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Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) is a logical error: That because y happened after x, that doesn’t mean that x caused y. It is the plague of political punditry.

The plague of political strategists, partisans, and hopers is the false choice: If x didn’t work, then surely y will. You lost because you didn’t follow my advice/preference.

Jon Ossoff’s defeat in GA-06 allows everyone to trot out their favorite hobbyhorses for a spin. Many of these explanations are plausible. I’m not sure which one I believe. But we all owe ourselves a great deal of skepticism and self-interrogation in eliding a.) what we’d prefer, and b.) what actually seems to be true.

Here’s North Shore sensation Rep. Seth Moulton:

#Ossof Race better be a wake up call for Democrats – business as usual isn’t working. Time to stop rehashing 2016 and talk about the future.

— Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) June 21, 2017

We need a genuinely new message, a serious jobs plan that reaches all Americans, and a bigger tent not a smaller one. Focus on the future.

— Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) June 21, 2017

I have so many questions … Was Ossoff’s race “business as usual”? How? Did he disappoint by not winning, or did he max out Dem potential in what had been a blood-red district — boding well for Dems in other, slightly friendlier districts?

Anyway, Twitter being what it is, I look forward to Moulton’s jobs proposals. I strongly suspect they might look a lot like the 2009 stimulus: Infrastructure; high speed rail; job training and education; renewable energy, etc. In other words … pretty standard Dem party stuff. It would require monetary investment and indeed, Big(ger) Government, which sounds to a lot of people like higher taxes.

In the Obama era, the GOP congress refused adequate infrastructure spending, and in fact dis-invested in the economy through budget cuts like the sequestration. These cost jobs! As intended, this created frustration and kept the Democrats from delivering on promises — even to the detriment of the economy. Hillary Clinton’s jobs plans ( for instance) were doubtless met with skepticism: How are you going to get it through Congress? That’s the extraordinary success of GOP obstructionism: Mitch McConnell knows what he’s doing.

Moulton notably supported Ohio Rep Tim Ryan’s challenge to Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi is being blamed for Ossoff’s defeat, since the GOP ran ads tying the two.  To blame Pelosi for Ossoff’s defeat is illogical post hoc ergo hoc thinking. The GOP will simply demonize whomever takes her place.

Even if one stipulates that GOP ads tying Ossoff to Pelosi “worked” (i.e. drove GOP base votes to Handel), it’s implicit that in GA-06, the GOP base exist in numbers sufficient to swing the election. Is there a message to similarly drive the Dem base in a place like GA-06? Is there a Dem base in GA-06, enough potential D voters whom Ossoff simply didn’t reach? Or are we still laying that groundwork in a heretofore hostile district?

I’ll say this, with regard to messaging: The best defense is a good offense. I rarely see Democrats really feast on Republican opposition to jobs investment,  and the GOP’s willingness to take away people’s health care. There is often a visceral quality missing from Dem messaging: They vote against your jobs. They want to take away your health care. It’s an outrage. That’s a message that a moderate or progressive can use. It’s not about white papers or policy; it’s about making people take a side.

People want justice in the economy. They want to feel it. Trump has been great at making that visceral connection — in fact, that’s all he has as a cover for a rather ordinary, plutocratic GOP agenda. Surely the Dems can find their own strong voice.

In any event, let’s disentangle “I would prefer x” from “x will be a political winner.” It’s easy to assert the former; harder to demonstrate the latter.

UPDATE — Your calls are working. Politico reports:

Democrats will grind Senate business to a halt in a protest against Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare.

Beginning Monday night, Democrats will start objecting to all unanimous consent requests in the Senate, according to a Democratic aide. They plan to control the floor of the chamber Monday night and try to force the House-passed health care bill to committee in a bid to further delay it.

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Read this good Twitter thread by one of the Indivisible guys (former Congressional staffers, remember):

Got a Democratic Senator? Here’s how they can ACTUALLY PLAY HARDBALL on TrumpCare. Yes, they have tools to use. Yes, they can win. 1/

— Ezra Levin (@ezralevin) June 15, 2017

Essentially the Dems have to play “vote-o-rama” — in reconciliation, the process by which a spending bill bypasses the filibuster, the Dems offer as many amendments as possible to slow the vote down. It’s an ersatz filibuster, but it has to be active.

They can also withhold consent for any bit of Senate business. The price: Hold hearings and do this normally – let the bill see the light of day and scrutiny. That may well peel off some embarrassed GOP votes — which, of course, is why Svengali McConnell won’t allow it to happen.

Ed Markey’s numbers are 617-565-8519 and 202-224-2742. Elizabeth Warren’s are (617) 565-3170, (413) 788-2690, (202) 224-4543.

The whole process, if you can call it that, is truly bizarre. There must be some contemporary Kafka whose fiction can’t possibly compete with this brutal illogic.  Read Vox’s very simple, direct, non-gotcha questions to GOP Senators and you quickly realize they have no idea about either a.) health care policy in general, or b.) the current bill under consideration, which they haven’t read, and they don’t know what’s in it or not in it. It’s a gutting display of brainwashed incuriosity and negligence:

Sometimes a senator could identify a desired outcome, like “lowering premiums” or “stabilizing marketplaces.” But they rarely could explain the mechanism through which they planned on achieving that outcome.

How will Republicans lower premiums? “It’s working together and coming up with a bill that does do that,” Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas said. What tool will bring stability to Obamacare’s volatile exchanges? “By bringing certainty to the insurance market,” Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said. What new policy will lead tax cuts to lower premiums? “It’s teetering because the exchanges are failing,” Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi explained.

They never had anything but talking points. They never did their homework. The lives of their constituents are not worth lifting a finger to understand what the bill does, nor asking questions in public, nor certainly challenging leadership.

Read it, and spread the word to people in GOP states. Shame them any way you can.

Our much-maligned legislature has its fingers to the wind, and approved the blindingly popular Fair Share initiative onto the 2018 ballot.

Supporters, who have dubbed the measure the Fair Share Amendment, say it would raise an extra $1.9 billion each year that could only be spent on “quality public education, affordable public colleges and universities, and the repair and maintenance of roads, bridges, and public transportation.”

Meanwhile our also-unassailably-popular governor won’t come out and say it straightforwardly … but he’s basically agin it. Because he starts, continues, and apparently ends with the proposition that people are taxed enough — including the wealthy who have seen their tax burden decrease over the last generation. (More here.)

Under the circumstances — our regressive tax structure in Massachusetts, chronic underinvestment in transportation, and the plain desirability and successful track record of investment in public education —  Baker’s is not a “moderate” position. It’s dogmatic, even Norquistian. (Even our small-c conservative Speaker DeLeo supported the Fair Share.)

The Mass. Taxpayers Foundation has even trotted out the argument that we’ll create well-heeled tax refugees and therefore fail to realize the benefit. This may seem hard to believe: Why wouldn’t folks have already moved to NH? Why aren’t Wellesley and Wayland already ghost towns? MTF does a little calculation based on 300 well-off people leaving … but I’m a bit baffled as to how they arrived at that number.

And indeed Mass. Budget and Policy Center points to a review of studies, saying this effect is extremely minimal. After all, if you’re wealthy, don’t you need to be near the economic and educational networks that create that wealth? And — if you’re a big-picture, enlightened thinker — wouldn’t you want to strengthen those networks with better infrastructure and education? The wealthy of Massachusetts aren’t here in spite of past investments in those areas; they’re here because of them. They’re not going anywhere.

MTF points to Connecticut as an example where raising taxes supposedly cause businesses to leave the state, notably hedge funds, GE et al. Well … different places are different. Our tax base is not overly dependent on a vaporous financial industry with a nominal physical presence. We have universities with smart people, and the universities aren’t going to up and leave. And GE got a tax benefit, but probably didn’t even need it to move here.

Now, MTF does make a couple of interesting points: One, that revenues are inherently volatile, and tax policy ought not to be engraved into the Constitution but left to the legislature and Governor to adjust as necessary. I’d agree — but I’d extend that to the ban on progressive taxation written into the Constitution currently, article 44. That’s the inflexibility we’re chafing against right now. They also point out that it’s possible to gain some progressivity to the tax code without altering the Constitution, by increasing the nominal income tax rate but increasing exemptions for lower income earners. This has been floated by progressives before: An Act To Invest would have raised the income tax to 5.95% but increased the personal exemption from $4,400 to $7,900. (Whether this actually passes Constitutional muster itself is another story.)

What would the most preferable path be? To repeal Article 44, lower the regressive sales tax and institute a progressive income tax — which has failed countless times in the past. The cause endures. The dream will never die.

But things don’t always work linearly. Sometimes the legislature intercepts a ballot initiative and takes its own action. The Fair Share Amendment looks like a juggernaut for now. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is extremely popular, and widely recognized as necessary. Could the legislature pass something like the Act to Invest, partially obviating the need for a Constitutional amendment?