Ellington

An interesting piece in Salon today takes on the idea of what "corruption" really meant to Americans as they went to the polls last night. Exit polls showed that corruption was the top issue—even bigger than the Iraq War. Something about that fact makes me very proud to be an American today. You can only lie to and cheat the American people for so long. Arrogance lost last night. From the Salon piece:

"This is not a Republican victory. It's not a Democratic victory. It's about the American people making a set of choices." -- House Speaker-to-Be Newt Gingrich in Marietta, Ga., on Election Night 1994

Twelve years later, the American people have made another set of choices, erasing the once impregnable Sun Belt-based House conservative majority that Gingrich and his successors worked so hard to maintain. But corruption will do that to you -- the outright money-for-favors corruption that pointed two GOP incumbents toward prison, the see-no-evil corruption that caused the House Republican leadership to wink at Mark Foley's preying on congressional pages and, most of all, the corruption of the idea that Congress is an independent branch of government.

The resurrection of the legislative branch is no longer in doubt after a dramatic election in which the Democrats picked up about 30 House seats (a few races are still being tabulated) and also (pending recounts in Virginia and perhaps Montana) may have assembled a Dick Cheney-proof one-vote Senate majority. The magnitude of the seismic shift is underscored by this never-before-in-modern-politics fact: Not a single Democrat-held Senate or House seat or governor's mansion went Republican. [...]

No one is naive enough to believe that Bush will abandon his hard-line policies in Iraq just because the president suddenly finds himself between a rock and a hard place. The no-compromises tenor of the administration was illustrated by the president's pre-election vote of confidence in Cheney and Rumsfeld -- probably the two least likely public figures to offer an olive branch to congressional Democrats. Nor is it realistic to expect a narrow Democratic majority in Congress to rewrite American military strategy. But after Tuesday's political upheaval, a heedless president is about to be forced to learn a civics lesson about checks and balances.

Previous Comments

ID

108403

Comment

Sounds to me like the next two years on Capitol Hill are going to be more entertaining than usual. It looks as if after the crazy election yesterday, the prez campaign in '08 is going to be extra nasty. Mud for slinging is being mixed as we speak.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2006-11-08T18:18:05-06:00