Theresa May has sustained the heaviest parliamentary defeat of any British prime minister in the democratic era after MPs rejected her Brexit deal by a resounding majority of 230.
The prime minister immediately announced that she would welcome a vote of no confidence in her own government, and would make time for it on Wednesday.
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, quickly confirmed he had tabled the motion, with the support of the leaders of all other opposition parties.
Corbyn told MPs: “This is a catastrophic defeat. The house has delivered its verdict on her deal. Delay and denial has reached the end of the line.”Unfortunately, "delay and denial" has not reached the end of the line. The DUP is going to support May in the confidence vote. The zombie appears likely to plod on. The downside for the Tories is that they will own the crash out 100 percent.
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Parliament begins voting today at 11 AM PST on zombie prime minister Theresa May's Brexit agreement.
The vote is being framed in much the same terms as the vote May pulled at the eleventh hour in December: a narrow loss will allow May wiggle room to perform her Brussels kabuki yet again; a resounding defeat will lead to a confidence vote. You'll notice that the framing doesn't include the possibility of a May victory.
Either way, don't expect a change in the zombie narrative. The New York Times opines in "Brexit Vote: Parliament to Decide on E.U. Withdrawal Plan" that:
Still, few feel that it will bring any sort of conclusion, and many expect Mrs. May, if she survives, to try to return to Brussels for more talks before a second parliamentary vote and then probably ask for a delay to the legal withdrawal date of March 29.
European officials seem optimistic that the other 27 states would agree, as they must unanimously, to an extension, as long as there is a sense that Britain is on track to reach an agreement before elections for the European Parliament, beginning on May 23. No one wants a “no-deal” Brexit, even if some think it may shake the markets enough to cause Britain to rethink.Because of an amendment passed by parliament last week, May is obligated to return to parliament on Monday, rather than in three weeks, with an alternative Brexit proposal. This affords May the opportunity to begin her "pilgrimage to Brussels" charade all over again. The Ulster Democratic Unionist Party, which keeps May's coalition government afloat, will play along provided May's Plan B scotches the current Irish backstop.
The only thing that is going to stop the zombie in its tracks is for May's government to fall, followed by snap elections. The fact that Corbyn has been reticent up until now to move a confidence vote seems to me evidence that he doesn't have the votes. Those Tories who don't support May's Brexit deal are content to support her as prime minister because the closer the UK gets to March 29 without any sort of agreement the greater the possibility of a crash out (which is really what the hard-line Leavers, the DUP included, desire).
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In yesterday's national edition of The New York Times there was an article, "Ocasio-Cortez Pushes Democrats to the Left, Whether They Like It or Not," by Shane Goldmacher, which included some stunning numbers:
“Over 200 members voted for Nancy Pelosi today, yet the G.O.P. only booed one: me,” she wrote on Twitter on Jan. 3. “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”
It has already been retweeted nearly 50,000 times.
Supporters and rivals alike agree that she has upended the traditional rules of engagement on Capitol Hill with a millennial’s intuitive sense of what sells online — all before she has hung anything on her barren office walls or even found a permanent place to live.
[snip]
It has all come in a rush: By the end of her full first day as a congresswoman, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had overtaken Ms. Pelosi’s following on Twitter. Her initials and Twitter handle, @AOC, have become shorthand for the phenomenon that is the talk of Capitol Hill.
She had a full “60 Minutes” segment devoted to her on her first Sunday as a congresswoman. She was the first lawmaker that MSNBC turned to after Mr. Trump’s first Oval Office address for analysis on what was Rachel Maddow’s most-watched show ever. And she has become a viral internet sensation many times over, including one video of her dancing outside her office that has topped 22 million views across the globe.
She’s a draw on the right as much as the left: Fox News spent more than two hours covering her first five days in Congress, according to a tally by Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group. MSNBC spent 52 minutes and CNN 96 minutes talking about her in that span.
(Interest in Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is so intense that even her chief of staff has appeared on CNN — something almost unheard-of in Congress, where 30-second hits on cable are a sought-after commodity for members of Congress themselves, not their aides.)
In a recent Instagram chat — live from her kitchen with several thousand fans watching — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez outlined her strategy to “shape the national narrative” while chopping vegetables for an Instant Pot recipe.
“In Trump’s America,” she explained, “I’m not a big fan of bipartisanship.”
On the environment, she said that her goal was to move the boundaries of debate far enough to the left that a carbon tax would look like the moderate option, compared to “wildly ambitious” direct government intervention imagined in the Green New Deal.
Perhaps Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s most talked-about idea, raised on “60 Minutes,” has been that people she called “the tippy tops” — those earning above $10 million — should pay a 70 percent rate on income above that threshold. The remark set off days of debate among economists and pundits, on the right and the left, about tax rates unseen in America in decades but common during the post-World War II era.
“I’ve been trying to open up this rhetorical space for many, many years,” said Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist for Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.
“They used to talk about the Oprah effect,” said Ms. Kelton, now a professor at Stony Brook University. “I think it’s the Ocasio effect at this point.”
Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and federal housing secretary who is running for president, was shown the clip of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s tax comment during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — and then went even further than her.
“As you know, George, there was a time in this country where the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent,” Mr. Castro explained. “Even during Reagan’s era in the 1980s it was around 50 percent.”The rank'n'file Democrat has found her avatar. and she is a socialist. The question becomes how long before a smear campaign appears to take down AOC? Tulsi Gabbard's presidential announcement was effectively tarred by numerous stories of her prior support for traditional marriage.
What's clear is that the Democratic National Committee and its many wealthy backers are asking themselves, as Luke Savage writes in Jacobin, "Who Will Be the American Justin Trudeau?"
There are several contenders: Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand. They will parrot AOC's issues. But if elected, they will be, like Obama, staunch neoliberals.
The problem for these candidates is that they have no real activist energy behind them. It took the DNC with an elephantine foot on the scale to hurl Hillary's rotten corpse across the finish line. There will be no such organizational unity of focus for the American Justin Trudeau.
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