Blue Dog Blues

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

18 January 14

Four years ago, they were the most influential voting bloc on Capitol Hill, more than 50 House Democrats pulling their liberal colleagues to a more centrist, fiscally conservative vision on issues such as health care and Wall Street reforms.

Thereby leading us to the very provisions by which the Affordable Care Act has been vulnerable to hobbling, and to the rise in the financial-services sector of Even Too Bigger To Fail. Please do continue.

In danger of losing even more clout, the leading Blue Dogs are regrouping and rebuilding. They are adding four members to their ranks this week - Reps. Ron Barber (Ariz.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.), Nick J. Rahall II (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) - and angling to play a key role in bipartisan talks over the next few years in the belief that the polar tension in the Capitol will thaw.

Look, unicorns!

"We're in this for the long haul," Rep. Kurt Schrader (Ore.), co-chairman of the Blue Dogs, said in an interview, predicting that the Democrats could regain the majority only if they are once again competitive in those rural and Southern districts. "We're the way the Democrats are going to get back into the majority."

Is there something about actual progressive populism that simply won't sell in rural districts? Most of the progressive ideas the last time we had a Gilded Age came out of rural districts. Bob LaFollette didn't grow up in Queens, after all. I believe the time for selling out principles is probably over.

The group wants its power to grow and thinks that the tea party influence on House Republicans will begin to wane, leaving many rank-and-file GOP lawmakers searching for Democratic allies to restore the legislative process. "Maybe because of the heightened partisanship in this Congress, you're seeing more and more members interested in working across the aisle," Schrader said.

Stop. No, really. You're killing me.

After Republicans made historic gains in 1994, routing longtime Southern strongholds that had tilted to the right, a small group of remaining Democrats from rural districts created the Blue Dogs around the principle of fiscal restraint. Slowly but surely, their ranks grew. By 2006, then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) scoured the countryside looking for future Blue Dogs to recruit, leading to a midterm election that vaulted the Democrats and Pelosi into power. Back then, Blue Dogs kept some interested Democrats out of their coalition. Their internal rules forbid them from becoming more than 20 percent of the full Democratic caucus, because they do not want to water down their centrist views. In 2009 and 2010, Pelosi spent countless hours negotiating with senior Blue Dogs over the scope of the Affordable Care Act. The group played a key role in eliminating what liberals had considered a key piece of the health-care legislation, a public insurance option, to assure the overall bill's passage.

Jesus, not this again. The gains the Democratic party made in the 2006 midterms were a function of C-Plus Augustus's many and varied cock-ups, and because Howard Dean's 50-state strategy put in place a party mechanism that was perfectly suited to take advantage of said cock-ups. This has been written out of history by the courtier press because Rahm is a Beltway character while Howard Dean yelled in a ballroom once. And these are not centrists. They are conservative Democrats.

John Tanner, a former congressman from west Tennessee who co-founded the coalition in 1995, says he is working with normally Republican-leaning interests on Washington's K Street to deliver a message that they need to support these centrist Democrats because their GOP opponents tilt toward tea party interests that have not been friendly to the business community. "It's an opportunity to reach out to a whole new crowd downtown," Schrader said of the fundraising potential for the four new Blue Dogs.

Yeah, what the Democratic party needs at this moment in history to attach itself to The Business Community again.