By Josh Feit
A Democratic Majority > Stephen Miller’s Promotion
If you’re outraged that Trump promoted Stephen Miller to White House Chief of Staff, you—not Trump— have surely missed the point of last Tuesday’s election results.
Who cares that Trump named Miller as White House Chief of Staff on Friday. The joy of Tuesday is that I can’t be bothered with what Trump does anymore. Watching fellow Democrats react to the Miller story this week with the usual outrage strikes me as missing the point of the election. And it doesn’t help that the New York Times fell for it too (surprise, surprise) as they amplify Trump’s post-election cry for attention by playing along. Their willingly gullible headline ponders Trump’s decision to “forge ahead with an agenda that many voters rejected.” More accurate headline: Trump reverts to class-clown form by taunting Democrats with obvious troll.
Trump thrives on driving the Democratic base crazy. Appointing Miller as a response to Election Day’s thundering anti-MAGA vote was Trump, in a state of denial, attempting to get his usual round of attention as if he still had that power over us. The point Democrats need to take in is that he doesn’t. Or shouldn’t anymore. He’s a lame duck saddled with a movement that utterly collapsed on Tuesday night in the biggest popular vote backlash in fifty years.
And practically speaking, Miller has already had teacher’s-pet prominence in the White House anyway. Miller’s elevation doesn’t represent anything new. Trump and Miller have been trying to destroy America with their KKK politics for years. Miller is the policy architect behind ICE and its terrorist mission, one that has imprisoned an estimated 70,000 people in abusive detention centers to date where several have died. Feeling outrage over Miller’s new role is redundant. The only thing that’s new is that Democrats have the power stop to him. Let’s act like it. The historic blue wave means that rather than taking Trump’s bait and flipping out about his every latest kneejerk ploy, we can take the initiative instead.
The commanding Democratic majorities can block any new Miller policies and also hold Miller accountable for his reign to date, including conducting a congressional investigation into the shooting deaths of ICE victims like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti.
This week’s historic rebuke is also a historic mandate. We should take the initiative by passing Democratic policies. Trump will be the one who’s now stuck reacting.
It’s fitting that the last time either party won the House popular vote by such a decisive margin (at least 13 points) was when the Democrats did so in the immediate aftermath of Watergate in 1976. This comparison isn’t potent simply because both routs involved a historically corrupt president, but because the American project to expand rights was in full bloom in 1976. It was nice to wake up in America again this week.
As this becomes the “Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!” election, it’s worth pointing out this now-famous taunt happened at a rally in Mississippi in late October, when Trump was campaigning for Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. The Democratic challenger, District Attorney Scott Colom, is now poised to win and flip another red senate seat blue.
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A Long List of Pro-Housing Bills > A Kneejerk Progressive Vote
The blue wave hit Washington’s state legislature in last week’s election too. Democrats are set to go from a simple majority to a supermajority in the state house, and if the pickup in the 35th legislative district holds, the Democrats advantage in the senate will go from a 30-19 to a 31-18. And it wasn’t just a blue wave, it was a dark blue one, with a handful of progressive challenger ousting Democratic incumbents.
Unfortunately, the lack of nuance in that kind of wave doesn’t bode well for the urbanist, pro-housing agenda next session. Specifically, it’s disappointing that incumbent YIMBY superstar Sate Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32) was ousted by the progressive challenge from longtime state house rep Cindy Ryu (D-32). (The 32nd LD covers Shoreline, Edmunds, Mountlake Terrace, and Lynnwood.)
In recent years, Salomon has taken a daring lead and passed some of the session’s most innovative, pro-density legislation, including bills to authorize co-living micro housing, disarm NIMBY misuse of historic landmarking, exempt infill housing from prohibitive SEPA appeals, and hack anti-density zoning regs by creating more density in existing confines with his single-stairway bill, and a PubliCola favorite along the same lines—his elevator reform bill. Salomon also took on AI rent fixing. Thanks to his A+ record on housing, the Urbanist endorsed him over Ryu.
Ryu, who got her start opposing pedestrian-friendly fixes to Aurora, represents the political sphere where progressives and NIMBYs align in a provincial wariness of development. This potent wing of the Democratic party could pose a real threat this coming legislative session to state senate housing committee chair Sen. Jessica Bateman (even more of a YIMBY standout than Salomon). Bateman (D-22, Olympia) is the housing hero whose monumental 2023 fourplex legislation, HB 1110, forced reluctant Seattle (and former mayor Harrell) to allow more density in neighborhood residential zones. As Sen. Bateman cues up her 2027 pro-housing agenda, it’s bad news for urbanists that she no longer has Salomon as a legislative ally. And, worse that Beatmean’s intraparty foes will have a new ally in Ryu.
Josh@Publicola.com