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Al Franken seems like a good dude. He’s certainly written many punkass-style dressing-downs of the powers that be, and even though he’ll inevitably be coddled into the sleepy state of going with the corporate flow, I was happy to see him declared the winner.

And I was dreading Harry Reid’s reaction.

A Republican leader who woke up with a hugely popular president, a dominant majority in the House, and a 60-40 edge in the Senate would be crowing about their good fortune like this: “Americans have spoken, and overwhelmingly they want absurd military spending, overt patriarchal control, imperialism, and white power. Everyone else can SUCK IT.” And then they would do what the Bushies did when they had their window of American support — jam the system with the most extreme ideologues they could.

Harry Reid does it this way:

“We have 60 votes on paper,” Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said Wednesday in an interview. “But we cannot bulldoze anybody; it doesn’t work that way. My caucus doesn’t allow it. And we have a very diverse group of senators philosophically. I am not this morning suddenly flexing my muscles.”
[...]
That Democratic dynamic means the party will have to continue to try to appeal to at least a handful of Republicans on major issues to compensate for potential defectors. “One or two could peel off on any issue,” said Mr. Reid, who has seen the ranks of his party swell by 15 in the past two elections.

I read that as: “Americans are left-leaning on nearly every national and international issue in every poll. And they’ve backed that up with their vote, pushing the most liberal available option into office at nearly every turn. This blows. Because now Americans will learn how little we actually want to change anything in this country. I mean, sure, we won’t rob you of any more rights than you’ve already lost, and we’ll only continue the conflicts that have already been started, but we can’t really stop killing people overseas and start helping folks at home. That’s, well, who’ll pay for my $300 steak dinners? And Aspen ski trips? And delicious escorts? Corporate America’s taken great care of me, and unfortunately, you’re finally gonna see that we love them and merely pander to you. So I better pretend like we’re still the underdogs and pray you believe me.”

Think of what the Republicans did with a small majority in Congress. They repealed habeas effing corpus. We’re not even going to get a decent healthcare plan.

I realize some Dems will defect on any given thing, but they can only defect in ways that open the door to a filibuster, not actually block the passage of legislation. And even laypeople will get tired of Democrats who defect on filibustering. Of course, Reid knows this. He’s just using the threat of defections as cover for doing nothing.

Sadly, when the Republicans say “are you better off now than you were when the Democrats took over?” most people aren’t going to say yes. Then Republicans will gradually return to power and go right back to making things much, much worse.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under Punkass!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.