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****AUGUST 22, 2025****

**On the

**Prospect **website**

[link removed]

How Moderate Senate Democrats Enabled Trump’s D.C. Takeover [link removed]

Many have warned that allowing D.C. to remain a disenfranchised colony would lead to disaster. They were right.BY

**RYAN COOPER** [link removed]

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Judge Rules Ohio’s Voucher System Unconstitutional [link removed]

[link removed] The ruling could end the siphoning of funds to private and parochial schools.BY

**E** [link removed]

**LLA TUMMEL**

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“How Can They Not Feed the Kids?” [link removed]

[link removed] Indiana and Tennessee opted out of Summer EBT, which gives families grocery support when schools close for summer.BY

**BRYCE COVERT** [link removed] 

****Meyerson on TAP****

**Will next week’s DNC meeting call for a ban on U.S. arms to Israel?**

**The committee can either put the party on record opposing those sales, or regurgitate Biden’s do-nothing policy.**

The Democratic Party is no stranger to

**tsuris**these days. It’s not just its failure to win working-class votes; it’s also its failure to convince its own base that it can stand up to Donald Trump and move beyond those moderate positions crafted in and for a time of less extreme challenges.

Next week, when the Democratic National Committee meets in Minneapolis, the party has an opportunity to show its disgruntled base—whose dismay is chiefly responsible for the party’s bottom-basement standing in the polls—that it can actually grapple with current realities. Of the various resolutions [link removed] the DNC will consider, two stand out. One would ban corporate contributions and super PAC dark money from the Democrats’ 2028 presidential primaries. The second would put the party on record as supporting a ban on the provision of U.S. arms to Israel.

Let’s look at that second one first. It was authored by one of the DNC’s youngest members, the 26-year-old Allison Minnerly, whose day job is working for a Florida voter registration organization. And, for now at least, it is starkly counterposed to another resolution backed by DNC chair Ken Martin, which calls for an end to the Gaza war and the release of the remaining Hamas-held hostages, supports a two-state solution, but says nothing at all about limiting the shipment of U.S. arms to Netanyahu’s legions. Rather, it simply restates the positions of the Biden administration, which did nothing whatever to deter Bibi’s blood-drenched onslaughts and land seizures.

Martin’s resolution, says Jim Zogby, who’s been a DNC member for 32 years and was chair of its Resolutions Committee for 11, “could have been written four years ago. It’s completely out of touch with the current reality. Simply regurgitating the old Biden position is both wrong and insulting.”

It is also profoundly at odds with what rank-and-file Democrats want. Last month’s Gallup poll showed [link removed] that Israel’s war on Gaza commands the support of just 32 percent of the American public, and a bare 8 percent of Democrats. Minnerly’s resolution “is an opportunity to get ourselves back where our voters want us to be,” its author told me. The party, she added, is “rarely handed an opportunity to embrace a policy so strongly supported by its rank and file.”

The predominant problem with the Martin-backed resolution, of course, isn’t what it says; it’s what it doesn’t say. In theory, there’s no reason why Minnerly’s resolution can’t be incorporated into Martin’s. In practice, there’s some pre-meeting discussion under way about doing just that, though that likely would require some alterations to both. The Minnerly text calls for a flat ban on arms transfers to Israel, while the Bernie Sanders resolution for which a majority of Democratic senators (by a 27-to-17 margin) voted [link removed] three weeks ago called for a ban on offensive weapons only. Any such incorporation, not to mention bringing the unincorporated Minnerly resolution to a vote, is being fiercely opposed, of course, by groups like Democratic Majority for Israel.

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While the DNC doesn’t occupy the commanding heights of Democratic policymaking, it nonetheless is now in a position to give or withhold its imprimatur to a policy that actually-existing Democrats support, and none more so than the Gen Z and millennial Democrats who will sooner or later control the party. At a time when young Democrats’ exasperation with the party is higher than at any time since the days of the Vietnam War, the DNC would raise that exasperation to stratospheric heights if it can’t even align itself with the majority of its Senate caucus by calling for a shutdown of U.S. arms to Israel’s continuing war of Palestinian extirpation.

There’s one set of commanding heights that the DNC does indeed control, however, and that’s the rules under which the party’s presidential primaries are conducted. Former Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen, a longtime DNC member and de facto representative there for Bernie Sanders–flavored policies, has long sought to end, or that failing, diminish the toxic role that big money plays in politics—Democratic politics in particular. He’s the moving force behind a resolution that would establish a commission and task it with presenting to the DNC next year a ban on corporate and dark-money super PAC contributions to Democratic presidential candidates in the 2028 primaries. As is not the case with Minnerly’s resolution, DNC chair Martin has signed on to this one.

The DNC’s control over Democratic primaries begins and ends at the presidential level, but Cohen hopes that the kind of ban he’s proposing will be imposed by state parties for their own Democratic primaries for local, state, and federal (House and Senate) offices. “We can’t talk about opposing

**Citizens United** and not clean our own house,” Cohen told me.

Hence, a more important DNC meeting than is usually the case. The Committee’s website includes a way that people can send it comments, should the spirit move you before it begins to consider resolutions next Tuesday.

**~ HAROLD MEYERSON**

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