More and more Democratic civil war infighting!

Schumer faces brewing war and progressives ramp up primary threats

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has a brewing civil war on his hands as Democratic activists turn up the volume on talk about challenging Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.) in future Democratic primaries. More centrist members of Schumer’s caucus want to move past the messy internal battles over President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda and filibuster reform, two high-priority issues where Manchin and Sinema stood apart from the rest of the caucus.

But liberal lawmakers and many Democratic activists are still fuming over the failures to pass a sweeping climate and social spending bill or voting rights legislation — and the roles Manchin and Sinema played. Schumer surprised some colleagues last week when he declined to say whether he would support Sinema or Manchin in a future primary and instead sidestepped the question.

While some on the left are trying to pretend that the recent censoring of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger is some sort of big deal, it appears that this is little more than projection.  Cheney is not likely to survive a primary challenge and Kinzinger has already dropped out of the 2022 race and will not run for reelection. For the most part, these are two people who are literally leaving Congress and arguably have left the Party. Unlike Manchin and Sinema, whom Democrats censored but also are quite dependant on, these two are not necessary for the Republican Party. 

There is nothing new about the fact that there have been, are currently, and will always be never-Trumpers in the the broader conservative coalition. Many of these never-Trumpers have become irrelevant in the new order, mainly for not accepting the change from the kindler gentler losing politics of someone like Mitt Romney towards a fight fire with fire attitude that the GOP need to get down in the mud and wrestle with the Democrats (who have long been willing to get dirty). 

For many people on the Right, the main appeal of someone like Trump was his willingness to get dirty, willingness to take on the MSM (rather than try to appease it), and ultimately the fact that he won in 2016 when almost anyone else in the GOP would have not had the attitude to do what he did. Liberals hate it, but by criticizing it, they are technically criticizing a dog eat dog anything goes style of politics that has become the bedrock of the Democratic Party. 

The fact of the matter is that never Trumpers are not a danger to the 2022 or 2024 election. But the current attacks from the left on the moderates of the Party is a big threat, especially at a time when so many Americans are moving against that liberal tide.