Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of March 8

Inside the Lincoln Project’s Secrets, Side Deals and Scandals

The behind-the-scenes moves by the four original founders showed that whatever their political goals, they were also privately taking steps to make money from the earliest stages, and wanted to limit the number of people who would share in the spoils. Over time, the Lincoln Project directed about $27 million — nearly a third of its total fund-raising — to Mr. Galen’s consulting firm, from which the four men were paid, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

After DSA sweep of nevada state elections, entire staff of Nevada Democratic Party quits

Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.

She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.

A former Nevada Democratic Party staffer, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told The Intercept they quit out of a belief that Whitmer hadn’t built relationships across the party as Clark County chair and was at times unfairly critical of the state Democratic Party. “I knew I couldn’t work with her and watch her destroy the years of hard work so many operatives put into making our state party the best state party in the country.”

How Elizabeth Warren's Acolytes Infiltrated the Biden Administration

Entryism libs looking pretty good in the wake of that stimulus bill. The article goes over the long-term payoff of Warren's political strategy over the past decade or so. The idea being it's less about mobilizing around her and more using herself as a foot to wedge the door open so she can get the right people whose ideas and work she admires into positions of influence. It's much more of a model of nurturing talent and seeding conditions to get them in the right places where they can do the most good.

“She realizes that if you’re going to get a big job, you need to show you have experience in governing and politics,” Sperling says. “She encourages her people to get into positions where they can grow from, where they can get a track record for getting stuff done.”

During the Obama years, Warren torpedoed NEC Chair Larry Summers’ expected ascent to the Federal Reserve, and, the following year, led the charge against Antonio Weiss, an executive at boutique asset management firm Lazard when Obama nominated him to serve as Treasury’s undersecretary of domestic finance. That veto power hung over Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations, and Warren exercised a quieter pressure on Clinton to avoid similar choices. The way Warren has nurtured her staff is not unrelated to her broader personnel project: It’s one means for preparing a slate of progressive-minded experts to be worthy alternatives.

Warren has been a private but constant voice to the Biden administration on personnel decisions. “I think she’s an enormous resource for the administration,” Damon Silvers, the policy director for the AFL-CIO and a friend of Warren’s. “She’s both a political power that has to be answered at some level, but she’s also a partner with great insight who offers a lot of help.” In Biden’s transition, Warren found a likeminded ally in Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime chief of staff when he was in the Senate. Kaufman is best known for briefly taking over his old boss’s Senate seat when Biden ascended to the vice presidency in 2009. Less known is the fact that he later replaced Warren on the congressional panel overseeing the 2008 bank bailout and inherited her staff.

How much longer can this era of political gridlock last?

Democrats may have a narrow majority in both the House and the Senate for the next two years, but it’s nothing near the margin they hoped for. And the likelihood that Democrats keep both the House and the Senate in 2022 are low, as the president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterm elections.

That means more divided government is probably imminent, and the electoral pattern we’ve become all too familiar with — a pendulum swinging back and forth between unified control of government and divided government — is doomed to repeat, with increasingly dangerous consequences for our democracy.

For starters, the period we find ourselves in now is unique in that the national partisan balance of power is extremely close (with control of national government up for grabs in almost every cycle), even as most states and most voters are either solidly Democratic or Republican. [...]

Since 1984, no party has won by more than 10 points in an election

States have stuck to the same party for an unprecedented period of time

Control of the government by any given party has not been as prone to change sinde the 1870s

The last time these parameters have been somewhat similar was at the gilded age

Trump makes cash grab in bid to dominate GOP

Just in the past few weeks, Trump declared at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the “only” way to give to Trump-aligned candidates was through Save America, his leadership political action committee, circumventing the party campaign arms devoted to electing Republicans. He has criticized the party for how it spends donor money, and his attorneys have sent cease-and-desist letters to GOP committees demanding they stop using his name in fundraising appeals.

In case his message wasn’t clear enough, Trump followed up this week by proclaiming that “no more money” should be given to “RINOS” — Republicans in Name Only. On Tuesday, he said in another statement that sending cash to his PAC would be "doing it right."

[...]

It remains unclear how far-reaching the financial impact will be for Republican groups. The RNC, which has the closest connection to Trump of any official party committee, has rejected the cease-and-desist demand, arguing that since Trump is a public figure it has every right to fundraise off his name.

Senate Advances Interior Secretary Nominee Deb Haaland - Huffpost link)

The vote on cloture was 54 to 42. Every Democrat voted to advance Haaland’s nomination. Four Republicans voted with them: Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska). Four senators didn’t vote at all. They were Republican Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Bill Cassidy (La.), John Kennedy (La.) and Jerry Moran (Kan.).