It’s election day in the U.S. – midterm elections. Typically, fewer people turn out to vote for midterm elections than for presidential elections and yet, there’s a lot at stake with this one – whether the Republicans will take over the senate and control the congress.
In recent history, this has happened three times with two-term presidents – under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. During Republican Reagan’s second term as prez, the midterm elections turned the tide and the Democrats won enough votes to control congress. During Democrat Clinton’s second term, the Repubs took the congress. Under Repub Bush’s second term, the Dems took the congress. Now Dem Obama, in his second term, faces the possibility that the Repubs will take the senate and control congress. The Repubs expect to win and are already fighting over who will be majority leader.
If history repeats itself, I suspect the top priorities of the Repub congress will be to:
1) Impeach Obama – but for what? The conspiratorial suspicion that he was born in Kenya?
2) Overturn the Affordable Care Act – so that 10 million people or so lose their health care
3) Overturn the federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 an hour. Do the math on that one. Can a family live on $404 a week? And that’s before taxes and social security are taken out.
4) Overturn anything and everything that helps people.
5) Vote to make marriage between one man and woman the law of the land
6) Declare that personhood begins at conception
7) Try to institute more draconian laws concerning the right of women to govern their own bodies in terms of birth control and abortion. Give these mostly white men enough power, and they’ll hurl the country back to the Dark Ages.
Rob and I voted on Sunday, the last day of early voting in our county. It was held at our local library and there seemed to be a lot of hoops you had to jump through to do this. First, you had to fill out a form with your name, address, precinct number. Then you sat in front of one of perhaps ten poll workers, who asked for your driver’s license or voter registration card. Your name was run through a device and when it showed up on the screen, you signed your name and were directed to one of the printers, where your ballot was printed out.
Now: the ballot. Since the 2000 voting debacle in Palm Beach County that ended up in the Supreme Court, the county has redesigned their ballots several times. Now we’re back to paper ballots and a pen. A felt tip pen. Next to your candidate choice, you use the pin to darken the line between a broken arrow. It sounds ridiculous. It IS ridiculous. But, hey, okay. We get it. The Diebold voting machines used in 2004 were rigged and that election was stolen. When I punched in John Kerry’s name, Bush’s name came up. Not once but three times before my vote registered for Kerry.
At stake for Floridians is the governor spot. Our current governor, Rick Scott, was convicted of Medicare fraud some years back, has been against everything that might benefit the state –Medicaid expansion, which would enable more Floridians to get health insurance for a reasonable price; the restoration of the Everglades, and job creation. The man is a jerk with a big dopey smile.
Charlie Crist, the Democratic challenger, has been governor of Florida before, as a moderate Republican, who was socially liberal, and was actually a decent governor. He was on the short list for VP when McCain ran for the prez, got raked over the coals by the party, and eventually changed his party affiliation. Flip-flopper in that regard, but the alternative would be much worse.
One of the amendments on the ballot was for the legalization of medical marijuana. Rob and I voted yes on that one. Twenty-three states have now legalized pot for medical use. There’s plenty of evidence that it helps mitigate nausea in chemo patients, relieves pain from glaucoma, nerve pain, headaches, helps in the treatment of seizure disorders and in the treatment of Crohn’s disease. Colorado and Washington have made it legal for recreational use, and I suspect that’s going to happen in even more states. It shouldn’t be classified in the same category as a drug like heroin.
In Colorado, the first state to legalize weed for recreation use, the crime rate is down more than ten percent from 2013, with a drop of more than five percent in violent crime. That pretty much shoots a hole in the argument that legalizing pot would spell the end of the civilized world.
But if the Repubs sweep the senate and control congress, you can bet they’ll try to overturn all these state laws. In their worldview:
1) Pot leads to the use of heroin and oxycontin- but hey, alcohol and guns are just fine.
2) Women are too stupid or hormonal to make decisions for themselves
3) Minorities shouldn’t have the right to vote
4) All immigrants should be denied the right to become citizens
5) Climate change is NOT happening
6) Corporations are gods
This list is actually pretty long, but I’ll end it here. You get the idea. If you live in the U.S., please vote in this election for the party that actually speaks for the people, for the party that instituted Medicare, Social Security, the minimum wage and just about every other law that actually helps people. For us, but especially for our kids and grandkids, the stakes have never been higher.
Obama hasn’t been a perfect president, hasn’t been the agent of sweeping change we had hoped for. But can you imagine where we’d be if McCain/Palin (wink, wink) had won? Or Romney?
Actually…both Clinton and Obama lost control of Congress in their first mid-term elections, after two years in office. That’s what makes me so steamed. Bush was able to increase Republican control of Congress in his first mid-term because it was the first post-9/11 election, which he used to scare voters. It wasn’t until his second mid-term that he lost control of Congress because by the sixth year of his presidency (post-Katrina), most Americans realized at that point what a disaster he had been.
Imagine how much further along Obama would’ve been if Democrats had controlled Congress for his first 6 years!
Sad, how it all shook out. No telling what damage the repubican majority will do.
I think Trish forgot the GOP’s primary directive: shift money away from government programs to help the people at the bottom to bolster the richest 1%, supposedly so some of it will trickle down. That’s their philosophy.
In Washington state, all voting is done by mail. In Colorado, my husband and I were always the first people in line to vote before the sun even came up. And before I voted here this time, I logged onto progressivevoter.com to read their take on the issues. And then we voted last week. We have a chance to make everyone have to pass a background check to buy guns. In the name of the Sandy Hook children, I voted.