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State Democrats are vowing to confront ex-U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Rep. Dave Reichert on Thursday, when Gingrich appears at a Reichert fundraiser at the Issaquah Hilton Garden Inn.

Rep., Dave Reichert: The 2011 redistricting gave the 8th District Republican a much safer seat in Congress.

They may be biting off more than they can chew if either or both of the guests of honor encounter the demonstrators outside.

Gingrich used to relish arguing with Puget Sound liberals back in the mid-1990s, describing Washington as Ground Zero of the Republican revolution after the state elected six new Republican House members. He waded into a crowd of protestors outside the Space Needle for a brief and animated set-to.

Once a hostage negotiator in days with the King County Sheriffs office, Reichert specialized in disarming with cordiality liberal delegations from the group MoveOn.org during his first two terms in Congress.

American politics have, alas, drawn inward since then. Political handlers stress avoiding hostile encounters. Its especially wise strategy here. Washington Democrats work with one of the countrys most skilled trackers, who in 2012 filmed GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna in an embarrassing moment. (McKenna was set up.)

As well, event arrangers emphasize donor maintenance, giving of your time to those who give to you.

The Reichert event has various levels of givers. It will set back donors $2,500 apiece, or $4,000 a couple, to participate in a roundtable discussion with Gingrich. (Big Democratic donors paid $25,000 for an Obama roundtable in August.) A picture with Gingrich costs $500 or $750 a couple. General admission is $150 or $250 a couple.

Reichert has never been a confrontational conservative. He votes with Republicans in the House, but sometimes leaves the reservation on such conservation issues as funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Newt Gingrich, pictured at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference.

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Democrats vow to confront Gingrich at Reichert fundraiser

Miracles can happen or so say House Democrats longing to win majority control of the chamber in November.

They need a net gain of 17 seats to seize the speakers gavel, which would require winning the lions share of roughly two dozen Republican-held seats targeted by Democrats this year most of them in GOP-leaning districts.

Pundits and pollsters give Democrats virtually no chance of pulling it off, but the party faithful nevertheless hang on to hope.

I am a believer, said Rep. James P. McGovern of Massachusetts, one of the most liberal Democrats in Congress.

I read regularly all the political pundits and the polls showing whos up and whos down on all the news shows. But I think people are not happy with the way this place is being run and, on the issues, I think people agree with us. If we get our message out and get the vote out, we win, he said.

Indeed, Americans overwhelmingly dislike what is happening on Capitol Hill. A Fox News poll last week found that 79 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Congress. Another recent poll showed that for the first time, a majority of voters 51 percent want to oust their own representatives.

House Republicans dismiss any suggestion that their majority is in danger and expect to expand their edge by as many as 10 seats.

Republicans also have high hopes of capturing the Senate as well. The party has an excellent shot of winning the net six seats needed for complete control of Congress.

Much of the difficulty facing House Democrats is that the path to midterm success runs predominantly through Republican-leaning districts. Republicans now have a 233-199 edge in the House, with three seats vacant.

Of the 24 Republican seats identified as in play by the Rothenberg Political Report, just nine are in districts that backed President Obama in the 2012 election. Winning in those districts could put Democrats more than halfway toward their goal.

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House Democrats hold out hope to win majority control of chamber in election

Democrats love to cast Republicans as the party of big money, beholden to the out-of-touch billionaires bankrolling their campaigns.

But new numbers tell a very different story one in which Democrats are actually raising more big money than their adversaries.

Among the groups reporting the biggest political ad spending, the 15 top Democrat-aligned committees have outraised the 15 top Republican ones $453 million to $289 million in the 2014 cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis of the most recent Federal Election Commission reports, including those filed over the weekend which cover through the end of last month.

The analysis shows the fundraising edge widening in August, when the Democratic groups pulled in more than twice as much as their GOP counterparts $51 million to $21 million. Thats thanks to a spike in massive checks from increasingly energized labor unions and liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer and Fred Eychaner.

(POLITICO's 2014 race ratings)

So, even as Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are working methodically to turn conservative megadonors like the big-giving conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch into the boogeymen of 2014, the party itself is increasingly relying on its deepest pockets as the best chance of staving off a midterm wipeout forecast by oddsmakers.

For example, Steyer, a retired San Francisco hedge fund billionaire, on Aug. 15 stroked a $15 million check to his own NextGen Climate Action super PAC that single-handedly exceeded the combined monthly total raised by the two GOP congressional campaign committees. And his political lieutenant, Chris Lehane, hinted that Steyer, one of the biggest individual donors of 2014, may give more to his super PAC than his $50 million pledge, which Lehane said should not be seen as a ceiling. Steyers spending and that of other Democratic billionaires has helped fuel an advertising gap favoring the partys candidates in key races across the country.

The surprising financial advantage, which has some leading Republicans nervous, is a state of affairs that would have been unthinkable during the 2010 midterms or even the 2012 election. Democrats were badly beaten in those cycles outside-spending derbies by rich conservatives.

(See more from POLITICO's Polling Center)

Democratic megadonors and operatives attribute their big-money surge to a realization that they couldnt compete without embracing the new environment, but they assert its inaccurate to suggest theyre ahead.

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Dems relying on big donors to win

Former Mexican President Felipe Caldern Speaks Immigration Reform
Spineless: Pres. Obama Dems Disappoint, Again -- Punt on Immigration Until After 2014 Elections: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Spin...

By: politicalarticles

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Former Mexican President Felipe Caldern Speaks Immigration Reform - Video

President Obamas zigs and zags in pursuit of immigration reform are a long-unfolding narrative now assuming epic dimensions. In the latest installment, Obama has postponed the unilateral reforms he promised to have unveiled by now. He did so not for any high-minded purpose but rather to avoid dealing mortal blows to the re-election of a handful of Democratic senators who begged the president to hold off.

Thus has subverting immigration reform become a bipartisan project advanced by Republicans, who despise the idea of putting millions of Hispanics on a path to citizenship, and by Democrats, who like it but fear the political fallout.

Obama insists that congressional inaction justifies his determination to take matters into his own hands and refashion enforcement of the nations laws to his liking. In his view, executive action is warranted by legislative paralysis; he alone will determine (though not quite yet) the breadth and depth of changes that could affect the status of millions of undocumented immigrants.

The presidents goals are right; his method, depending on how far he goes, seems ill-advised. Until he outlines his legal justification, if he eventually proceeds unilaterally as promised, no firm judgment can be offered. But his options seem limited if he intends to carry out the sort of sweeping changes that advocates of reform are counting on.

Just a year ago, Obama told an interviewer that it would be very difficult to defend legally any move to shield large numbers of additional illegal immigrants from deportation as he did in 2012 for so-called Dreamers undocumented migrants brought to this country as children.

Other ways for the president to protect immigrants from deportation, including granting administrative parole, have never been used and are not intended for huge categories of millions of individuals facing possible deportation.

Whether Obama may be able to make stick such a blanket change in enforcement is one question; he probably can. A separate question is whether its wise.

His decision to postpone an action he promised for the end of the summer, for fear of the electoral fallout, underscores the enormity of the likely political backlash. By ignoring Congress and sidestepping normal procedures the same procedures he himself followed for several years in hopes for immigration reform Obama does the nation no favors.

We share the presidents conviction that the immigration system is a mess; that Congress specifically, House Republicans has abdicated its responsibility and defied popular will by refusing to fix it; and that the status quo of 11 million undocumented immigrants is economically self-defeating.

But rewriting the law unilaterally in defiance of Congress and on dubious legal grounds, even after the midterm elections, will not ultimately serve the cause of durable reform. It is more likely to ignite a political firestorm that will give the upper hand to immigration restrictionists, who would use it for years to justify resistance to reform. For the president, that would be a pyrrhic victory indeed.

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Immigration Reform