Philadelphia Weekly

Al Franken's in the Senate now. So what excuses do Democrats have left?

Photo by Flickr user Chad Davis, used under a Creative Commons license.

In reality, Franken doesn't make much difference. The real difference is that with Franken in the Senate, the Dems have no ready-made excuses for failing to pass their agenda.

--Martin Longman, Booman Tribune

These two sentences say so much about where we are today as a country, and where the Democrats are today as a party.

One would think that the Democrats, who now control both houses of Congress and the White House, would be taking the bull by the horns and ramming their agenda through despite the objections of the defeated and humiliated Republican Party. After all, that's what the Republicans did in the wake not only of their questionable 2000 "victory", but of September 11 as well, passing enormous unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, gutting the federal government's ability to respond to disaster, starting a needless, stupid, unwinnable war in the Middle East, stacking the Supreme Court with the same kind of judicial activists they pretend to deplore, and of course, eviscerating Americans' civil liberties.

So you'd think the Democrats would be eager to reverse all that. You'd also think the Democrats would be eager to fulfill some of their own promises, like that universal health care thing we've heard so much about, or making it easier for unions to organize.

Instead, we get bullshit like Chaka Fattah selling out on his promises to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spending the last week refusing to say where he stands on public health care. We get Bob Casey and Patrick Murphy voting to gut our Fourth Amendment rights, saying it's perfectly OK for the government to read our e-mail and listen in on our phone conversations for no reason at all. We get the Democratic leadership in D.C. coalescing around an embittered, self-serving Republican who openly admits he became a Democrat because he couldn't win with his base anymore.

And after years of telling constituents, "we need 60 votes to get anything passed" (even when that's such a baldfaced fucking lie that even the Wall Street Journal called it out as the bullshit it is), guess what happens the very day that Al Franken gives them the magic number?

You got it: "you don't want to get too far ahead of yourself here. It is not like the caucus is unanimous on every issue."

"Sixty is an imaginary number," said one operative. "You are always going to lose the Ben Nelsons and all the centrists. This is why 2010 proves to be so important because it can set a buffer for that 60 threshold."

"This is a story Jim Manley [Majority Leader Harry Reid's press secretary] will love, but it has the virtue of being true," the operative added.

"It's true," said Manley when reached by phone. "It is obviously sometimes difficult to say this to your audience [Huffington Post readers]. While this is, of course, good news to the people of Minnesota, President Obama, and the Senate Democratic, Franken's mere presence alone will not mean that the Democrats will be able to jam through our agenda, or make it any less critical for Democrats and Republicans to work together.

And with that particularly slimy slab of CYA spin, I'd like to pause for a message from our sponsor:

Over the past week or so, I've been watching episodes of Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, a wonderful BBC series that unearths the truth below so many of those stories of the Dark Ages. In just about every episode, public figures who abuse the people -- including kings, monks, knights, and nobles -- end up with their heads lopped off and mounted on pikes in the middle of town for everyone to see. I hate to admit it, but I'm beginning to feel the same way those English peasants did.

Or more pertinently, the way the American colonists felt under the yoke of England. Cus in the week leading up to the July 4th holiday, I've been re-reading the Declaration that started it all, and I find myself asking, who gives a shit what the name of the party in power is when both seem to exist solely to perpetuate the rule of corporate oligarchy?

When it comes to our inalienable rights, Our "Form of Government" has become "destructive of these ends": it ain't much of a life when basic health care is a sure road to bankruptcy, it ain't liberty when the government's reading your email and throwing people into cages forever without so much as a trial, and it ain't "pursuit of happiness" when your elected representatives persistently side with the powerful over the powerless. Why do I even have to CALL the Democrats about health care, which they've been promising for nearly thirty fuckin' years? Why is the Constitution suddenly a political football?

So am I calling for a revolution? The overthrow of the government? Nah. No one would participate anyway. As Richard Blair said a few years back, we're too busy makin' the nut. And furthermore, times have changed: Thomas Jefferson once opined that "every generation needs a new revolution" but in a country as enormous as ours it's incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to build the critical mass necessary to topple much of anything. Also, most of us don't own the kind of firearms necessary to carry out anything like that. Also, despite (or perhaps because of) the proliferation of mass media, we're nowhere near as smart as the founding fathers: we wouldn't get anything nearly as creative as their system of bicameral representation. It's my feeling that "revolution" would be better called "disaster".

But Jefferson also said a couple of other things. Like: "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." and, "If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions."

That's the whole purpose of my writing: To keep people like you well-informed and attentive to public affairs. More than that, I want us to be effective advocates for ourselves, because it's quite clear we can't count on our elected representatives to, you know, represent. And our self-advocacy should easy and fun to do.

It's not perfect (what is?), but we've had our victories. Like this week: After writing about Chaka Fattah's dilly-dallying on health care, I made a point of calling his office and rubbing their noses in it. Apparently a lot of you did too, because now Fattah's office is following the Philly Weekly on Twitter. More importantly, I've received e-mails from other activists saying that in response to your phone calls, Fattah's office is singing a VERY different tune: Now they say in no uncertain terms that he supports a public plan. I just tried it out myself.

YOU did that. And you should be damned proud of yourselves too. And if we keep it up, every day, every week (put 'em on your friends and family plan like I do and you won't use any minutes calling), we can make our reps responsive to what WE want instead of what some corporate lobbyist wants. Because at the end of the day, Congress answers to US.

And really, isn't that why we fought a revolution to begin with?