lowey. She won relatively easily until she retired in 2020.

Mondaire Jones won in 2020. But in 2022, another census redistricting caused a shift that put Jones in the same district as another Democrat, Sean Patrick Maloney. That caused Jones, a promising Democrat, to shift to an ill-fated New York City race, and left us with Maloney, who represented the Democratic establishment. Lawler beat him by less than 3,000 votes.

So those are all the reasons why this race is the center of attention. Conley and Lawler both make national TV appearances – Lawler is unlike a lot of other Republicans in that he embraces the non-right wing networks because he thinks he can seem like a reasonable member of his party.

I’d love to be confident that Lawler is going down. I’m not. Not at all. I could see a scenario where Democrats take a big majority in the House, capture the Senate – and we’re still stuck with Smarmy Mike.

Early voting starts Saturday. The only way I, the other democracy savers in New York-17 and the other democracy savers from Maine to Alaska can make what we want happen is to vote. As soon as we can. In numbers that can’t be denied.

Standard