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Democrats are maneuvering to claim the interests of the American people on their side, with a rallying cry of transparency. They're decrying a combination of quick hearings -- several key nominees will testify next week -- with what they say is a slow pace of nominees returning standard paperwork for vetting.

They want to put Trump on trial through his nominees, using the billionaires he's nominated to his Cabinet to call attention to conflicts of interest, and using conservative nominees to show how Trump has reversed course from previous campaign promises, according to aides and senators.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats want at least two days to review each nominee, full paperwork, tax returns for many of the nominees with complex financial records, and hearings spread out so members can attend as many as they want.

"There are a lot of questions about these nominees," Schumer said. "And I would like to succeed in negotiating something but we get full and fair hearings. ... There are so many issues about so many of them that to rush them through would be a disservice to the American people."

With a majority in the Senate, Republicans have a strong chance of confirming virtually all of Trump's nominees and are able to set the schedule and pace for the confirmation process. Several key nominees are set to testify next week, including Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and James Mattis as secretary of defense.

One senior Democratic leadership aide maintained that stacking up the hearings and nominees is "exactly the kind of thing that can cause trouble" for the GOP with Democrats.

Democrats are already getting backup from the progressive base. On Wednesday a progressive group launched an advertising blitz on television stations targeting vulnerable Republican senators to vote against Trump's nominee to run the Treasury Department, Steven Mnuchin. And more than 1,000 law school professors from across the country wrote a letter to the Judiciary Committee opposing Sessions, raising money to place the letter as a newspaper ad in senators' hometown newspapers. As of Wednesday evening, the effort had raised more than $15,000.

Republicans say that they are following precedent in moving quickly on the President-elect's nominees. Several of President Barack Obama's nominees were confirmed in a voice vote on Inauguration Day and most of the rest of them soon followed, noted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's spokesman Don Stewart.

"When President Obama was elected, Republicans and Democrats worked together and expeditiously to carefully consider his nominees," Stewart said. "Sen. Schumer and others approved wholeheartedly of this approach at the time, so surely they won't object to treating the incoming president's nominees with the same courtesy and seriousness with which the Senate acted on President Obama's nominees."

McConnell told reporters on Wednesday that he hoped national security positions could move quickly.

But Democrats say speed wasn't a problem for the Obama nominees because his team provided adequate background on nominees, while Trump's camp has not.

"We are only expecting from the Trump nominees what the Obama nominees provided," said Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, who is the top Democrat on the committee that will confirm Trump's homeland security and budget picks. "All the Obama confirmations that occurred in the early weeks of the Obama administration, all of those things had been done. Only one nominee right now has that done, only one."

Democratic lawmakers repeatedly cited conflict of interest forms from the Office of Government Ethics, financial disclosures and background checks from the FBI that are mandatory for nominees.

"As Ronald Reagan said, 'Facts are stubborn things,' and ultimately I think if there is enough outcry and uproar about qualifications, that will have an effect," Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said.

Democrats don't have much say in when hearings are scheduled, but they can respond to a rushed hearing process by dragging out votes. Using procedural measures, Democrats could force each confirmation vote on the floor of the Senate to take up to a week, by insisting on cloture votes and full debate time for each nominee. That would string the confirmation process out over months and prevent any other legislation from getting done in the meantime.

Democrats aren't backing off their demands, saying if the stall tactics come into play, Republicans will "own it," per No. 3 Senate Democrat Patty Murray.

"If the Republicans can't come to a reasonable agreement and throw their first month or two into total chaos, it's on their back. We're willing to be reasonable," Schumer told CNN Wednesday. "We have a good deal of leverage. We hope we don't have to use it, but we have a good deal of leverage."

At least one Democrat up for re-election in 2018 in a state carried by Trump this November, McCaskill, said she wasn't concerned about being labeled an obstructionist in opposing nominees.

"That didn't seem to be a problem for (Sens.) Pat Toomey or Rob Portman -- and my recollection is they engaged in a whole lot of obstructionism," McCaskill said of two Republicans re-elected in battleground states this November. "I'm not going to be an obstructionist, but I'm going to do my job."

CNN's Jeremy Diamond and Ted Barrett contributed to this report.

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Democrats plan to put Trump on trial through his nominees ...

Democrats unseated two Republicans on the East Rutherford council, with George Cronk and Philip Sorbera II defeating incumbents Joel Brizzi and Michael Homaychak, according to unofficial results.

TARIQ ZEHAWI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

A voter arrives with his son at his polling site at East Rutherford Firehouse on Carlton Ave on Election Day.

Democrat incumbent Wayne Hamer won in a landslide in the race for the citys 4th Ward council seat.

Democrats Thomas Mullahey and Mark Goldsack have won against Republican incumbent Mark O'Connor and Republican challenger Michael Duffy for two seats on the Rutherford Council.

Secaucus residents voted 3,170 to 2,042 to establish an open space trust fund to preserve remaining tracts of open space in the town. The result of the ballot initiative allows the town to establish an annual tax levy at the rate of 1 cent per hundred dollars of assessed value.

Emerson selected Gerald Falotico, a Democrat, and incumbent Councilwoman Danielle DiPaola, a Republican, to serve on the borough council on Tuesday night.

According to unofficial results Falotico received 1724 votes and DiPaola garnered 1720.

Kenneth Hoffman, who ran with DiPaola, received 1685 votes while Michael D. DeOrio, who ran with Falotico, gained 1490 votes.

BERNADETTE MARCINIAK/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

A voter exits Tenakill Middle School in Closter after casting her ballot on Nov. 8, 2016.

Unofficial election results Tuesday night show Democratic candidate Michael D. Warren has defeated Republican incumbent Kenneth J. Kovalcik by two votes for a seat in the Rochelle Park Township Committee.

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The latest: Democrats unseat two Republicans on East ...

The union representing New Jersey teachers has told Democratic Party leaders that it will not make any campaign contributions this year until the Senate votes on a constitutional amendment requiring that the state make quarterly payments to the public employee pension fund, a top Democratic official confirmed Tuesday.

John Currie, chairman of the New Jersey Democratic Party, said Wendell Steinhauer called him Monday night to deliver the unions position. The story was first reported in Politico New Jersey.

Union officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Currie, who is also Passaic County Democratic chairman, said the union had called several Democratic County chairs to say that the unions contributions will cease unless the Democratic-controlled Senate puts the pension amendment up for a vote.

I probably got the call first, Currie said. Theyre just frustrated with the Senate president, Stephen Sweeney.

The call from Steinhauer came after union members unleashed a chorus of boos from the visitors gallery after the Senate concluded a voting session without taking action on the pension amendment.

Sweeney who co-sponsored the pension amendment said he delayed the vote until the Legislature can resolve an impasse with Governor Christie over how to fund the states dwindling Transportation Trust Fund.

I am the primary sponsor of the pension amendment, as I was in 2011, Sweeney said in a prepared statement Monday. There is no one in the State House who has done more to bring this plan closer to completion than I have.

However, I have not fought this hard, only to see its passage jeopardized, he added. Decisions about the states finances cannot be made in a vacuum. Until there is a rational resolution to the transportation funding crisis, passage of the pension amendment by the voters remains unlikely.

Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, D-Secaucus, have agreed on a plan to replenish the transportation trust fund with a 23-cents-per-gallon increase in the gas tax. Their plan also calls for phasing out the estate tax.

Christie said he was willing to support the gas tax increase, but only if the Democratic-controlled Legislature agreed to lower the state sales tax to 6 percent from 7 percent.

At a State House news conference Tuesday, Christie said he had spoken to both Sweeney and Prieto and was open to negotiating with them.

But at another news conference later in the day, Sweeney sounded less optimistic.

Were working to try to get it done, Sweeney said. Its important to get it done. Im not hopeful. I just dont see a pathway at this point.

The Legislature is facing a deadline. Unless the Senate passes the pension amendment by next week, it will not be ready in time to appear on the ballot in November.

Currie said he wanted more time to study the situation.

I want to get all the facts before I make a statement, Currie said. I would love to see the pension fully funded.

Email: ensslin@northjersey.com

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N.J. teachers union won't donate to Democrats until Senate ...

As the new Congress is set to convene Tuesday, Democrats are mounting an aggressive messaging campaign against Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare.

Democrats are warning that repealing President Obamas signature healthcare law would lead to tens of millions of Americans losing their healthcare coverage and affect Medicare and Medicaid. Since Republicans will have the power to dismantle the major pillars of the law, Democrats are trying to protect it by touting all of its benefits.

This is not just about the 20 million previously uninsured who now have health security, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said during a call with reporters Monday. But this is about the 75 percent of American people who get their health benefits through their workplace -- not through the ACA.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to to make a rare visit to Capitol Hill Wednesday morning to huddle privately with House and Senate Democrats to strategize how to preserve Obamacare. Vice President-elect Mike Pence is also heading to Capitol Hill that day to meet with Republicans about their plans.

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President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. President Obama is huddling with Demo...

Early this year, Republicans are planning to immediately begin work on repealing Obamacares major parts through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires a majority for passage in the Senate and not a supermajority. Last year, the GOP-controlled House and Senate sent a bill that would have repealed the law to President Obama, which he quickly vetoed. That effort could now become reality with Donald Trump as president, who promised repeatedly during his campaign that he would scrap the law.

Republicans have argued that Obamacare has led to rising premiums and a lack of choices in the healthcare market. Democrats say the purpose of the law was to lower healthcare costs, increase access and increase benefits for all Americans.

If the ACA were to be repealed, tens of millions of Americans lose their coverage, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said Monday during the press call. And tens of millions of others will see their healthcare costs skyrocket.

Hoyer bashed a plan that was recently floated by Republicans that would involve Congress passing a repeal plan, but delaying its effective date for at least a few years while a replacement plan can be developed.

Republicans so-called repeal and delay plan is code for repeal without an alternative, Hoyer said.

Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, top Democrat on the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, defended the law by arguing that it has led to 137 million Americans now having access to preventive services without cost-sharing, it has addressed chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes and it has expanded Medicaid eligibility.

The repeal bill Congress passed last year would have repealed the health-care laws tax hikes, insurance exchange subsidies and the Medicaid expansion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the plan would lead to 22 million people losing their healthcare insurance.

While Mr. Trump has made it clear hes in favor of repealingthe law, he suggested after the election that they wouldnt dismantle the law without a replacement plan ready and would do it simultaneously.

Were not going to have, like, a two-day period and were not going to have a two-year period where theres nothing, he said on 60 Minutes when asked if people would lose their coverage.

Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, told 60 Minutes Scott Pelley in an interview in December that they want to repeal the law as soon as possible.

We have to bring relief as fast as possible to people struggling under Obamacare, said Ryan, who was then asked what it would be replaced with. Patient-centered healthcare that gets everybody access to affordable healthcare coverage, so that they can buy whatever they want to buy.

To cap off the first week of the new congressional session, Pelosi is calling on her Democratic colleagues to hold press events in their respective districts Saturday to highlight the risks of repeal of the ACA and of ending the Medicare guarantee. House Democrats are also coordinating a Our First Stand: Save Health Care day of action on Jan. 15 with their counterparts in the Senate including Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont.

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The House Speaker tells 60 Minutes he wants to bring relief to those "struggling under Obamacare." Here's how he plans to replace it

Democratic governors are also voicing their concerns about a repeal. In a recent letter to Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, they argued that reversing the law would throw millions of our residents off their insurance coverage.

Repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including its Medicaid expansion, would be a financial and health disaster for states. Repeal would throw millions of our residents off their health coverage, shift enormous costs to state governments blowing a hole in state budgets and cause economic uncertainty for our states businesses, hospitals, and patients, the letter said.

Without a replacement plan, repealing the law would risk making 30 million people uninsured, according to a study released last month from the nonpartisan Urban Institute. Of that total, it predicted 22.5 million would become uninsured because of the laws subsidies being repealed and 7.3 million would become uninsured because of the near collapse of the nongroup insurance market.

Mr. Trump, for his part, has chosen a key Obamacare opponent as his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services: Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia, who was part of crafting previous legislation to undo the law.

Price is among eight people Mr. Trump has nominated to his Cabinet who Senate Democrats plan to target as congressional committees hold their confirmation hearings early this year, according to a report Monday by The Washington Post.

Pelosi, meanwhile, admitted Monday that if she could have done one thing differently on Obamacare, she said Democrats could have messaged it in a much stronger way.

Originally posted here:
Democrats mount aggressive messaging campaign against ...

Ross K. Baker 12:28 p.m. EST December 27, 2016

The U.S. Capitol(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)

There really is a swamp in Washington, D.C. It's located on the western side of Delaware Avenue, NE right across the street from the Russell Senate Office Building. It's a space of an acre or so where small rallies are held that typically involve speeches by members of Congress unable to get a proper congressional hearing for causes they espouse.

It is not, however, the swamp that President-elect Donald Trump wants to drain. That swamp is the permanent establishment of the nation's capital Congress, the bureaucracy, and the lobbyists. Oh yes, and the high-end restaurants, one of which just opened in the Trump International Hotel.

History endowed the Democratic Party with the ownership of Washington, D.C. Beginning in 1933with the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his vow to deliver a "New Deal" to the American people, FDR's party has held a more-or-less permanent easement of the city. To be sure, there have been Republican presidents who inhabited the town uneasily as tenants, but the traces they have left have been largely symbolic: National Airport re-named for Ronald Reagan and a large federal office building bearing his name. But the stately edifices lining Independence and Constitution Avenues and the National mall all have a distinct Democratic architecture; from the art decobuilding of the Federal Trade Commission to the neoclassical home of the Federal Reserve. Throw in for good measure the Supreme Court building, a Roosevelt-era structure.

But the Democrats' claim to ownership of the capital city is broader and more complex than simply the New Deal and its vast expansion of government and broadening of regulatory authority. The federal government was looked to as the hope of African Americans trapped in the Jim Crow states of the South. And while that gaze was a forlorn one as anti-lynching bills failed to pass Congress in the 1940s, a small break came in 1948 with Democrat Harry Truman's Executive Order 9981 that desegregated the armed forces of the United States. More important still was the U.S. Supreme Court located on 1st Street, NE that issued the order desegregating schools in 1954 and a Democrat-dominated Congress prodded by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson that enacted the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

USA TODAY

Why Democrats made Harry Reid their leader: Ross K. Baker

USA TODAY

Make D.C. a swamp again: Glenn Reynolds

POLICING THE USA:Alook at race, justice, media

Post-Depression-era Democrats, if they were honest with themselves, would admit that they havean uneasy relationship with federalism. They saw the states were the bastions of segregation that yielded only to the power of the government in Washington. States gave birth to the right-to-work laws so detested by the labor unions, and the restrictions on the right to abortion that came in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. The core Democratic constituencies blacks, women, union members almost always looked more kindly on Washington than on the states.

One unfortunate result of this belief in the innate benevolence of the federal government was to turn the Democrats into a kind of "court party" that disdained the states as benighted appendages of an enlightened federal government. They became politically blind to the importance of state legislatures and ceded control of them to the Republicans, who gladly took on the role of congressional redistricting that gave the GOP a virtual easement on the House of Representatives. Topeka, Harrisburg, and Augusta might not be as interesting or as grand as Washington, D.C., but it is there that the Democrats need to plant their flag.

Now, in light of the ambition of the new president to "drain the swamp,"they may need to seek the high ground in unlikely places that boast fewer good restaurants than Washington.

Ross K. Bakeris a distinguished professor of political science atRutgers Universityand a member of USA TODAY'sBoard of Contributors.

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Democrats own the D.C. swamp: Ross K. Baker