Voting For Lesser of Two Evils Led Directly To Yesterday’s Gun Filibusters

For years I’ve heard fellow Democrats argue that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, that it’s better to vote for the lesser of two evils, and other inane arguments to convince me to vote for people who have (D) behind their name but are not strong advocates of Democratic values.  “It’s always better to vote for a (D) than an (R),” they say.  Really?  I haven’t thought so for a long time and have voted accordingly come election time.  That means I haven’t voted for “Democrats” than I don’t think will stand up for the issues I think are most important: climate change, privacy, jobs, universal health care, gun safety, etc.

Many pundits are saying today that President Obama was very angry yesterday following the US Senate’s ridiculous failure to pass watered down, gun industry influenced amendments.  Oh, a majority of Senators (50+ out of 100) voted for the legislation, which in sane circumstances would mean the amendments pass.  Not in the US Senate yesterday, where a very small number of fringe Senators stopped honest consideration of any amendments.  That is because of the Senate’s cloture rule, which once invoked requires 60 votes (a supermajority) to break.  Democrats could have changed or removed that rule at the beginning of the current session with only 51 votes.  Unfortunately, Sen. Reid (D-NV) didn’t agree that the majority needed to change or remove the rule.  Instead, he made a deal with Minority Leader Sen. McConnell (R-KY) that cloture would be invoked on legislation and nominees only in “extreme circumstances”.  Since January, Republicans have invoked cloture again and again and again and again.  Apparently, there is a permanent state of “extreme circumstances” in the Senate according to today’s Republicans.  Sen. Reid publicly complains that the rules could be revisited mid-session, but his complaints are ever-moving carrots for the Democratic base, who must enjoy being lied to.  Sen. Reid will not change the cloture rule because he doesn’t want to; it has nothing to do with courage or will.  The sooner the base accepts that, the sooner they’ll vote for Democratic Senators who care more for their constituents than the access to power a Senate position entails.

Observe then that these same Republicans are the people with whom the President wants more desperately than anything to craft a Grand Bargain – be it health insurance in 2009-2010 (note: not health care) or the national debt and social welfare programs (which this “Democratic” President proposed be slashed!) and gun safety legislation now in 2013.  The very same Republicans that so angered the President on his surprising signature issue (gun safety – when did he campaign on that?) have worked since 2009 to stop anything the President wants done.  Yesterday’s public display of anger, which I’m not sure was honest, will not cause the President to evaluate his most desired goal: that Grand Bargain.  The Republicans will not work with the President and the President and his most ardent supporters refuse to acknowledge that basic political reality.

Moreover, the President has only his zealous desire to reach his Grand Bargain to blame for yesterday’s cloture votes.  In the absurd push to enact health insurance legislation in 2009 and 2010, which took months too long precisely because the President wanted that Grand Bargain so badly, health care reform was explicitly removed from consideration a priori to negotiation.  That health care reform was a central plank of the Democratic Party’s most loyal activists, who worked tirelessly in 2008 to get the President and other Democrats elected at all levels across the nation.  There was no mention of a Grand Bargain in the 2008 campaign.  Democrats justifiably felt misled and were extremely disappointed.  Hence, they didn’t vote with similar intensity in 2010 as they did in 2008, which had enormous ramifications.

Governorships and state legislatures flipped from Democratic to Republican.  As a result, the required realignment of political boundaries for the US House and state legislatures following the 2010 census were redrawn in ways that led to more Republicans, many of whom were Teabaggers whose core philosophy is government cannot and should not work, elected in newly safe seats.  That is, people in 2010 made sure that the mix of voters in districts leaned heavily enough Republican that any other candidate would have a very hard time being elected.  Hence today’s Republican-led chamber despite the fact that Democratic candidates nationally received 1,000,000 more votes than Republican candidates.  There simply aren’t enough Democrats and left-leaning unaffiliateds in these districts to challenge what will be Republican dominance.  Remember that when Democrats tell you there are “only 17 seats” they need to flip in 2014 to take back control of the House.  Absent some significant change in the political landscape, Democrats will not take the House back in 2014.  Teabaggers will remain in control of the chamber and a Democratic Senate Majority Leader will not change chamber rules (again) in January 2015, regardless of how many bills Republicans filibuster; regardless of how many judicial and agency nominees Republicans filibuster who are proving that government cannot and will not accomplish anything.

Senators didn’t lack courage yesterday.  They simply do not see any downside to voting  against their constituents’ wishes.  When most Democratic voters “vote for the lesser of two evils” no matter what, they are not holding their elected officials accountable for their actions.  Thus, Republicans will continue to abuse the filibuster.  The President will seek more Grand Bargains.  And we will make very little progress in a time when much progress is needed.  But come November 2014, I will hear once again that I have to vote for the same people who voted against my values, who only want to stay in power, because the alternative is just unthinkable.

Senators who abuse a parliamentary tactic do so for one reason: to remain in power.  Senators are not there to represent anyone or anything except their access to power.  People on the “news” networks are saying Republicans thwarted the will of 90% of the American public yesterday.  The President and the Senate Majority Leader both could have done very different things had they wanted to avoid yesterday’s political result.  They didn’t want to, so they didn’t do things differently.  They did exactly what they wanted to do and stuck the rest of us with the devastating results.  Remember that the next time someone tells you it’s better to vote for the lesser of two evils.  Evil still happens: someone slaughtered 20 innocent children with a tool designed exclusively to kill other humans.  If a plastic toy killed 20 children, we would ban the toy.  The right to own a gun ends at the life of others, especially children.  More than 30,000 people die because of gun violence in the US every year.  Their blood is as much on the hands of “Democrats” who advocate for political cowardice as it is on the shooters; for voting for the lesser of two evils because what other choice have we?  We have choices, but are purposefully misled by people who only want to remain in power, then show public displays of anger.  Finally, minorities can be vocal, but they shouldn’t be able to thwart democratic processes single-handed.

Actually, one more thought.  Does anyone seriously think the NRA won’t target Democratic Senators in their 2014 elections even if those “Democrats” voted against gun safety amendments yesterday?  The same amendments that a majority of constituents in those Democratic Senators states supported?

Not Breaking: Obama Misjudges Republican Willingness To Negotiate

In the sordid mess leading up to this week’s sequester, the NY Times editorial board diagnoses part of the problem:

The White House strategy on the sequester was built around a familiar miscalculation about Republicans. It assumed that, in the end, they would be reasonable and negotiate a realistic alternative to indiscriminate cuts. Because the reductions hurt defense programs long held sacrosanct by Republicans, the White House thought it had leverage that would reduce the damage to the domestic programs favored by Democrats.

Obama chose excellent election staffs throughout his political career.

He did not choose competent political strategists.  He himself is not a competent political strategist.  His team spent 18 months on health insurance legislation, during which he gave away concession after concession without getting anything of value in return.  Why?  Because he wanted a Grand Bargain as part of his political legacy.  One result of this shortsightedness was the Republican wave election of 2010, when state legislatures and governorships flipped from Democratic to Republican control.  The Democratic base didn’t think Obama had done much for them for 2 years, so they didn’t show up to vote.  The biggest problem with this: your average Republican wasn’t elected; the far right-wing fringe of the Republican Party was: enter the Teabaggers to the US Congress, governorships, and state legislatures.

Obama’s team made multiple deals on financial items: the debt ceiling (Republicans don’t want to pay for the bills they charged up), the Bush tax cuts (expired after 1 extension), and the 2011 deal to initiate blind spending cuts because the Republican-led House of Representatives can’t execute their Constitutional duty to pass an annual budget on time.  Hence the leading NYT paragraph.

Time after time after time, the Teabagging Republicans have refused to negotiate or work with President Obama or Democrats.  How many times will it take before Democrats take the Teabaggers at their word: despite the trillions of debt run up by their party in the 2000s, they won’t allow Obama to run up any more debt, regardless of the cost to the US economy or its citizens.  Well, it will take at least one more time, apparently.

No more Grand Bargains, Mr. President.

President Obama Still Can’t Negotiate

The President this morning had important statements on what the group to be led by Vice President Biden will do in the wake of the Newtown terrorist attack.  After his announcement, the press asked many questions regarding the fiscal curb negotiations.  Here is a gem of a response from President Obama (emphasis mine):

I have gone at least halfway in meeting some of the Republican concerns.

Did Americans vote for President Obama to go more than halfway in meeting Republican concerns?  They did, even if they didn’t consciously think about it beforehand.

This is a frightening admission.  The start of fiscal curb impacts won’t start for another two weeks and Obama has already given up more than half the field to his opposition.  How many football games would you win if you let the other team start at your 45-yard line?  In the last four years, Obama’s defense hasn’t kept Republicans out of the end zone when he should have been scoring his own points.  How far will Obama yield just to satisfy his own intense desire to make a deal with anybody, no matter how ridiculous they are?  The American people are on the record rejecting Republican fiscal proposals, yet Obama continues to add them to his own proposal.  If the stakes weren’t so high, it might be entertaining to watch how this unfolds.

How Much Of The Big 3 Will Obama Give Away Just To Make A Deal?

We heard plenty of rhetoric from Obama super-supporters leading up to the November election: how we had to vote for Obama because crazy ol’ Mitt Romney would destroy the country.  It turns out Democrats are just as eager to scare-monger as Republicans are when it comes to protecting those in power from accountability.  Largely left unsaid was what Obama would do if re-elected.  I argued with many friends about this topic.  I saw what the first-term was all about: taking progressive policies off the table prior to negotiation, negotiating for too long, yielding concession after concession while not getting anything of equal value in return from Republicans who only wanted to see him lose the 2012 election.

Now that Obama has been reelected, a political “crisis” that Obama and Congress purposefully created for themselves needs our attention.  The fiscal curb is approaching.  For a couple of weeks, Obama made a good show of touring the country and showing voters how smart they were to vote for him, because he wasn’t going to capitulate and concede on tax cuts for the obscenely rich or the Big 3: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  Social Security doesn’t add to the deficit because it has a guaranteed revenue stream.  Medicare and Medicaid could be made solvent for decades with minor adjustments that have nothing to do with things Republicans think they do.

I had no doubt we would see the following.  Obama made the following proposal yesterday: in exchange for extending middle-class tax cuts, raising the debt limit, extending unemployment benefits, and new spending on infrastructure, he would continue Bush’s high-income tax cuts for income up to $400,000 and would cut Social Security benefits.  That’s $1.3 trillion in revenue for $850 billion in spending cuts.  Obama has already given up on raising taxes for incomes over $250,000.  And he threw Social Security under the bus.  For nothing in return.

Mark my words: the Big 3 will take massive hits.  And unlike in 2005 when the country resisted a Republican President doing it, a Democratic President will do it in 2012.  Republicans will successfully get even more spending cuts in programs that need only slight tweaks while raising the income limit that gets subjected to a return to tax rates under Clinton than is present in this offer.  How do I know?  Speaker Boehner quickly rejected the President’s offer.  Why?  Because it ensures that Obama will continue to foolishly engage with the Speaker in closed-door meetings instead of speaking in front of the American people.  If he did the latter, as was his initial strategy, Boehner would have to agree to the President’s proposal.  Because Republican plans consist of everything Americans don’t want to see: slashing unemployment insurance, tax hikes on the middle class while the rich walk away untouched, cuts to the Big 3, etc.

And here is why that will happen: Barack Obama wants his legacy to be defined by his ability to make deals with Republicans.  The specific details don’t matter that much to him.  He wants to be perceived as someone who gets things done, regardless of who came up with the idea in the first place.  Health care?  Let’s try the Republican plan Mitt Romney got through in Massachusetts.  Climate Change?  Let’s try the Republican plan from the 1990s.  Budget balancing?  Let’s try what Republicans have wanted for decades: no social programs and lots of defense spending.

The best part?  We’ll all do it together!  Yay!  Be happy, Democrats!  You prevented the world-ending Mitt Romney from being elected and now your party’s President will dismantle the most successful programs that kept millions of Americans out of poverty in the 20th century.  Because we all had to vote for the lesser of two evils.  Phew, disaster was narrowly avoided, wasn’t it?

You Get What You Vote For

Bill McKibben of 350.org has a snarky post over at the Daily Beast that ends with the following:

That’s why it would be so scary if it wasn’t a hoax. But it must be, because if it was a real crisis, responsible authorities would be taking action. The president wouldn’t be approving new oil drilling in the Arctic on the very same week. The Interior Secretary wouldn’t be auctioning off a vast new store of coal. The Republican presidential nominee wouldn’t be promising to approve the Keystone pipeline to the vast tarsands of Canada as his very first order of business.

Let’s all be very, very honest here: that president is a Democrat.  So is that Interior Secretary.  The obfuscation and obstruction isn’t the sole province of Republicans: both major political parties have done their fair share of ignoring the climate and energy arenas in the last few decades.  There were elections to win and financial supporters to pay back with political favors.  Boring stuff like energy policy can always wait until the next Congress or President is in office.

On this topic, there isn’t much difference between the major party candidates for President, as evidenced by the overall lack of action in the past 3.5 years by the “Hope and Change” candidate.  True, Obama hasn’t campaigned against action the way the $1 Billion candidate has, but that’s a pretty shoddy comparison that we’re forced to make.  You get what you vote for.

Chief Justice Roberts Concerned About Supreme Court’s Integrity

And he should be concerned, considering the history of the institution in the past 200+ years.  There has been a recent resurgence of bench activism, with Bush v. Gore and Citizens United providing two highly memorable examples.

Chief Justice Roberts took something to heart that is critically important, IMO.  If the populace loses faith in the Court’s decisions, the populace will grow to resent those decisions and actively work to undermine the Court’s authority.  What would happen in Americans refused to acknowledge the Court’s legitimacy?  9 hollow shells whose actions mattered not a whit does not bode well for a functioning democracy.

I think Roberts tried to walk the Court back from the step or two with the Obamacare ruling.  The other right-wing extremists would have taken the Court even closer to the edge, if not a little bit over it.

Congress might want to learn a little bit of the same lesson for its own good.  Both parties seem primarily interested in getting elected and re-elected, not governing.  The Democrats have done a slightly better job of governing, but not much – and what kind of bar am I comparing them to?  Some of the most extreme bunch of folks to ever control any kind of power in US government.  Thus, my statement should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of the Democratic Party or its so-called “accomplishments”.

To the contrary, the Democratic establishment continues to try to play the Democratic base for fools with their fear-mongering of the Republican Teahadists.  I want to see real progress made on every critical issue of our time.  What I’ve come to realize is the Democratic establishment doesn’t want that any more than the Republican establishment does.  Doing actual work would distract us from the scary “others” out there that need to be constantly fought.  No, what I and millions of other Americans want are effective political movements – the kind which were squashed in the 1960s with all of the assassinations of the previous movements’ leaders and high-profile supporters.  We have seen what the lack of those movements has meant for America: stagnation on multiple different fronts.  Sure, I can buy lots of crazy cool crap, but is my life really significantly better than the average Americans’ life at the end of the 2nd third of the 20th century.  I don’t think so.

So Roberts took a small step back – good for him.  The question is: will it be enough?  How many more decisions have to be made; how many more elections have to be held until most Americans not only realize the establishment isn’t working for them, but are willing to actually do something about it?

Health Insurance Law (ACA) Upheld By Supreme Court

First things first: it’s not a health care bill, it’s a health insurance bill.  Tens of millions of people will be made to buy insurance from private corporations.  Whether those folks actually receive quality health care is another problem altogether, having mostly to do with socio-economic status.  Do you think a child in the poorest part of Alabama will have access to the same level of care as Mitt Romney’s sons or Barack Obama’s daughters?

Onto the main topic this day: the Supreme Court of the US has upheld the Affordable Health Care Act.

This is not the result that I predicted beforehand.  I did not think the anti-consumer, anti-citizen, anti-Constitution right-wingers on the Court would do anything that might help President Obama.  My initial reaction is that Chief Justice Roberts realized the profits the health insurance industry would reap if the law remained in place and that overwhelmed his tendency to stick it to the American people.

Furthermore, I do not think this helps Americans get closer to a universal health care system. in the short to medium term.  I think that is the direction most activists are pushing and therefore we will implement such a system sometime in the more distant future.  I would like to see individual states offer some version of universal health coverage by themselves and then join cooperatives to expand their population pools.

This gives candidate Romney something to talk about for a while, but there is no way he will actually remove the ACA if he were elected: the industry has already changed too much in preparation for 2014, when the law takes full effect.

Some of the media struggled with reporting this as the following screenshots demonstrate.

MSNBC at 10:20EDT:

CNN at 10:11EDT:

CNN at 10:18EDT

Oops.

Arctic Will Be Opened To Drilling

Among the reasons: Russia, Canada and Norway will drill, so we should also.  This from a “Democratic” administration.  This development is the result of increasing  corporate control over a government.  When people voted for “Hope and Change” in 2008, did they really think that any part of Obama’s administration would stand up to fossil fuel drilling in the most sensitive areas left on Earth?  In Colorado, policy allows natural gas drill pads physically closer to elementary schools than are marijuana dispensaries.  All this is occurring just two years after one of the worst oil spills in world history – how short is our memory?  Maybe people figure as long as the oil only destroys an Arctic ecosystem instead of an ecosystem which Americans might personally experience, then it’s alright.

Shell will receive approval for drilling later this year, according to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.  The article also includes a couple of reassurances that any potential spills in the future will be dealt with quickly because sufficient technologies will be in place already.  Once a spill occurs (as they always do), every politician and corporate executive interviewed will lament that nobody could possibly have foreseen an oil spill in the Arctic.

Solar panels and wind farms don’t explode or leak, to say nothing of the lack of carbon emissions from their energy generation.  The resources utilized are also common resources (nobody owns the sun or air – yet), so they directly threaten the obscene profits realized by a handful of corporations who now  have more rights than American citizens.

Conservatives Do Not Believe In States’ Rights

The most conservative judges on the Supreme Court since the 1930s issued a decision yesterday that said police could racially profile people in Arizona.  Some of the writings and statements made yesterday were overtly political – exactly what judges should not be.  The politicization of the Supreme Court by right wing extremists has reached new heights with this group.  That was the state of affairs forecasted to occur by non-partisan experts asked to comment on President Bush’s unqualified nominees.  And that is the state of affairs that has developed.  Based on the aforementioned writings, the conservative judges defended the so-called “right” of Arizona to “defend” itself against people that those in power don’t want in the state: brown people.

Is the immigration system broken?  Yes.

Are most government systems broken?  Yes.

Why are they broken?  Because those same right-wing extremists have put policies and personnel in place to ensure the systems don’t operate as they were designed.  The more they can wreck things, the truer their complaints that government doesn’t work rings true.  It’s called fulfilling their own prediction.

But hold on one moment.  Those same so-called “pro-states’ rights” folks are equally silent on the right of Montana to enforce a 100-year old law to keep corruption out of government.  Folks used to publicly pay for legislators – including U.S. Senators – to get the policies they individually wanted implemented.  The people of Montana stood up to that kind of nonsense.  Alito, Romney, Limbaugh and all the other right-wing nuts out there didn’t say word one about Montana’s right to pass a state law in the absence of national laws and a broken election system.

There are dozens of corporate media articles proclaiming Romney’s unwavering belief that states’ rights are paramount.

Except that it isn’t.  The corporate media is part of the problem.  If they sold themselves as stenographers, dutifully copying down everything fed to them by whatever source they could dredge up, that would be one thing.  But they continue to try to pass their industry off as legitimate.  The results?  Declining participation in a democratic process.  Disapproval of all branches of government.  These conditions won’t last forever.  Movements will arise and succeed in putting the ship back on course.  The wealthy and powerful won’t like it, but that’s not the real issue.

At the end of the day, conservatives believe in states’ rights.  Except when they don’t, which is more often than when they do.

Obama Doesn’t Show in WI, But Asks For Money Post-Walker Win

I was thinking about what it meant that President Obama didn’t get involved in the Wisconsin Governor recall election today.  Obama reinforced the conclusion I came to: Obama cares about Obama in 2012.  Period.  No other candidate or issue is really on his radar screen: his reelection is all that matters.

All one need look at is this from an email sent by the Obama campaign this afternoon:

Republican Governor Scott Walker and his allies outspent the Democratic challenger nearly EIGHT to ONE — and one of the most unpopular governors in the country managed to hold on.

[...]

Please donate $15 or more to support President Obama and make sure people, not special interests, decide this election.

Obama didn’t stump for Walker’s Democratic challenger in the past month – in much the same way that Obama let 2010 slip by without getting engaged in races that would make a difference to his agenda.  As a result, Wisconsin is still led by a deeply unpopular right-winger and the recall election lead-up to the validated the right’s approach to burying opponents in money.

After refusing to stand up to the right in Wisconsin, Obama wants to use the election results to fundraise off of me and millions of other Americans.  That might be considered good politics in the insular world of D.C. politics, but it’s bad politics in my book.  I’ll continue to donate to and work for local candidates, thank you very much Jim Messina.  Obama and other establishment Democrats aren’t truly interested in getting money out of politics.  They’re interested in getting reelected so they stay in power.