Teresita @ 26:
I actually vigorously and vehemently disagree with Scott Brown re: abortion being “a settled issue.” If anything Roe v Wade inflamed the issue exponentially by cramming it down the throats of the American public by a non-legislative, non-publicly-deliberated process via a decision made be a handful of unelected public officials. If Brown believes that same-sex marriage ought to be decided by the states (ideally, by either legislatures, public referendum or state constitutional amendments depending on each state’s allowances for process, and NOT by the courts), then I think he’s inconsistent in giving Roe v Wade a thumbs-up for the way in which it was decided, regardless of what he thinks of the decision itself.
I happen to think both the process and the decision itself are appalling, and that we are reaping the social, economic & spiritual whirlwinds of that SCOTUS power grab in ways that most people do not even begin to reckon. (For starters, think about how much having 45+ million Americans under age 45 already in and about to enter the workforce, and paying taxes, would have on the terribly inbalanced payee-to-recipient ratio of Social Security, Medicare, etc. The Boomers really screwed themselves [and the rest of us] there, if you ask me. But I won’t continue belabor the issue any more than I already have.)
LOTM @ 45:
I probably didn’t make myself very clear, which wouldn’t be the first time that has happened.
What I object to re: Armey’s advice to GOP Congressman is that NOTHING he said appears to indicate that he or his audience of GOP pols truly grasps the extent to which the Tea Partiers have been and are continuing to become radicalized. When I say radicalized I mean the “to-the-root” nature of ordinary citizen-voters’ views on how the current system needs to be overhauled and returned to Constitutional boundaries and practices. When a million people, a significant proportion of whom have never engaged in political protest before, march on DC … do they understand that this means something, and that this “something” is not business as usual?
When I stated before that the political status quo in Washington is over, I didn’t mean it is that way because the Tea Partiers are making it so, I meant it’s because reality is making it so. For all the reasons commenters on BC have been enumerating lo these many months — out of design margin, etc.
The DC system has been specifically engineered to protect and further entrench the power of those inside the system. It has become not only sclerotic and unresponsive to the needs of ordinary taxpaying citizens, it has become actively destructive of the jobs, property and political voice of these citizens.
The ways in which the political system has been engineered by the insiders for the insiders are many, but I will choose a few representative examples:
1) Gerrymandering, done specifically to create “safe seats” for the incumbent and his/her party
2) Election laws, which have been constructed to create an impenetrable jungle of impossible hurdles hindering newcomers, while BASIC things like the integrity of the ballot go ignored
3) The triangle trade of Lobbyist Cash to Campaign Contribution to Congressional Earmark (where a $100,000 contribution can become a $50million contract — nice ROI that!), essentially legalized bribery and influence peddling
The percentage of Republicans who engage in the above is overwhelming. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of GOP Congress people who do not practice earmarking.
Dick Armey was telling the Republican pols to tell Republican voters, “We’re not the ones who broke your hearts” with the breaking of the promises contained in 1994’s Contract for America … but who does he think he’s kidding? Percentage-wise, how many of today’s Republican senators are the same people who were there ten years ago?
Armey’s advice to “meet” and “talk” and “listen” appears, to this voter and taxpayer, to be following the paradigm of addressing voter anger by tinkering around the edges of the existing system without any fundamental change of the system. That is not what the Tea Partiers are interested in. Talk is cheap. To cop a phrase from Dr. Phil, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. What have the vast majority of the current crop of GOP politicians in Washington shown us by their behavior? That they are in it for themselves and their cronies, at the expense of the rest of us.
If there is a lesson about Scott Brown’s election (and let’s hope that there is), it is not that Scott Brown is Mr. Wonderful … it is that We the People spoke. We the People, not the system insiders, are the ones who sent you to Washington and we can damn well recall you if you start smelling like you have become part of the cesspool. Remember who you work for.
Does Scott Brown get this? Do the rest of them?
We’ll see.
