The Recipe For Getting Voted Out
Wednesday - October 25, 2006
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Del.icio.usRepublicans are facing on Nov. 7. A NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted Oct. 13-16 showed only 16 percent of the respondents approved of the performance of the current Republican-controlled Congress. Seventy-five percent disapproved.
Fifty-two percent said that they would prefer a Democratic majority controlling Congress. Thirty-seven percent preferred continued Republican control.
Commenting on PBS’s Newshour, congressional scholar Thomas Mann characterized the present Congress as “the broken branch” of the federal government, arguing that “corruption, Iraq and partisanship” had done the Republicans in. He compared their problems in the fall of 2006 with that of the Democratic congressional majority in the fall of 1994, on the eve of the Republican pick-up of 52 congressional seats.
Mann predicts the Democrats will gain 25-35 seats in the House of Representatives, five or six in the United States Senate. If he’s correct, that will give the Democrats control of the House and, if the gain is six in the Senate, of that body as well.
Why? Try the resignations of four congressional Republicans, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, for accepting bribes and, in the case of Rep. Mark Foley, for improper behavior with House pages.
Or the Republican majority’s unquestioning acceptance and approval of George W. Bush’s wretched war in Iraq. Or of his administration’s ineptitude in responding Hurricane Katrina.
Or the spectacle of the Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician with presidential ambitions, diagnosing signs of life in the vegetative Terri Schiavo from a television news video clip.
And so on, and so on, and so on. That kind of behavior, over time, will do in any party.
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