Goodbye voting rights

When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008 and Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, I figured Republicans would be humbled and accept the will of the people.

Boy was I wrong. Republicans became energized. They weren’t the slightest bit interested in the will of the people — all they cared about was making Obama a one-term president and taking back Congress, by hook or by crook. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) even declared the GOP’s official mission to be limiting Obama to one term. As far as he was concerned, that was his first order of business. How’s that for governing?

But what Republicans realize is that running on a do-nothing platform might not win them enough votes in 2012 — at least not if every eligible voter gets to vote. Remember — Barack Obama won by a healthy margin in 2008, and if all those people (and then some) show up to vote again in 2012, he’ll probably get reelected. So what Republicans also realize is that because they probably won’t win a fair election, they’ll have to cheat.

And the cheating has already begun. Already in many Republican-controlled states, legislatures are passing draconian voter ID laws that will make it difficult to vote for minorities, students, and the elderly. Seniors without picture IDs who’ve voted all their lives might be disenfranchised because they no longer have drivers licenses. Republicans claim this layer of security is designed to prevent voter fraud, but there’s never been voter fraud on a level to justify such measures. What we’re seeing are the modern-day version of Jim Crow laws.

The tea party Republicans may or may not realize that this is what the real tea party was all about — taxation without representation — although if they do, they probably don’t care. After all, someone who is denied their legitimate right to vote is still required to pay taxes, and by being disenfranchised, they will be taxed while denied a voice in their representation.

Voting is a sacred right. That Republicans would deny the right to honest Americans is a travesty of the first order — about as un-American as it gets.

Tea party lays waste to economy

In the wake of the S&P downgrade, Republicans are slamming President Obama for their own malfeasance. Obama is also being criticized from the left for not standing up to the tea party-led GOP, but it’s hard to calculate just how that would have worked out. In the game of chicken forced by Republicans, the possibility of legitimate compromise seemed off the table. That left default or what we got as the two possible outcomes, and the tea party made it clear that default was acceptable.

Tea party Republicans make up a minority of the House majority, so they did not come by their power legitimately. What they did was create an aura of fear around their movement, threatening primary challenges to incumbent Republicans if they didn’t toe the tea party line. The no-tax pledge authored by Grover Norquist has trumped the Oath of Office each representative swears to, which makes it impossible for Republicans to govern responsibly.

The House leadership bears the blame for this. John Boehner should have repudiated the tea party for their extremism while he was minority leader, but he probably saw them as a means to gain the speakership. Even then it wasn’t too late. When he saw the direction tea party Republicans were taking the party, he could have put the brakes on.

He didn’t, and here we are. S&P, whose own credibility is questionable (says Paul Krugman in his NY Times column today as he wrote about S&P’s two trillion dollar math error), didn’t say we didn’t cut enough to reduce the debt — they said we didn’t do enough. It does not take a genius to understand that you attack debt from two directions if possible — spending cuts and revenue increases. It was possible to do both, but the Republicans forced us to do just one.

The markets are taking no small comfort in the fact that two other ratings agencies did not lower our rating. After a week of declines anticipating the lowered rating, the market today is plunging again, the Dow Jones down over 300 as I write this. What to do? Boehner could call the House back into session and craft a bill that would end a few wasteful subsidies and raise taxes on those making a million and above. Then Harry Reid could call the Senate back into session and get it passed. It might not get S&P to change its mind, and it might not reverse the market’s decline right away, but it would increase revenue, and it would reduce the debt. This would paint a healthier picture of the US economy overall and demonstrate to the world that we’re serious about managing our budget.

 

Stupidity rules, for now

Each time I hear an interview with a member of the tea party, my general impression is reinforced: there are no intellectual luminaries among them — or, in other words, they’re uniformly stupid. The latest tea partier to make a bad impression on me was Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), who blustered for what seemed like forever last night on Hardball.

Meanwhile, tea party Rep. Allen West (R-FL) made a fool of himself after Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), in her half of a traditional House exchange, wondered why her colleague from Florida would vote against the seniors who comprised so much of his constituency with his support for cuts in Medicare and Social Security. In an email response, West called Wasserman Schultz vile, unprofessional, and despicable. It’s actually West who is vile, unprofessional, and despicable.

This kind of bald incompetence bodes poorly for the Republican party, which was once capable of governing. This also bodes poorly for the country, since unfortunately the tea party is running the show in the House. The trick will be to survive until November, 2012, when there will hopefully be enough buyer’s remorse to chalk it up as a bad experiment.

Polls continue to show that the public understands just who’s responsible for the current morass over the debt ceiling — the GOP-led House. Even Wall St. and the US Chamber of Commerce are urging Republicans to raise the debt level, ironic considering they generally supported tea party candidates in the last election.

By all logic, the tea party is self-destructing even as we speak. We have to hope that they don’t take the country down with it.