Month: July 2024

My name is Stephanie Jones and I am a Democratic insider. Not the kind who plays one on teevee, but a real honest-to-goodness one.

As true as it is, it feels strange to say because actual insiders don’t go around calling ourselves insiders. Kind of like how fighter pilots with the right stuff never uttered the words “right stuff, ” we are what we are and there’s no need to talk about it.

But I’m going to make an exception just this time. Because some folks are out here claiming to be insiders and causing a whole lot of trouble.

Some background:

I’m an insider who has sat with presidents and senators and members of Congress and cabinet secretaries in quiet rooms where difficult decisions are made. Sometimes I’ve been there to participate in the decision-making, other times my role was to support the deliberations.

I have been the first person a president has looked for when he walked into a room because he knew I knew exactly where he needed to go and what he was supposed to do.

I’ve been one of the first calls more than one candidate has made when they decided to run for president and needed to be sure they reached out to the right key people before going public.

I’ve participated in several debate preps with a presidential candidate and ridden with them to the debate, so I could give a last-minute brief on how to handle prickly questions, and then climbed back into the car with them afterward so we could discuss how they did.

I have watched a candidate’s victory speech on television, only to notice the tight shot wasn’t reflective of the campaign’s diversity, so I picked up the phone and made a call, and within seconds watched the human backdrop rearrange itself according to my instructions.

I have sat in the Speaker’s box in the House Gallery, at her invitation, to watch her preside over a historic vote.

I’m the Stephanie in the sentence uttered on several occasions: “I know you all think I need to do thus-and-so, but I need to know what Stephanie thinks before I make a decision.”

I’m telling you this, not to boast or show off, but to illustrate my bona fides support what I’m about to tell you.

I’ve done all of these things and more.

But you know what I have NEVER done?  I have never, not once, not ever, told a reporter that I thought someone I worked for or advised had performed poorly in a debate, speech or interview, or was likely to lose an election or needed to change course.  

And I definitely never called or took a call from a reporter during or after a debate, speech, or interview to tell them that I was “jittery” about anything.

Because true insiders don’t do that.

Actual insiders don’t talk to the media about what’s happening on the inside, and they certainly don’t try to send messages to principal through journalists. A hallmark of being an “insider” is that we can communicate directly with the principal or we are well-connected and respected enough by the people in the inner circle that we can tell them and know that our thoughts and advice will make it all the way in.

We don’t go around talking off the record to reporters who are looking for dirt and we definitely don’t provide it to them.

That said, there is a cadre of people in Washington I refer to as “Inside Adjacent”: folks who perhaps worked on the Hill or in a department years ago and have stayed connected enough with certain players to get invited to an occasional DNC briefing or the White House Easter Egg Roll or annual holiday party and have lots of pictures with powerful people they took at fundraisers they paid good money to go to so they could get their pictures taken with powerful people.

I suspect that when we hear pundits talking about how their phones are “blowing up” with calls from “nervous Democratic insiders” and then presenting this as proof that President Biden is “in trouble,” or that “Democrats are wavering,” what you’re really hearing are opinions from the Insider Adjacent crowd.  And I strongly suggest that you take what they’re supposedly saying with a huge dollop of salt.

Of course, it’s always possible, even if it’s not likely, that an actual insider has spoken with a reporter. But, unless and until breathless journalists who claim they are talking with anonymous “insiders familiar with Biden’s thinking” reveal who these so-called “insiders” are, THIS genuine insider suggests that you give their reporting the consideration it merits – in other words, just ignore it.

I remember attending John Roberts’ confirmation hearings in 2005 (including the one in which my father, Judge Nathaniel R. Jones, testified), and noticing a cabal of young lawyers – all of them white Ivy League men – there to support him.

I was struck at the time by their smugness, their confidence in their assured future success, and their generally privileged and rather off-putting and often rude and condescending conduct and demeanor.

Several of my colleagues noted it too, with one saying to me, “They look like the young Aryan Nation. If we don’t stop them, this is our future.”

I have no doubt that those young men we saw then have been, over the last 20 years helping to build the foundation for the MAGA movement and have been instrumental in Project 2025 and its related agendas.

And they are the middle-aged men who are now putting the finishing touches on their wholesale takeover of our democracy. Foremost among their cohort is Brett Kavanaugh, who now sits on the U.S. Supreme Court, but was a high-level White House official when Roberts was appointed and confirmed. The following year, he was appointed to the federal appellate court, which launched his elevation to the Supreme Court where he now is fervently carrying out the MAGA agenda.

It’s important to understand that this didn’t just spring up with the rise of Trump. It has been in the works for decades, even before Roberts’ ascension to the Court. In fact, Roberts was one of the young lawyers in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses that my father described in his testimony as stoking the fires for what is happening today.

“At the time I left my job as General Counsel of the NAACP, a position that I had occupied which Thurgood Marshall also occupied, I had been involved in litigating major civil rights cases all across the country. I joined the court upon appointment by President Carter in 1979.

“At that time, we thought generally that certain civil rights principles were settled. We thought that the issue of school desegregation was settled in light of Chief Justice Burger’s decision in Swann in which he said that busing transportation was an appropriate remedy when you had a finding of constitutional violations that rigged a school district.

“We thought the issue of affirmative action was settled with the Bakke case and Justice Powell’s plurality opinion in which he said you may take race into account.

“But we find that following that case, or those cases which I thought were settled, I was then sitting as a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and I was engaged in dealing with the first wave of attacks against school desegregation and against affirmative action. The challenges claiming preferential treatment, claiming “forced busing,” all of these buzzwords were coming at the court and we were then faced with the decision, are these principles settled?

“I have now learned that in the boiler room of the Reagan administration, stoking out and crafting out a lot of the theories that were being used in the courts to attack these settled principles, was the nominee [John Roberts]. *

This is a long plan coming to fruition. Many of us have tried to warn of this happening, but were ignored or accused of overreacting.

But now that the danger is clear, we all must do everything in our power to stop it.

VOTE BIDEN-HARRIS and VOTE BLUE up and down the ticket.

*You can watch my father’s full testimony here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?188799-3/roberts-confirmation-hearing-day-4-part-3

I can’t help but notice that most of the calls for President Biden to be tossed out of the presidential race and replaced by a shiny new and younger but usually unnamed candidate have two weirdly connected features: 1) they also include jettisoning his Vice President Kamala Harris, his hand-picked successor: and 2) the cabal of commentators calling for this move is almost all white.

Hardly a coincidence. The white media elite has long treated America’s first Black vice president as invisible.

And, true to form, they have also thrown the invisibility cloak over tens of millions of Black voters who wholeheartedly support President Biden and Vice President Harris, pretending we don’t exist or just don’t matter.

It’s easy to float ideas when you’re not responsible for gaming them out, much less, making them work, and to assume that the outcome you want is the only outcome that will ensue. But that’s a child’s way of thinking, like a 5-year-old assumes the only possible consequence of dashing into traffic to retrieve her errant ball is that she will simply retrieve her errant ball.

The folks floating the cockamaimie Biden Replacement Theory that has no possible path to success (see my analysis here), seem not to have considered the political ramifications of banishing the sitting vice president into political exile.

The cavalier dismissal of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s replacement is particularly interesting given that she is one of fewer than a dozen people alive today who have actual hands-on experience as president or vice president. And three of those people are term limited, one is in hospice, and other than the previous vice president whom Biden’s opponent sent a mob to kill, the others have shown no interest in returning to the White House in any capacity.

So, if Joe Biden needs to be replaced, his hand-picked vice president is not only the most logical choice, she is literally THE most qualified person on earth available to step into his shoes should the need arise.

And yet, these pundits barely mention her in this regard and when they do utter her name, it’s simply to bat it away so the they can float the names of various white people who don’t come close to having her bona fides, name recognition, political support, or confidence of the president they want replaced.

The purported goal of the Biden Replacement Theory is to ensure a victory in November by switching him out with someone who supposedly will attract more votes than the incumbent president will. And yet the Kamala-free solution would hemorrhage tens of millions of votes of people – particularly African-American voters – who would not docilely go along with the first Black female vice president being supplanted by a largely unknown and untested candidate plucked from the Great White Hope short list, whom most people outside of their home state and a small circle of political junkies have never even heard of.

And yet, the pundits haven’t considered, much less managed to come up with a plan for making up for the innumerable critical votes that will be lost in this gambit and pulling together the fragile coalition of voters needed to win in November without Joe Biden on the ticket with Kamala Harris by his side.

Black voters, the loyal base of the party, who year after year put in the hard work and drag us over the finish line to victories made more difficult by reticent white Democrats, are only so tolerant and will only take so much before we say “Enough!” We are not going to accept being spit in the face as our votes and candidates are snatched away from us in order to appease a handful of unreliable Independents and shaky, fair-weather Democrats.

Many of the people who demand that Democrats upend our entire campaign to appease a few people they think might not vote for Biden because he’s not a spring chicken assume that Black voters don’t deserve the same (or any) deference because we’ll put up with anything – after all, “where else are they going to go,” right?

Well, invoke the ultimate act of white supremacy-steeped political betrayal against us and you’ll see where a critical mass of Black voters go. Or more accurately, where they DON’T go: to the polls.

And the few independents picked up with this scheme won’t come close to making up for the loss of Black support or the irreparable long-term damage done to the party and to the country as a result of such a monumental double-cross.

The chattering class of pundits and self-proclaimed but unidentified Democratic “insiders” have made it clear that Kamala Harris and millions of Black voters are irrelevant and invisible to them. But if the Democratic Party were to lose its collective mind and follow their advice, they will realize, too late, that they’ve made a tragic mistake.

Because while Black voters may be invisible to the media elite, the last thing the party or country needs is for Black voters to make ourselves invisible in November.