…so little time to blog.
FuryI am furious that an outright MAJORITY of DEMOCRATS can’t get DADT repealed. Strike that. That a MAJORITY OF DEMOCRATS won’t live up to their own bloody platform. EQUALITY, GODDAMNIT!!
I am furious that an outright MAJORITY of DEMOCRATS can’t get it together to extend unemployment benefits and extend tax cuts to 98% of Americans. WITHOUT giving away $708 BILLION dollars to folks who already have more money than the bottom 50%.
I am furious that every single TV news outlet except for Comedy Fucking Central let the Republicans get away with filibustering against health care for 9/11 first responders.
I am furious that Fox News is on every day, all the time, in my office break room. I sprain my eyeballs rolling them every time I go in there. If I change the channel, it’ll be changed back within 15 minutes.
I am furious that Democrats in the Senate and in the House have acted for the last two years like compromise would work with people to whom “compromise” means “give me everything I want”. They should NEVER have passed bills to assuage Republicans when they ended up not getting a single Republican vote.
And now we’ve lost the House. And did we learn anything from it? No.
Fury.
Please note that I am NOT furious with the Republicans. They are doing what folks in the minority SHOULD do. And it’s pretty clear that when they hold the House next year that they will do what I wish the Democrats had done for the last two years…and didn’t.
With the majorities the democrats had for the past 2 years, there wasn’t even a need for republicans to show up. Can’t blame the republicans–I blame the democrats for not having the spine to get these things done.
Come on! A 30 seat majority in the house and a 60/40 filibuster proof majority (til Brown) and it took as long as it did for health care?
You know I share your frustration (because, when we discuss it, you have to remind me to keep my language appropriate to our eight-year-old). But we’re not like the other side. They vote the way they’re told to vote, claiming later that being sheep is their way of showing dedication to such constitutional principles as “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” (yes, I know where that’s really from; tell the new Speaker).
For people who actually know what it says, our oaths to support the constitution require us to think before we vote. For liberal Democrats like me, that means we are confident that the principles of the separation of powers, the right to personal privacy, and women having the vote reside in the document, even though the words “separation,” “privacy,” and “women” aren’t in it.
Now, while our so-called Senate “majority” is failing to repeal the unconstitutional DADT policy, that act of cowardice is not the fault of that majority. Rather, a few within it convert what should be an exemplary act of liberal progressiveness into a failure of our legislature. Fact is, most of the Democrats in the Senate would vote in favor of constitutional equality (as the “equal protection” clause of Section I of the Fourteenth Amendment requires, and, yes, that phrase actually is in the amendment, forcing particularly jack-assed conservatives to say such excrementious things as, “gays got the same rights as straights cuz they can marry people of the opposite sex, same as the rest of us,” and see Loving v. Virginia to find out how up-to-date that is from a constitutional perspective.)
Yet, while most of the Senate Dems get it, a few are afraid of the consequences of abiding by their oaths, politically, and are allowing this cruel relic of a policy to continue to ruin people’s lives to protect their seats and what they put in those seats. Let’s not give them a pass, but let’s not blame the entire majority for the sins of a few. After all, even a Democratic majority, if its going to live up to its liberal agenda, sometimes takes all of that majority to make the difference that it should. Imagine what it must be like, to be a member of a Democratic majority in a representative body, and not see them all unite and lead because, for one reason or another, we’re just not sheep. The liberals in that group respect your fury, but they need your love.
You can take my word for it.