Gene Michael Stover (gene@acm.org)
created Sunday, 2022 May 8
updated Thursday, 2022 May 12
original at https://cybertiggyr.com/iubg0.html
Here's a refresher for anyone reading this far enough in the future that they don't remember the issue.
The Democrat party views the court's decision with a kind of glee. Sure, it pisses off their constituents & yet more people, but they plan to use it to motivate voters to vote for them.
I predict that this will fail, maybe even back-fire. (It didn't work in the presidential election of 2016.)
For decades, the Democrat party has been the party of nominal resistance against the Republican party. It hasn't been the party of actual resistance against Republicans, much less actual liberal or progressive action.
They have based their election strategy on being not nearly as insane as the Republicans. You could see that in how they presented Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They assumed that Donald Trump was so nuts & so incompetent that their candidate was a shoe-in.
So the leaders of the Democrat party, though personally offended by the Supreme Court's draft decision, are gleefully planning how they'll use it to build rage & therefore votes in the next election.
As in 2016, 2004, 2000, & probably a bunch of other elections, it has a good chance of failing.
(By the way, there's nothing new in what I'm saying. It's been true for decades.)
The Democrats should take actual liberal or progressive action. Actual action. Actually liberal. Actually improve things for people.
Most USAians are in favor of such action in at least a few issues (often on many issues), so actual action would probably let the Democrats win many elections by landslides, obvious majorities. It would improve things for us all & have a longer-term effect of making the country more liberal or progressive.
This has been true for decades, & the Democrats have rarely made liberal or progressive progress, so my guess is that they won't do it. They'll continue to campaign as being not nearly as nuts as the Republicans — which is true but insufficient to win elections reliably. So even though people are pissed off about the Supreme Court's draft decision, & it might help the Democrats in near-future elections, it won't help them or the average person as much as would actual liberal or progressive change that the Democrats say they will make but rarely make.
I wish we had a third party, a truly liberal party, but that won't happen.
My next favorite solution is to make the Democrat party actually liberal as Thom Hartmann suggested in We the People: Take Back America, but that won't happen.
Other options are lame: We can vote for the Democrats or suck up the loss of rights brought on by the authoritarian extremist minority — otherwise known as the “conservatives” of our country. And those two options come to the same end.
On 2022 May 11, the Senate voted on S.4132 - Women's Health Protection Act of 2022. You can reach the voting log from that page, or you can point your browser there directly.
50 Democrats voted. 49 of them voted in favor. The sole “Democrat” who voted against was Joe Manchin (D-WV).
Copyright © 2022 Gene Michael Stover. All rights reserved. Permission to copy store, transmit, and view in electronic form is granted. Permission to link to this document is granted.