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Tasked To Recruit Women Candidates, GOP Rep. Susan Brooks Quits

Tasked To Recruit Women Candidates, GOP Rep. Susan Brooks Quits

House Republicans’ pitiful number of women in their ranks could fall even further in 2020, as Rep. Susan Brooks (R-IN) announced on Friday that she is retiring rather than seeking reelection, according to USA Today.

Brooks is one of just 13 women in the House Republican caucus and serves as the head of candidate recruitment for the National Republican Congressional Committee — which seeks to elect Republicans to the House.

As part of her role of convincing Republicans to run for the House, Brooks has said that she wants to see more women and people of color run.

“It’s important that we, as a conference, do a better job of looking like America, and better representing the very diverse country that we have,” Brooks told Roll Call in April.

So her decision to leave Congress in 2020 looks like a pretty bad omen for the House GOP as it desperately tries to diversify its almost entirely white male membership and win back the majority they were swept out of in spectacular fashion in 2018.

Brooks painted her retirement as a personal decision to spend more time with her family. However, Brooks is a top Democratic target in 2020, as her suburban Indianapolis district is one that is shifting away from the GOP thanks to suburban voters’ disdain for Trump.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which seeks to elect Democrats to the House, put Brooks on their “retirement watch list” for 2020. Trump carried Brooks’ district by 12 points in 2016, while Mitt Romney carried it by 17 points in his failed 2012 presidential bid — meaning the district has gotten less Republican in the Trump era.

The DCCC gloated about her retirement in a Friday morning tweet following her announcement.

 

DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos said Brooks’ retirement is indicative of the problems Republicans have in convincing women not only to run, but also to support the Republican Party.

“In a party whose leadership continually marginalizes women’s voices, losing Congresswoman Brooks, who was working hard to recruit women to run for office, underscores the problem Washington Republicans have created for themselves,” Bustos said. “Furthermore, as the head of the NRCC’s entire recruitment effort across the country, Congresswoman Brooks’ retirement is the clearest evidence yet that Washington Republicans efforts to retake the majority are in a tailspin.”

Not to mention, House Republican leaders have made comments that would likely be discouraging to Republican women looking to grow the number of women in their white-male dominated caucus.

“I think that’s a mistake,” NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer (R-MN) said back in December about efforts by House Republican women to increase the number of women in their conference. “It shouldn’t be just based on looking for a specific set of ingredients — gender, race, religion — and then we’re going to play in the primary.”

Because there are so few women in the House Republican conference, Brooks amounts to eight percent of House GOP women.

Her retirement is ultimately a setback for both Republicans’ efforts to diversify and their efforts to win back the majority in 2020.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

In Open Congressional Seats, Democrats Raise Three Times As Much As Republicans

In Open Congressional Seats, Democrats Raise Three Times As Much As Republicans

Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.

Democrats are crushing Republicans on fundraising — and they’re doing it in the congressional districts that are critical to winning back the House in this year’s midterms.

Bloomberg analyzed the data from 12 races for open seats and found that Democrats have collectively raised $23.3 million. That’s three times more than what Republicans have brought in.

New Jersey Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, for example, announced this week that he will not see re-election. Daily Kos Elections notes that Frelinghuysen’s fundraising had been “surprisingly weak,” especially for a 12-term congressman who “hails from one of the oldest political families in New Jersey.” Meanwhile, Democrat Mikie Sherrill — a former federal prosecutor, Navy pilot, and mother of four — has raised $1.2 million. The only other Republican in the race has raised a mere $8,659.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises money for Democratic House candidates, is also crushing its Republican counterpart in small-donor donations, which, as Bloomberg notes, is “often seen as a barometer of grassroots enthusiasm.” Democrats had banked $22.2 million by the end of 2017, while Republicans had a paltry $9.8 million.

Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, recently admitted Trump would be a drag in most competitive districts and couldn’t even name a single battleground district where he’d want Trump to campaign.

Major donors and average Americans voters already see the writing on the wall, and their money is going to Democrats in anticipation of halting Trump’s destructive agenda.

Oliver Willis is a former research fellow at Media Matters for America who has been blogging about politics since 2001. Follow him on Twitter @owillis.

PHOTO: The Capitol Building is lit at sunset in Washington, U.S., December 20, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

House Democrats Look For Answers, Accountability After Midterm Losses

House Democrats Look For Answers, Accountability After Midterm Losses

By Emma Dumain, CQ Roll Call (MCT)

WASHINGTON — House Democrats came back to work Wednesday still reeling from last week’s bruising election results — and they’re looking for answers about what went wrong.

But for many lawmakers, it isn’t enough to blame the loss of at least a dozen House seats on an unpopular president, gerrymandered districts and a host of other factors beyond the party’s control. They want their leadership to do some soul-searching, and so far it hasn’t happened.

Several Democratic lawmakers and aides told CQ Roll Call they chafed at the postmortem conference call Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi convened on Nov. 6, in which she, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel of New York and other senior members sought to deflect responsibility for the election results that gave House Republicans their largest majority in nearly a century.

A few members challenged Pelosi for her suggestion that voter suppression accounted for low Democratic turnout, a source on the call said.

A handful of Democratic aides said there was general frustration that the DCCC, at the eleventh hour, had to shift precious dollars around to help incumbents who should have been safe — or should have been warned by the DCCC much earlier to get back to their districts and protect their seats.

Meanwhile, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-NY) was telling his local newspaper the party’s messaging needed to change. Democrats wouldn’t win elections, he said, talking about Pelosi’s favored “When Women Succeed, America Succeeds” agenda.

“Where the hell were the Democrats? What were we talking about?” he said. “We’re losing white men. Why are we not talking about that? Why are we always concerned with what’s the politically correct thing to say?”

“Where’s the humility?” a senior Democratic aide lamented. “Don’t we want to self-assess here?”

Over the weekend, it looked like party leaders were starting to come around to the idea. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida announced that a special panel of “key party stakeholders and experts” would perform a “top-to-bottom assessment”of what went wrong this cycle and how to do better next time.

The news was welcomed by Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-VA), who tweeted that Wasserman Schultz “is right: Dems need a thorough, honest analysis of what went wrong. … Business as usual is not the clarion call we need now.”

Even the House’s third-ranking Democrat, Assistant Leader James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, acknowledged there should be some examination of how the messaging strategy was executed.

“A couple of weeks before the election, my travels around the country, in and out of these congressional districts, led me to the conclusion that our message, or a lack thereof, was causing a problem,” Clyburn told CQ Roll Call on Monday. “Where was the Democratic message in this campaign? People couldn’t tell you.”

A leadership aide pushed back against the thesis that House Democrats lacked a compelling narrative on the campaign trail, and that leaders are required to self-flagellate to prove they’re disappointed.

The aide told CQ Roll Call that the caucus had numerous opportunities to collaborate on a party platform ahead of the midterms, with Pelosi and Israel holding listening sessions to hone talking points and messaging strategy. The result was the “Middle Class Jumpstart” economic agenda, which House Democrats promised to implement within their first 100 days of regaining control of the chamber.

Attendance was always high at these special planning meetings, the leadership aide continued; if members now are saying they didn’t like the message or appreciate the tone, it’s not because they never had the chance to make their feelings known.Also, grousing about a lack of message, the aide said, is par for the course for Democrats every two years.

At least one tradition, however, is missing from this year’s election aftermath: Calls for an imminent change at the leaders’ table.It’s a far cry from 2010 when Democrats lost control of the chamber and there was considerable chatter about whether it the time had come for Pelosi to step aside after 12 years in leadership.

For the time being, even ambitious lawmakers clamoring to move up in the House’s party power structure are keeping their powder dry, perhaps expecting 2016 to be the year where a sea change finally takes place at the very top.

There are also fewer members in elected office willing to risk even a symbolic challenge of Pelosi, Clyburn or Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland.There is now a shortage of fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats willing to “take one for the team,” as ex-Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina did four years ago.

But it doesn’t mean that Democrats don’t want to see some changes. That’s especially true for the dozens of members who were elected in 2012 eager to compromise and get things done, even if it meant working with Republicans.

One member of that class, Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM), said there needs to be a “whole different level of engagement” between members and leadership going forward, and she predicted the caucus would be confronted with the challenge of evaluating the status quo.

“I am ready to talk and have an action plan ready on Wednesday,” Lujan Grisham told CQ Roll Call on Nov. 8, adding that she wanted to see the 2016 cycle built around talking points that focused more on positive ideas and less on partisan finger-pointing.

In a separate interview on Tuesday, first-term Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla., one of the most vulnerable incumbents of the cycle, said members were undeniably getting antsy with business-as-usual in the senior ranks.

“I think you’re going to have some of the more senior members frustrated about when we’re going to get the House back,” said Murphy, “and you got some younger, newer members who kind of want to be set free and don’t want to be tied down as much.

“They want to talk about the things that got them elected in the first place,” he continued. “This is a new generation of leadership.”

AFP Photo/Chip Somodevilla

Senate Democrats’ Super Lawyer Preps For Overtime

Senate Democrats’ Super Lawyer Preps For Overtime

By Kyle Trygstad, CQ Roll Call (MCT)

WASHINGTON — As the Senate chamber erupted in applause after the swearing-in of Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, Majority Leader Harry Reid eventually looked up and directed his appreciation toward the newest senator’s attorneys.

On that day, more than five years ago, standing alongside his two Franken campaign co-counsels was Marc Elias, the Democrats’ go-to attorney. He’d spent the previous eight months in Minneapolis in a seemingly unending recount and trial that ultimately resulted in a 60th Senate seat for the party.

This cycle, as Franken is favored for re-election and Democrats fight to hold their majority, Elias sat down with CQ Roll Call to chat about Senate races, where exactly he’ll be watching election returns on Nov. 4, which states he’s keeping an eye on for potential recounts, and his role in one of the longest recounts in Senate history.

“It was a very emotional thing,” Elias said of standing in the chamber on July 7, 2009. “Not just because of the fact that Franken was getting sworn-in, but I remember Leader Reid looking up at us, Sen. (John) Kerry and all these other members that I’d been involved with in representing, and it was really a great moment.”

Elias was upbeat and energetic as he entered a conference room in the expansive Perkins Coie office in downtown Washington on Monday, jumping right into Senate campaign chatter. He suggested the interview take place there, as his new office a few doors down, had yet to be set up.

He offered a brief tour anyway, picking up framed hallmarks of his noteworthy legal and political career that still leaned against the wall.

Among them was a March 2004 New York Times front page, top-of-the-fold photo of Elias alongside Kerry, taken the night the Massachusetts senator had secured the Democratic presidential nomination. Another was a Roll Call cartoon from April 2009 — Franken and Republican Norm Coleman were depicted as knights, with Franken holding a sword and Coleman down to one limb, standing on his “last leg.”

Over the past decade, since Kerry hired him as his campaign counsel, Elias has risen to become an indispensable figure in the party. He has a second office in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee headquarters, where he’ll spend most of Election Day “pacing around” Executive Director Guy Cecil’s office “and driving him nuts for most of the day.”

As chairman of the political law practice at Perkins Coie, Elias oversees 18 attorneys and represents nearly every Democratic senator. The firm’s client list also includes the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Governors Association.

On Tuesday, there will be attorneys stationed at each committee, as well as lawyers in state-based boiler rooms.

“The truth is, Election Day is a lot more sitting around and waiting than people think,” Elias said. “If there’s a broken voting machine in Little Rock, Ark., I may get on the phone and be told there’s a broken machine … and I’ll give my 2 cents on it. But fundamentally, that machine is going to get fixed or not fixed by someone on the ground.”

That night he’ll be watching for close Senate races in states such as Alaska, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as plenty of gubernatorial and House contests. Until then, Elias and his team are busy preparing for potential recounts and working with campaigns and the committees on Election Day “voter protection.”

“Plus, we’re still dealing with the last of campaign season, so we’re still reviewing ads and dealing with get-out-the-vote issues and the full panoply of issues that we deal with every day,” Elias said.

The 45-year-old was born in New York City, grew up on Long Island and attended high school in Suffern, a small town in suburban Rockland County, N.Y. He’s one of two sons to a stay-at-home-mom and a father who worked on Wall Street before becoming a small-business owner. They were “New Deal Democrats, Jews from New York,” Elias said, laughing.

He graduated from Hamilton College in 1990 with a degree in government before going to Duke, where he earned both a law degree and a master’s in political science in 1993. He joined Perkins Coie and quickly moved into the political law practice under Bob Bauer, who would go on to become campaign and White House counsel to Barack Obama, and Judy Corley, who became in-house counsel to Richard Gephardt after Republicans won the House majority in 1994.

“I sometimes say that I have Newt Gingrich to thank for my entry into political law,” Elias said.

Democrats wanted to go after the new speaker, so the young lawyer worked extensively with the DCCC drafting ethics and Federal Election Commission complaints.

It was the front end “of this huge explosion in the intersection of law and criminal law and ethics law and politics,” Elias said. “I was kind of situated in the right place at the right time, and the practice just expanded from there.”

In the 2008 cycle, Elias became Franken’s campaign attorney after Stephanie Schriock, now president of EMILY’s List, took over as campaign manager. On election night, the Associated Press briefly called the race for Coleman, but his lead continued to diminish before he finished ahead by several hundred votes.

Not sure if more votes would turn up for one side or the other, Elias began “a phased deployment of resources into Minnesota” but didn’t get there himself until the following Monday, when it was clear the race would go to a recount. He’d be there full time until the end of June, when the state Supreme Court ruled for Franken.

“Marc Elias is the guy you want leading you out of the wilderness,” said Jess McIntosh, communications director at EMILY’s List and a former Franken spokeswoman. “He’s a giant of a human being, which can be helpfully terrifying, but he’s incredibly funny and warm.”

This year, Elias was at the center of some of the biggest political court battles of the cycle. That includes redistricting cases in Virginia and Florida, helping Kansas Democrat Chad Taylor remove his name from the ballot, and an unsuccessful push for preliminary relief on new voting laws in North Carolina.

When grouped together, Elias said, those laws in the Tar Heel State — which include decreasing the number of weeks of early voting, ending same-day registration and eliminating out-of-precinct provisional voting — are clearly an effort by some Republicans “to simply make it harder for people to vote.”

“That is, right now, the big fight in politics,” he said, “and will be one of the defining fights I think for the next five to 10 years.”

Photo: Diliff via Wikimedia Commons