A Solution Menu With Prices

The filibuster, the supermajority, the constitutional amendment. The prices are seat.

Americas Undoing is published by A Fight Worth Having. The Not AIPAC SuperPAC.

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Happy Sunday,

Let’s talk about what real solutions actually cost. Not in dollars. In seats and votes.

Most Americans agree on the basics. The economy. Jobs. Healthcare. The influence of money on politics. Education. Immigration. People want these things fixed. They just don’t hear anybody being honest about what fixing them requires.

Just like you can’t take half a round of antibiotics and wonder why you’re still sick, half measures on a broken system make things worse. So here’s the full prescription.

We’ve confused health insurance with healthcare. Having coverage doesn’t mean there’s a hospital, a clinic, or a doctor. We sold off public healthcare delivery over decades, and the nonprofits that replaced it act like for-profits. You can fix who pays the bill and still have towns of two thousand people with nowhere to go at two in the morning. Same with the economy. People don’t want talking points about GDP. They want to afford a house, a doctor, childcare, school. Those things keep getting further out of reach. And we can’t seem to build anything anymore either. Not rail. Not energy infrastructure. Not housing. We have a hard time doing it, period.

So what does changing that actually cost?

Medicare for All has 65% support among likely voters, including nearly half of Republicans. To pass it you need 60 Senate votes to break a filibuster and 218 in the House. And even then you haven’t built a single new hospital or trained a single new doctor. So if you’re going to 60 anyway, go all the way. Restore public ownership of healthcare delivery. A hospital in a town of a thousand people is never going to exist for profit. It never did.

Break up monopolies in healthcare, food, housing. 60 votes. A House majority willing to take on the industries writing their campaign checks.

Tuition-free state owned universities and trade schools. Universal locally owned childcare. A minimum wage a person can live on. 60 votes.

Getting big money out of politics is a different category. The Supreme Court decided corporations have free speech and money is speech. You can’t limit what they spend. To undo that you either remove the justices who made those calls, which takes two-thirds of the Senate to convict, 67 votes, or you pass a constitutional amendment. Two-thirds of the House. Two-thirds of the Senate. Ratification by 38 state legislatures.

That’s the most expensive thing on the menu. And it’s been done before.

In the late twenties Republicans had a trifecta. Then everything collapsed. In 1930 Democrats started picking up seats. By 1932 they broke through. By 1934 they had 69 Senate seats. A supermajority. By 1936 they had 77. The largest in modern American history, built in six years from a minority, by offering something worth voting for while the other side presided over a disaster.

That’s the model. Build the majority. Then use it.

Which is why we have to be straight about where we are right now.

A recent CNN poll found 74% of Americans think congressional Democrats have the wrong priorities. That includes 55% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. CNN’s own data analyst called those numbers atrociously awful and said they scream primary challenges across the map. Democratic voters hold a net negative 4% view of their own congressional leaders. In 2006 that was positive 28. In 2018 it was positive 19. Both of those were midterm years with a Republican in the White House, just like now. Chuck Schumer’s hold on his leadership role is a coin toss according to the prediction markets.

The base isn’t confused. They’re not apathetic. They’re telling you something true, and the people currently in charge aren’t listening.

So we’re going to try something. I’ve put together a list of candidates who support the right policies and are willing to fight for them. They’re either primarying incumbent Democrats or running in open seats, and they’ve all raised at least a hundred thousand dollars, meaning they’re real. Over the next few weeks we’re going to try to talk to as many of them as we can, and get them on board with something simple: work together now, while you’re still campaigning. Build your power as a bloc before you get to Congress. Then actually use that power when you get there.

That’s the whole idea. We know how to do this. We’ve done it before.

But we can’t do it without you. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and help us get these candidates working together.

Corbin Trent

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PS

I have been writing about this for over a year. The thing I hear most, from people who read every word, is some version of yeah, I get it, but what do we do about it.

A Fight Worth Having is being built to answer that question. We are working to find candidates who understand what this moment actually requires. Not just candidates who can win, but candidates who know what winning is for. We put them through a real process before we back them because the filter matters as much as the fuel.

Are they ready to challenge Democratic leadership, not just Republican villains? Are they willing to stand alongside candidates in other states and districts around a shared mission? Do they understand that their victory matters more if the person running three states over wins too?

When we find those candidates we go to work for them through independent expenditure campaigns. That is a legal term for us doing the work ourselves, separate from the candidate, without them having to ask. It means we can move fast, hit hard, and build the kind of infrastructure that the other side has been running for decades.

Next week we’re releasing a list of 46 candidates we think could actually change the math if they’d run together, fight together, and refuse to let leadership off the hook. People we’ve found across the country who are primarying incumbents or running in open seats and have already shown they’re serious. We think this list matters. We’ll show you why next week.

If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do. Go to AFightWorthHaving.com and get in.