Tag: russ feingold
Donald Trump, Amy Coney Barrett

Feingold Warns Against Rush To Ram Through Barrett Nomination

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

Any system can only bear so much, whether it is a bridge overloaded with heavy trucks or our government in a time of crisis. President Trump's hospitalization for COVID-19 amid news that multiple members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have been infected by or exposed to the virus takes our government to a point where girders bend and cables snap. As we reel under the blows of a pandemic and a quasi-depression, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham must call a halt to their hasty and illegitimate effort to install Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. Their failure to do so would present a clear and present danger to the health and wellbeing of the American people.

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A Bitter Political Summer In Wisconsin

A Bitter Political Summer In Wisconsin

MADISON, Wisc. — The fields of corn growing across the state looked knee-high by the Fourth of July, as they say here, but politics is parched in the heartland as Wisconsin prepares for another furious showdown in this fall election harvest. Call it a civil war, that’s what it feels like.

I knew this place as a girl. I love Wisconsin, but don’t know it anymore.

The blue-leaning state is already a major battleground in play in 2016, with presumptive presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump vying for very different voter bases. Clinton will court the two cities, Madison and Milwaukee, while Trump may concentrate on the rest of the state, branding and sneering at the city folk as elites and eggheads. He is the champion of making people hate each other, after all. And she is head girl of the elite.

Trump did not do well here in the primary, however, and the chair of the University of Wisconsin political science department, David Canon, expects Clinton to do “marginally better against Trump than the national result.”

South of the state capital, two native sons from the small, depressed town of Janesville, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Democrat Russ Feingold, perfectly illustrate how far apart the two parties are.

Ryan, every inch the company man whose conscience cowers at Trump, can’t keep a neat House of Representatives. He has an unruly bunch of Republicans in the majority, and Democrats are beginning to show spirit, as they did staging a House sit-in on gun violence, which made Ryan fighting mad.

As senator, Feingold was the only one to vote against the Patriot Act. Bully for him. He’s running for the seat he lost in the tea party tempest six years ago.

For many — those who see Wisconsin as an enlightened state that produced Thornton Wilder, the playwright of the classic “Our Town,” dissenters who remember the campus anti-Vietnam War movement started on the shores of Lake Mendota and intellectuals who dwell on tree-shaded streets named after universities — there is a profound gulf with the rest of the largely rural small-town fabric of the state. Green Bay, for example, could not be more different than liberal, urbane Madison and the diverse, sturdy patchwork of Milwaukee.

Wisconsin can never be taken for granted, but current waters seem especially turbulent. In her insightful new book, “The Politics of Resentment,” Katherine J. Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, interviews working-class people from the rural reaches of Wisconsin. She struck up conversations with some people at gas stations. She explains clearly how forgotten and ignored they generally feel, caught in an economic cauldron with hourly wage work or health care costs that make life harder to get by since the Great Recession hit eight years ago.

The economic downturn that President Obama inherited from the “war president” George W. Bush has left fingerprints on so many houses and families. As Cramer shows, people are still struggling and they resent others with more privilege and access to new rules in an ethereal economy. The Obama “recovery” has Wisconsinites asking, “what recovery?” When Trump speaks of free trade and lost jobs, he strikes a chord.

Like the Mississippi River that runs along its border, Wisconsin captures the cross-currents of the national stage better than anywhere. With hard-charging right-wing Gov. Scott Walker set to speak at the Republican National Convention, the state’s civil war will be on display. Walker is hostile to a pride and joy, the University of Wisconsin, bleeding under budget cuts, and to public employee unions.

The Progressive Party was founded here, about 100 years ago, to stand for fairness and squareness in the Midwestern tradition, especially toward the giant monopolies like Standard Oil. Collective bargaining was practically invented here. Senator John F. Kennedy served on a committee that chose Robert La Follette, a Progressive, as one of the greatest in Senate history.

But never forget that Communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, the senator who first exploited the anti-intellectual, paranoid and nativist steaks in American politics, also started here.

A remnant of the real Civil War hangs around Madison’s heart. It’s a comfort that famed Camp Randall, the UW football stadium, began as a place on the right side of the Civil War. Here Confederate war prisoners learned the Union was not for quitting.

Somehow that makes things better.

Photo: Unions workers (front) and various supporters hold up signs before a U.S. Democratic presidential candidates debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States February 11, 2016. REUTERS/Darren Hauck

Feingold Faces Koch Smears In Wisconsin Senate Race

Feingold Faces Koch Smears In Wisconsin Senate Race

A report into the scandal of over prescribing opioids and other drugs to veterans at a facility in Wisconsin will be published Tuesday.

Three veterans, and possibly more, may have died as a result of the overprescribing of drugs at the Tomah VA Medical Center, dubbed ‘Candy Land’ by patients. Its acting medical director, who has since stepped down, went by the moniker ‘Dr. Candy.”

The report will be published by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, currently involved in a deeply fractious and tight race for re-election against former Sen. Russ Feingold.

Whatever the conclusions of the report, the Tomah affair is front and center in the crucially important Wisconsin senate race, which has already seen a flood of outside cash, most of it in support of Johnson.

Or more accurately, against Feingold.

In a television ad that aired earlier this month quoting a whistle blower who helped bring attention to the scandal — and who is an admitted Johnson supporter — Feingold was essentially accused of killing veterans.

“I found out that Russ Feingold got a memo in 2009 that outlined veteran harm and nothing was done,” Ryan Honl says in the ad. “All those veterans who’ve come back wounded, and they die at the hands of politicians who look the other way.”

The ad was released by Freedom Works, the super PAC funded largely by the Koch brothers and hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, often described as Illinois’ richest person.

Feingold, the ad claims, received a hand-delivered memo written by a union official at the facility, which highlighted the over prescription of drugs, and concluded veterans likely were being harmed. It was written in 2008, when Feingold was senator.

While the notation on the memo stated it was to be hand delivered to certain members of Congress, including Feingold, there is no evidence he received or saw the memo.

And its author, union official Lin Ellinghuysen, said the accusation that Feingold got the memo and failed to act was a “lie.” Indeed, she was told that it was not delivered.

Freedom Works walked back their claims some — perhaps because three television stations in the state refused to air the original ad — with a modified spot that did not claim Feingold actually received the memo.

Nevertheless, the incident is a good indication of the months ahead. This race, one of five Senate seats Democrats believe they can win in November, is not going to get any less nasty.

And it’s also likely to be one of the most expensive Senate fights in history. Already, the two campaigns have spent $11 million, while the outside groups spent $4 million. And that’s just counting through the end of March.

The Koch brothers have signaled their intention to put their money into state races and avoid the presidential election. Wisconsin is likely to see much, much, more of Freedom Works.

Not content with simply receiving all that outside money, Johnson’s campaign has additionally accused Feingold of hypocrisy for taking bundled contributions from that “dark-money heavyweight” — the League of Conservation Voters.

“Senator Feingold continues to say one thing and do another,” Johnson spokesman Brian Reisinger told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal.

“After repeatedly railing against ‘dark money’ he’s gladly showing his face with a group whose dark money arm is fueling his bid to claw his way back to Washington.”

Indeed, some $125,000 of the $10.7 million that Feingold’s campaign raised through the end of March came from contributions bundled by the league, which the Democratic candidate says he has worked with for 20 years.

Meanwhile, seven outside groups have already spent a combined $4 million against Feingold on Johnson’s behalf.

Feingold did receive a huge boost over the weekend, as Bernie Sanders’ team sent an email to the Vermont senator’s vast army of supporters, encouraging them to donate money to Feingold’s campaign.

Russ Feingold Announces Senate Bid

Russ Feingold Announces Senate Bid

By Alexis Levinson, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold announced Thursday he will run for his old Wisconsin seat.

“Today, I’m pleased to announce that I’m planning to run for the United States Senate in 2016,” Feingold said in an announcement video posted Thursday morning.

Feingold, a three-term senator, was ousted in the 2010 Republican wave by now-Sen. Ron Johnson.

His announcement that he will run to reclaim his old seat comes as no surprise — he has hinted at his plans and Wisconsin Democrats have long said they expected him to run.

Feingold immediately earned the endorsement of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“Russ Feingold has been a tenacious champion for the people of Wisconsin throughout his career and we’re thrilled to announce our support for his campaign,” said DSCC Chairman Jon Tester in a statement.

No other Democrat is expected to run for the seat.

Johnson, a wealthy businessman who self-funded his campaign in 2010, is one of the most vulnerable incumbents facing re-election in 2016. He did minimal fundraising in the first four years of his term, something he acknowledged, though he picked up the pace in the first quarter this year, pulling in $1.3 million. He has said he has no plans to self-fund this cycle.

Feingold’s signature issue in the Senate was campaign finance reform, and in his 2010 campaign he eschewed super PAC money. But super PACs have become ubiquitous in campaigns, and though Feingold criticized the fact that “multimillionaires, billionaires and big corporations are calling all the shots” in Congress in his announcement video, Wisconsin Democrats expect him to accept super PAC money this time to ensure an even playing field.

Since he left the Senate, Feingold most recently served as U.S. special envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He resigned from the post earlier this year.

The race is rated a “Tossup” by the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report/Roll Call.

Watch his announcement video below:

(c)2015 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: JD Lasica via Flickr