And now the Democratic National Convention attendees are watching a montage of horrific violence on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. It’s appalling. But we live in a world where the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a little more than a month ago, feels like ancient history. If Trump’s role in the riot of January 6, 2021 was as automatically disqualifying as Democrats believe, Trump never would have led the polls against Biden, nor would he be neck-and-neck against Kamala Harris now. Maybe January 6 ought to disqualify Trump from ever becoming president again. But roughly half the American public feels otherwise.
Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia, argues that the GOP is no longer civil or conservative, it is crazy, and declares today’s Republicans are “a cult.” I have a feeling of deja vu, as former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Mesa mayor John Giles made awfully similar comments last night. Sure, it’s always nice to have someone to play the Zell Miller role, a member of the opposite party who endorses your party’s nominee, but these are not terribly well known figures.
Fair enough @jgeraghty, but Goldberg-Polin’s family seemed to capture their attention, maybe even against their instincts given the loaded context of their topic. If they weren’t bored, we’d probably see it. To your point, the border crisis just isn’t gripping enough for this crowd.
The DNC aired footage of Harris promising to pass the “border security” bill that GOP Senator James Lankford negotiated with his Democratic counterparts. The point of the exercise was to attack Donald Trump for opposing that bill, and many conservatives and Republicans agree with Trump. They object to the provisions that only trigger an emergency shutdown of the border after so many contacts with migrants, insisting that the number of contacts we should tolerate is zero. True enough. But that bill was one of the toughest border bills to which Democrats have ever agreed.
It contained no pathway to citizenship, and no new legalization process. It increased enforcement detention capacity, revised the statute tightening criteria pertaining to asylum seekers, funded new judges to process the sprawling backlog of immigration claims, and even curbed the president’s ability to give migrants parole – so called “catch and release.” Donald Trump would probably be inclined to negotiate better, stronger terms from Congress – depending on its partisan makeup. But if Harris wins the presidency, Republicans would do well to hold her to her promise to pass this bill. They’re unlikely to negotiate better terms if she’s in the White House.
Noah, the crowd is no more attentive to Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut touting Harris’ toughness on border issues than they were for Escobar. The 8 o’clock hour on the third night isn’t exactly front and center in the convention schedule. This remains a check-the-box exercise for the Democrats so they can’t be accused of ignoring the problem of the border at their convention.
Congresswoman Veronica Escobar was tapped to be the sacrificial speaker who would address the situation at the border, which she didn’t do, of course. Escobar described the border crisis as “complicated” and offered substance-free nostrums about the need for broader “comprehensive” solutions to the migrant influx, like a pathway to citizenship. It was nonsense, but the din of the crowd engaging in crosstalk while she spoke suggests her Democratic audience doesn’t care. To them, the border is a box-checking exercise. And a boring
Cory Booker is shouting his lungs out. You have to feel for the guy, at least a little bit. He spent most of his adult life building himself to be “Barack Obama 2.0,” only to learn, after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, that the Democratic party didn’t want “Barack Obama 2.0,” they wanted “a fighter.” So Booker spent a few years trying to reinvent himself as “a fighter,” a persona that didn’t fit him at all. And now, he’s just another Democratic senator who probably missed his moment; you notice he wasn’t mentioned as a serious option for Kamala Harris’ running mate.
Democrats feature Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the family of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a U.S. citizen and a Jew who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023. This is the first sustained reference to the conflict in Gaza since the start of the convention. They received a standing ovation as a spontaneous chant of “free them all” broke out. It makes you wonder if the Democrats’ paralyzing fear of the anti-Israel sentiment within their ranks is overthought.
The DNC reminds Democrats of the electrifying moment when Kamala Harris probed Bret Kavanaugh over a secret meeting he allegedly took with Trump’s attorneys – a claim that made Harris a star among the very online left but went absolutely nowhere.
She produced no proof of any such meeting, nor did she even speculate about what might have been discussed. “That’s when I started to hear people really talk about what a badass she is,” one Ohio Democratic organizer said a the time. For the left, the allegation was enough. It didn’t need to be true.
Obama, the guy who mandated that every individual purchase a health insurance policy that includes benefits dictated by government rather than allow people to purchase insurance that fits their health care needs, tonight: “We believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have freedom to make choices that are different than ours”