Tag Archives: John Boehner

Few bright spots for the Democrats as America voted Republican

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Well, that was really depressing.

Only in Minnesota, and a few other bright spots around the country, did the Democrats win, or even put up a good fight in yesterday’s Republican landslide. Even in Democratic strongholds, like Massachusetts and Maryland, the voters elected new Republican governors. Southern Democratic Senators trying to get reelected failed, like Mark Pryor in Arkansas and Kay Hagan in North Carolina. Only Mark Warner in Virginia held on, barely…

The next US Senate will have a comfortable Republican majority, and the least sympathetic of all American politicians, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, will be the new majority leader. He was the one — remember ? — who set as his primary goal at the start of the first Obama Administration to make sure that America’s first African American president would only serve one term. Well, Obama was reelected in 2012 and McConnell remained minority leader. Now, McConnell plus House Speaker John Boehner in charge of an even larger Republican majority in the House of Representatives, will have to work with President Obama if anything is to get done in the new Congress.

Don’t hold your breath! The Republican majorities in Congress contain more conservatives and more Tea party sympathizers, who now see even less reason to work with the President. If they turn cooperative, it will be a first after years of Republican obstruction, including a government shutdown, for which, apparently, and remarkably, the American voters have rewarded them while at the same time — and completely illogically — bitterly complaining about the gridlock in Washington.

They give Congress embarrassingly low approval ratings — even lower than the President — and then vote them back in power, stronger than before. Figure that one out!

Actually, and once again, the American voters have shown how negative they are towards the government, not only this government but government in general. They want a weak government and with yesterday’s outcome they have assured themselves of that.

I mentioned Minnesota in the beginning, where I have recently spent quite a bit of time, and although Minnesota’s voters reelected all the top Democratic candidates, Governor Mark Dayton, Senator Al Franken, the State Auditor, the Attorney General, as well as all five Democratic members of the US Congress, and elected a new Democratic Secretary of State, the voters turned their back on the Democratic Farmer Labor Party’s (DFL) candidates for the State House of Representatives. The Democrats’ majority of 73 to 61 for the last two years will switch to a solid Republican majority, 72 to 62,  in the next House, while the Democrats keep their majority in the Senate, which is not up for reelection until 2016.

So, also in Minnesota, the voters chose change, to end, as they put it, the “single-party DFL rule.” It’s the fourth time in ten years that the majority in the House has changed hands. And, just like in Washington, the ability to govern, to get results, to move the country forward, has been weakened. In that sense, the voters in Minnesota were no different than the voters in the rest of America.

The outcome does not bode well for America in the next two years.

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The Republicans: “The cowardice in the many”

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“John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual secession from laws they disagree with.”

The words are from Garry Wills, emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University writing in The New York Review of Books under the title “Back Door Secession.”

Wills goes on to say what the people behind these efforts are doing resemble “the pre-Civil War virtual secessionism—the holding of a whole party hostage to its most extreme members”… and that “the presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

Where are we? Where is America heading?

A golden opportunity is wasted

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What are they going to talk about now?

That’s the question before tonight’s talks at the White House after Republican Speaker John Boehner’s announcement last night that he cannot do a big deal on the debt ceiling and the deficit, citing White House insistence that a deal must also include tax increases, especially for the rich.

The truth behind Boehner’s retreat is that he could not get such a deal approved by his Republican colleagues in the House. The Tea Party members say no to everything, except cuts. They even say to raising the debt ceiling at all, as witnessed repeatedly out on the campaign trail by their foremost spokesperson, Michele Bachmann as well as by Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor.

What part of the word “catastrophe” for the country if the debt ceiling is not raised do they not understand? They are really playing with fire. It’s time for everyone to get serious, writes Charlie Cook at the National Journal.

A golden opportunity to come to grips with America’s deep economic crisis has been wasted.