Local Quisling Accused of Drunken Affair with Subordinate

One of the few tiny specks of light in the 2024 election was that voters in my congressional district ousted our one-term Republican incumbent, Rep. Lori Chavez-Deremer, in favor of Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum. Turns out Portland was America's last bastion of normalcy.

Chavez-Deremer parlayed that loss to fall upward into the position of Trump's Secretary of Labor. On face, it was a payoff to the Teamsters for functionally backing Trump not endorsing Harris, since Chavez-Deremer had a somewhat stronger pro-labor background than most Republicans. In reality, Chavez-Deremer has cheerily enacted Trump's agenda of gutting labor protections, thus proving the already-obvious point that even "sympathetic" Republicans are useless when push comes to shove because they'll always ultimately accommodate whatever is the alpha ideology in their party, and right now the alpha GOP ideology towards unions is "bust them up and send the workers back into peonage where they belong."

Aside from that, Chavez-Deremer's most prominent entry into the news came when she publicly backed President Trump's announced military invasion of Portland, making her quite the little quisling. But I woke up today to read reports that Chavez-Deremer is under investigation after allegedly having a drunken affair with one of her Department of Labor subordinates.

"Chavez-DeRemer, 57, has welcomed her alleged paramour at least three times to her DC apartment and twice into her hotel room while traveling, alleges a complaint filed with the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Office of Inspector General last week, which has since begun a probe," said the report. DeRemer "is also accused of drinking in her office during the workday and committing 'travel fraud' by having her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff 'make up' official trips to destinations where Chavez-DeRemer can spend time with family or friends on the taxpayers’ dime."

Additionally, the complaint alleged, Chavez-DeRemer has abused her authority to force department aides to run personal errands for her — an issue that has gotten a number of previous Trump administration officials, like former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, in trouble as well.

Now, nobody should get their hopes up. Alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct are less "scandals" in the Trump administration and more "job requirements." One even wonders if -- her job head-faking towards a "pro-worker" Trump administration policy complete -- she might get tossed overboard to make room for a true believer to really go to town on labor.

But still, every news story that breaks about the brazen corruption, graft, and abuse that characterizes this administration, the better. So I raise my glass to you, Secretary (feel free to raise one or several of your own -- we know you've got them). I hope you've enjoyed your time in DC, because you sure as hell aren't welcome back here.

Portland: America's Last Bastion of Normalcy

In my congressional district, local media is now projecting that Janelle Bynum has ousted incumbent Republican Representative Lori Chavez-Deremer. As terrible as election day was on the whole, I am grateful that I'll be represented by a Democrat in Congress once again, and I'm glad my neighbors made the right choice in sending Bynum to Congress.

Meanwhile, across the river in Washington state, Democratic incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has won her rematch against Republican challenger Joe Kent. This was a result that thrills and honestly confuses me. Perez's 2022 victory over Kent was one of the night's bigger upsets, largely chalked up to Kent being basically a White supremacist. But clearly the lesson of 2024 is that that's no longer any object, and if you told me ahead of time that election night would see a broad-based "red shift" compared to 2020 I would have been dead certain that Perez was absolute toast. So why exactly did this nut crack? I don't have an answer to that,* and I acknowledge that Perez has annoyed Democratic leadership before. But she seems to have some ideas of how to present progressive priorities in a way that speaks outside of our current base (e.g., her championing of "right to repair" laws, or pairing student loan debt relief with "dollar-for-dollar ... investments in career [and] technical education"), and she is a voice worth paying attention to going forward.

Needless to say, both Bynum and Perez bucked a pretty terrible national trend. As most of the country embraced the chaos and the void, the single, solitary exception was the Pacific Northwest. Here, we rejected crude reflex and base instinct. And it's not just the local congressional races. In the Portland mayor's race, we didn't pick the woman who thinks the law doesn't apply to her just because she's "progressive", and we didn't pick the man who wants to execute the homeless because he promised "law and order". Our new mayor is going to be Keith Wilson, whose major appeal in the field, from my vantage point, is that he seemed like a normal, good guy making reasonable efforts to resolve the problems in front of our city. That shouldn't always be enough, but in the field we had it was better than all the alternatives.  In my city council district, I felt like we had a plethora of good candidates to choose from, and the three winners all were among my top six picks. Here too, I'm very happy with the choices offered and choices made, and none of them seem (yet, anyway) like kooks, cranks, or gadflies. I'm optimistic that they will be diligent and attentive public servants when they enter office, and again, that's not something I take for granted anymore.

It is, of course, quite off-brand for Portland to be America's avatar of normalcy. Locally, we're more used to embracing our "weird" identity, nationally, our reputation is something like that of a post-apocalyptic drag show. "Normal" is not historically our forte.

But for my part, I am so, so happy that this is the city my wife and I have chosen to build our life in and raise our child in. Portland is a great city. It is full of great people, great beauty, great resources, great activities, and great values. I'm under no illusions that anywhere, blue states included, will be "safe" in the coming years. But there are very few places I'd rather be than here, and if you're looking for a new place to call home, I'd encourage you to look our way.

* One thing I will say, and someone inundated with ads for the Perez/Kent race, is that Kent went 100% all-in on anti-trans fearmongering. The result was Perez likely expanding her margin of victory in an otherwise red wave year. Take from that what you will.

Clown Cars Aren't For Driving, They're For Clowning

At the start of the congressional session, I predicted that "endless stunt investigations is all the House GOP will do, because it's all they can agree upon". I'll give myself a pat on the back for that one, as the House -- on its second try -- decided to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for absolutely no discernible reason.

It's dead-on-arrival in the Senate, and rightfully so, but we need to reiterate just how pathetic and embarrassing this was. It was embarrassing when it failed the first time, and it's embarrassing that it succeeded the second time. The nominal complaint -- that Mayorkas isn't enforcing border policy to Republicans liking -- is not only not an impeachable offense (except insofar as Republicans believe it's unconstitutional for them to lose elections, which appears to be increasingly their consensus view), but it's doubly-embarrassing to blame Mayorkas for inaction on the border given that congressional Republicans can't even pass their own bill on the border because they think doing so will help Biden in the next election (and because actual policymaking, unlike endless stunt investigations, requires actual position-taking). Republicans dealing with the fact that they are too chaotic and incompetent to even have, let alone enact, an agenda on the issue they say is a Crisis Invasion Destroying America!!1!!1! by impeaching a Democrat is the latest example of the crippling infantilization that has completely overtaken the party.

The fiasco did give me a chance to call my Republican congressional representative, Lori Chavez-Deremer (R-OR), and Be Mad At Her, but to by honest my heart wasn't fully in it this time. I genuinely don't understand why Chavez-Deremer even wants to be in Congress at this point. She's not doing anything there -- she's certainly not legislating -- she just mindlessly nods along with whatever ridiculous circus show her more creative MAGA colleagues decide to put forward in any given week. One would think she could do the same thing much more remuneratively as a talk radio host, and with any luck after the next election she'll get that opportunity. 

[Image: NYT]

The Most Important Voter is the Uninformed Voter

For the first time in awhile, my representative in Congress is a Republican -- Lori Chavez-Deremer.

One of the very few bright spots of that fact is that I can call my congressperson to complain about Republican shenanigans without it feeling moot or preaching to the choir. Telling Barbara Lee that I oppose this or that GOP abuse felt a little pointless. But Lori Chavez-Deremer is a Republican in a swing district -- I can help put a bit of well-earned fear of god into her.

Anyway, today I decided to ring up her office to talk about raising the debt ceiling. But before I did, I had a thought: would it be better to play a little dumb?

Maybe I'm overthinking this. But my logic was that if I came out loaded for bear with facts and talking points and analysis, it'd be pretty clear I'm a high-information voter with strong views on the subject. And if I were the representative's staff (and the person I spoke to, for what it's worth, was perfectly polite and seemed quite intelligent), I'd correctly deduce that I'm probably not talking to an actually-persuadable voter. Even in swing districts, Rep. Chavez-Deremer is no doubt aware that there are plenty of voters who didn't vote for her before and are never going to vote for her in the future, and so their existence and their votes for her 2024 opponent are already baked into the cake. That someone like that is unhappy with her isn't really germane information.

By contrast, if somebody who doesn't seem to know a lot about the issue calls with concerns, that suggests that there's a problem seeping into the soft mushy center of low-information independents. And those voters absolutely are persuadable, which means if they get it in their head that the Congresswoman is causing a problem, that absolutely can make difference in 2024. If I was Chavez-Deremer's staff, I'd be far more concerned if uninformed voters who sound like they just read a couple of Facebook memes started complaining about her conduct than if informed voters did.

So I decided to go with that. I spoke in general terms about things I had "heard", I fretted about how "reckless" it seemed to be to just decide not to pay our bills, I worried about the effect this chaos would have on my retirement accounts, I insisted that the issue seemed simple (just raise the debt ceiling! Why is she making this more complicated than it is?), and I finally said that if we do drive over this cliff I won't blame Biden for it, I'll blame Chavez-Deremer.

I don't know if I make the most convincing uninformed voter. But it was a kind of fun, getting to be ignorant and obstinate and just go down the "I am constituent and I'm mad and you need to fix this" road. Life's little pleasures.