Nancy Braus, a retired independent bookseller, is a longtime activist.
GUILFORD-Even amid certainty that a terrible event will occur - when you have seen the players in action too many times before and you know your side does not stand a chance - the actual feeling of the knife sliding in the back is real.
Even when we have seen the same show of spinelessness again and again, how can we not feel pain from the weakness and betrayal yet another time?
Especially when our side had a small amount of real power after great showings in elections in places as different as New York City and rural Virginia one week ago. Now should have been the time to make a serious demand that health care subsidies - urgently needed by millions of Americas - be extended.
Instead, we saw the weakest Democrats in history walk away without any of the health-care subsidies for which the party has been standing firm on principle. But wait - their wealthy friends can fly to the Alps for Thanksgiving, so it was a great deal.
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During the entire political debacle - the most agonizing since the narrow election of Trump last year - I've made some major observations:
1. No matter how stupid, illegal, far from any past norm, and cruel Trump's irrational demands run, those in power - no matter the party - say, "Yes, sir, we will jump for you - you just tell us how high."
2. Those in the formerly august Senate chamber in the distant past worked with one another to create legislation that often did something these current automatons can't grasp: working across the aisle to create that long-out-of-favor concept of compromise. That word has been stricken from the Republican Party's legislative vocabulary.
3. In spite of a party that continues to work with the worst corporate shills - e.g., those who brought us the truly awful consultant-driven Harris campaign - there are always a handful of Democrats who have integrity, bravery, and a true willingness to lay it all on the line for the American people, especially those millions who are being punished for the crime of not being billionaires under these fascists.
None of those people ever have enough power to prevail in the current legislature. Yet.
* * *
I have been trying to give the sellouts the benefit of the doubt, trying to understand why they would sell out millions of their constituents. And what did they obtain by giving Trump his exact demands and getting exactly nothing meaningful in return?
So in real terms, the complete and total sell-out of the entire working class was in the hands of a small minority of Senators. We must ask ourselves what was in it for these eight Senators, who chose Donald Trump's demand to reopen the Senate for no deal that benefited those in need.
They gave away their only lever to power that might have assured that legislation for health-care subsidies was ever going to pass, thus effectively and intentionally ending the health care that has sustained millions of Americans, and thus signing the death knell for hundreds of rural hospitals.
What they got was a weak promise to vote in both chambers in December - with the House speaker, mini-Trump Mike Johnson, already refusing to commit to a vote. And the sell-out Dems knew this at the time.
* * *
I have had the strong feeling that the centrist-, corporate-, consultant-led class of Democrats was always more comfortable with the authoritarianism of Donald Trump than the "Medicare for all" beliefs of Sen. Bernie Sanders's millions of passionate supporters.
And since the election of Zohran Mamdani - the most exciting new figure who is, like Bernie, Democrat-aligned, but identifies as a Democratic Socialist - people like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand are squirming whenever asked about New York City's mayor-elect. This terrible sell-out of the basic needs of the American people may be one more clang in the death knell of the Democratic Party.
When your priority is getting planes running on time and giving Trump his wish over allowing insurance companies to terminate treatment for millions of children with cancer, adults with heart disease, and the long fights against rampant diseases like Parkinson's, all in favor of kissing the ring of a demented, deteriorating dictator, your priorities speak for you.
You really deserve a new job, one where human lives are not held in your hands.
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