Complaints about Democrats NOT being hard enough against Donald Trump and the GOPer’s….
The three-day gathering, which will draw several of the Democratic Party’s top 2020 presidential prospects to New Orleans this week — including U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren — is a stark reminder of the ideological and tactical rifts within the party barely three months out from the November election.
While Democratic leaders in Washington push forward with a midterm campaign agenda focused on health care and the economy, activists are embracing sanctuary cities, gay rights and other social issues igniting the Democratic base.
The conference opened with a panel calling explicitly for a “litmus test” on Democrats supporting abortion rights — a direct rebuke of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Ben Ray Luján’s comments last year that the party would impose no such test.
Decrying Trump’s immigration policies, Angelica Rubio, a Democratic state representative from New Mexico, described herself to a small crowd Thursday as “someone who feels incredibly saddened at times, with even my own political party, when it comes to issues of militarization of the border.”
And, invoking former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2016 campaign message, “when they go low, we go high,” Monica Roberts, a transgender rights advocate from Texas, told fellow progressives, “The Democratic Party needs to get some balls … There are some times in political life that you have to go World Wrestling Federation on people.”
In the conference’s early stages and on its sidelines, Trump is everywhere. Rallying about 400 supporters at a town hall meeting on the eve of the conference, billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer, a potential presidential candidate who’s spending millions to rally voters behind impeachment, said, “The powers that be in Washington, D.C., do not want us to talk about this … They want us to stand down. They think it’s bad politics, or they just don’t want to talk about the truth.”…..
image….Tom Steyer speaks at the Netroots annual conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 2 August. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters