Anita Chabria: One week: How long it took Democrats to let us down

Seriously, one week, Democrats?

You couldn’t have kept our hope for a revived democracy alive a little longer? You couldn’t pretend to have a spine, or leadership, respect for voters, or even just a plan — for more than seven days?

On the first Tuesday after the blue tsunami supposedly restored the checks and balances of our government, barely 170 hours into this shift of power, a vote to stop Republicans from burying an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was tanked by ... Democrats. Eleven of them, to be precise, who didn’t show up to cast their vote in the House, thereby letting the impeachment effort be rolled into an early grave in the committee process.

New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury, one of the Absent 11, had this to say about getting stuck in traffic on her way back from a Democratic cocktail party and missing the vote: “There is no one who is more disappointed in myself than me that I was not here that the moment that gavel dropped.”

Actually, Mel, there is.

In fact, there are millions of folks more disappointed in you than you are — in all Democrats, for that matter. Not only are they disappointed, they’re rightfully angry, which is a major, magical feat when seven days ago, America was embracing the Democratic Party in a way it hasn’t in more than a decade. It’s actually impressive Democrats could screw up so badly, so quickly.

So what really went wrong? Were Republicans just too organized? Democrats sloppy? Should the 11 be held responsible, or is it a larger Democrat mess?

Or did, as Stansbury explained, a slow-rolling bus really just destroy the Democrats’ comeback?

The California 3

Three of the Absent 11 were Californians, so let’s take a look at that. Santa Ana’s Lou Correa knew in advance he wouldn’t be at the vote for medical reasons. On Monday, he told media that he was having a surgery and couldn’t travel — but he didn’t think he would be missing much.

“Other than the [Pete] Hegseth impeachment, there’s nothing else,” Correa said in an interview, adding that he supported impeachment of the Defense secretary.

But it turned out he had a heart attack and Tuesday needed emergency open-heart surgery, so fair. Correa gets a pass.

Democratic standard-bearer Nancy Pelosi was also in California instead of Congress, having flown back that day. Surely, this lioness of the left must have a good reason?

“Speaker Emerita Pelosi returned to San Francisco to join and honor local veterans at Swords to Plowshares’ 30th Annual Veterans Day Celebration tonight, an important and longstanding district tradition she regularly attends and will mark for the last time as a Member of Congress by receiving the Lifetime Advocate for Veterans Award,” her spokesperson told SFGate.

“We could never do enough” to honor veterans, she said at that event.

Sure, great, OK. Like you know, protecting them from an amateurish “secretary of War” who has decimated the leadership ranks of the military and is being accused of perhaps ordering extrajudicial killings?

And what about Julia Brownley, the soon-to-retire Westlake Village congresswoman who was also absent?

She posted on Facebook that “Hegseth is one of the most incompetent, corrupt, and underqualified Secretaries of Defense in the history of our nation.”

But, as she “and many of my colleagues were rushing to the floor to support Hegseth’s impeachment, [Speaker] Mike Johnson closed the vote before we could.”

D’oh!

I sent multiple emails to her office asking why she was so late, but didn’t receive a response. Other outlets have indicated she was stuck in traffic too.

Regardless of gridlock, as another Californian — Los Angeles Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove — put it, it was “shameful” to miss the vote.

“We knew that this vote was coming, so people should have gotten their raggedy selves up these steps to vote,” she said. “There is no reason why we should have lost this vote because of attendance issues.”

But was it really the Absent 11’s fault?

Leadership vacuum

Multiple news outlets have reported that the postelection celebration that pulled so many party members away from Congress and into traffic was also attended by Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts. The whip, for those who don’t know, is the party member elected to herd the rest into voting.

The Wall Street Journal reported Clark left the party early because she heard about the logjam and didn’t want to miss the vote — but apparently didn’t tell her colleagues?

At a Wednesday morning meeting, Clark apparently expressed her disappointment that her fellow Congress members didn’t show up, which, again, is her responsibility to ensure that they do. One job, Madame Whip, one job.

But maybe it wasn’t Clark’s fault either?

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who would very much like to become House speaker and probably will, had earlier declared himself a “hard yes” on impeaching Hegseth.

But critics, especially on the progressive left, are attacking him for failing to round up support on this vote — there was, apparently, no be-there-or-face-consequences message.

Jeffries has been criticized in the past for seemingly failing to understand just how anxious the Democratic base is for action, and failing to keep his party on track. He’s also been criticized as a less-than-dynamic communicator.

It’s more than possible that Democrats didn’t think this was the right time to impeach Hegseth, with the articles introduced by Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie. The impeachment effort was somewhat doomed in the House from the start, and the Senate, where an impeachment trial would be held, is for now still Republican dominated.

Maybe Jeffries is playing chess, opting for strategy over optics.

The real lesson

But it’s irrelevant whether this was strategy or screw-up — it’s a sour start. The Democrats just proved in short order that they do not understand this moment in American politics, and they are really, really bad at communicating.

Both of those are politically deadly. If Democrats, or the leadership under Jeffries, thought that this vote didn’t matter to the public or that it wasn’t the best way to go, they were wrong.

Whether this impeachment was going to be successful or just symbolic, it was the symbol voters wanted. It was an easy way for Democrats to show they heard the message from this election and were taking voters seriously.

If there was indeed a masterful backroom political strategy to not voting, Democrats needed to communicate that in advance. Before they put a knife in Massie’s back and ours, there needed to be solid, clear messaging about why the blade was for the greater good. Because, seriously, Hegseth is unqualified and dangerous.

This debacle does not bode well for what comes in the next session of Congress. Voters didn’t elect Democrats to play secretive games, to plot and plan in the dark for future moves, or worse — to continue the status quo of wandering around in disarray as Republicans stay in lockstep.

Seven days, Democrats. I’ve bought fish that lasted longer.