Why Republicans don't care what the voters want
The GOPers have already rigged the system so they can't lose.
This is the poison brew that was steeped in the 2010 Tea Party sweep. You'll recall that was the election when your progressive friends insisted the only principled thing to do was to teach the Dems a lesson and withhold your vote. Because otherwise nothing will ever change. Well, I guess they were right about that. Things did change. A lot. For the worse.
That's the trouble with demanding all or nothing ideological victories. The odds are you're going to end up with nothing. So maybe next time I mention electing "hold your nose" Dems and accumulating incremental policy progress is better than giving control to the crackpot cons, more people will believe me.
Last January, the Republican Party published a triumphant report bragging that “Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.” The report touts the role GOP gerrymandering played in enabling Republicans to keep the House despite losing the popular vote, citing states like Michigan, where “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”Thus we have a new poll that shows if the election was held today, Democrats would win by an eight point margin, yet only gain a 5 seat majority. If Dems won by any less, the GOP would still hold the majority by a single seat.
This is the poison brew that was steeped in the 2010 Tea Party sweep. You'll recall that was the election when your progressive friends insisted the only principled thing to do was to teach the Dems a lesson and withhold your vote. Because otherwise nothing will ever change. Well, I guess they were right about that. Things did change. A lot. For the worse.
That's the trouble with demanding all or nothing ideological victories. The odds are you're going to end up with nothing. So maybe next time I mention electing "hold your nose" Dems and accumulating incremental policy progress is better than giving control to the crackpot cons, more people will believe me.
Labels: Broken Government, Republican corruption, Voters Rights
posted by Libby Spencer at 5:27 PM
2 Comments:
A somewhat interesting phenomenon can be noted when confronting the average committed Republican voters with outcomes such as you have noted. Ask "do you agree with this kind of proposal" and the inevitable answer will be in the negative, but when asked to justify why they still vote for such fools, inevitably the answer will be, "I'm a fiscal conservative."
Problem is that the last Republican president that would even semi-qualify for that label was Nixon, and even the most committed Republican won't deny that Tricky Dick was a crook.
One of the GOP's greatest successes is in defining themselves as fiscally responsible when in fact they waste more money than anyone.
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