What Trump can learn from Obama’s rough ride on health care

We talked a few weeks ago about the differences between rhetorical populism and actual populism, and it’s clear that the Republican president-elect has effectively cornered the market on the former. The Democratic Party should be so lucky. McConnell said last week that he wouldn’t anticipate yet that Democrats would try to block Trump’s nominee “or what we might do in reaction to that”.

America, the thinking goes, is now a Republican, conservative country. That’d be more than double the $23,660 threshold that we now have, and would give a raise to as many as 4 million workers. Over the summer Trump took the highly unusual step of releasing a short list of judges he would consider, heavily advertising that the list was basically handed to him by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, two far-right think tanks.

Republican Sen. Jim Guthrie’s highly publicized affair with another lawmaker seemed to have no impact on his re-election, and fellow Southeast Idaho GOP incumbents Rep. Kelley Packer and Sen.

Democrats should reject the urge to take comfort in favorable demographic trends. It would require companies to automatically pay salaried employees making $47,476 or less annually time-and-a-half overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week.

The exact balance of the body in the coming two years remains unresolved pending a pair of recounts on Long Island. The more Trump railed against the elites, the more the media characterized him as a populist, and the more his fans swooned.

“In my opinion, we don’t need white people leading the Democratic Party right now”, she told CNN’s Brianna Keilar Wednesday on “Wolf”.

And when another reporter asked whether Senate Republicans’ attitude will change now that Trump is president, he said he hopes they can all unite to solve the problem. I don’t have almost enough space to list all the ways in which he disqualified himself. Congressional Republicans may be able to enact their own versions of domestic initiatives, defense spending and immigration. Not to mention that while Democrats might agree with some of Trump’s goals – among them, child care and infrastructure – they don’t agree with the way he wants to use tax breaks that would mostly benefit the rich and well-connected to achieve them. There will be blood (metaphorically, of course).

The calls to go “nuclear” are only likely to intensify next year when Democrats begin to carry out their pledge to fight Trump’s agenda on areas where they disagree.

Hillary Clinton promised to name justices who would “represent” and “stand up” for one cause or another.

In other words, a Republican president-elect is thinking about taking Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s approach to relieving economic distress.

On the other hand, the Republicans, even with an unpredictable candidate like Donald Trump, delivered a message that hit home with the average voter, who was looking for something different and a candidate who gave hope for the future. They voted against both political parties. But there is an alternative to the no-holds-barred partisanship that has delivered nothing but gridlock and frustration to the American people. Two policies in particular are at high risk of being repealed on Trump’s first day in office: the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, and the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program for undocumented immigrants with citizen children.

Democrats have won the popular vote in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012 and now 2016. The president is a unique political talent of the kind that appears only once in a great while, when the stars magically align. One of the most interesting things that I found, talking to attendees at both the Republican and Democratic conventions over the summer, was that Republicans often spoke about the Supreme Court and Democrats nearly never did. Less than 60 percent of those eligible to cast ballots in the election bothered to do so.

The only way forward for NY to offer a strong defense to Trump’s reckless policies is for Democrats in Albany to come together. Trump made a bunch of pie-in-the-sky promises he can never keep.

Democrats will win when theirs is the “big tent” party.