Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) voiced his support for expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices and lamented his defense of Clarence Thomas during the conservative justice’s confirmation in 1991. In an appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press…
Page A12From§Eachthe late evening edition — 30 August 2026
Democratic leadership expels socialists, compromises with the GOP, then regrets defending Clarence Thomas.
As it ran on the front
Watch what the hands are doing while the mouth talks about principle. This week Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor turned party elder statesman, tells anyone flirting with the Democratic Socialists line to 'run as a separate party' — out of the tent, officially, on the record, no ambiguity about who's being told to leave. Same week, the Washington Examiner runs a piece cataloguing Chuck Schumer's 'many compromises to maintain political power,' which is a polite way of saying the same tent has been making room for the other side's asks for years, no eviction notice required, no press conference announcing the concession as a concession. And Jim Clyburn, the same week, says out loud that he 'rues' having defended Clarence Thomas, while also backing a plan to expand the Supreme Court to thirteen justices — which is one way of admitting that the last set of guardrails already failed and you'd rather build new ones than repair the old.
Line those three up and you get the actual shape of the party's math: the door is heavy going in from the left and it swings wide going out to the center. Socialists get told to find their own party. Compromise, when it flows rightward, doesn't get a press release calling it a compromise — it just gets called strategy, or maturity, or 'the art of the possible,' until someone tallies it up years later and calls it what the record now calls it: many.…
…(cont) None of this is a hidden hand. Rahm said the sentence himself, in public, to a reporter, on purpose. Clyburn said the regret out loud, on the record, this week, about a vote he doesn't get to recast now. Nobody here is alleging a conspiracy — the men held forth and told you the plan themselves, in their own words, without being asked twice.
The guy who feels this in his wallet is the guy who was told for a decade there's no room in the coalition for asking who the tent actually shelters, and no money in the budget for the programs the socialists kept raising, and now finds out the tent had plenty of room after all — just not for him, and not for that ask. There's always room to compromise rightward. There was never a vote on whether that counts as the plan, and there won't be one this week either.
“Rahm draws the line at socialists, Schumer draws the line nowhere in particular, and Clyburn admits out loud the last set of guardrails already failed. That's not three separate stories, that's one guy at the same bar every week.”
“Rahm's line about running as a separate party is just party discipline, keeping the coalition coherent for swing voters — and Schumer's compromises kept the government funded, which, yes, required giving up things the base wanted, but that's called governing, not — okay, it is somewhat the same thing the article describes.”
The receipts
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spent decades telling Jewish audiences that his name meant something important. In a 2010 interview with Jewish radio host Nachum Segal, Schumer said it “comes from the word shomer, guardian…
Former Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel said that he doesn’t view socialists as part of the Democratic Party, a rare pushback against attempts to establish a big-tent party that includes its left flank. In an appearance on Fox News Sunday…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.