Why the Democrats Keep Losing the Congress
(COMMON DREAMS) Ralph Nader, October 31, 2016 — Why isn’t the Democratic Party landsliding the worst and cruelest Republican Party in the past 162 years?
Just take a glance at their record votes and you’ll wonder why the Republican representatives don’t just incorporate themselves and be done with any pretense that they are real people.
A brief look at a compilation of Republican votes during the years 2011-2012, when the Republicans controlled the House, demonstrates that they regularly choose Wall Street over Main Street, drug and oil, banking and insurance companies over consumers. And that Republicans want tiny enforcement budgets against corporate crime to assure that hundreds of billions of your health and other consumer dollars are not recovered from the corporate criminals ($60 billion a year alone in business frauds on Medicare).
Repeatedly, these Republicans, often a unanimous 100% of them, in a bizarre kind of corporate-conditioned response, vote in favor of corporations shipping American jobs overseas rather than voting to protect American workers. This Republican-controlled congress was intent on defending and increasing massive tax breaks for the wealthiest at the expense of the lower income families, attacking Medicare, social security, and other programs assisting elderly Americans, even assaulting women’s health and safety, opposing stronger food safety enforcement and preventing toxic pollution controls while at the same time protecting rapacious student loan companies and keeping victims of mortgage companies and banks defenseless against onslaughts of insurmountable debt accumulation.
They also passed a bill to pay members of Congress during a GOP-led government shutdown, however, while refusing to guarantee that soldiers would get paid during the same shutdown. Moreover, the Republicans have this strange antagonism toward encouraging more people to vote, and assuring that every vote counts.