The conservative grip on power

[marmar]

from Salon.com:



The conservative grip on power
Don't let the Democratic president fool you: Conservatives are fully entrenched in D.C., especially on the Court

By Linda Hirshman


Writing in Salon, Natasha Lennard proposes that with the warm weather we can again expect the Occupy movement to shoot up. Arab Spring, American Spring. She’s right about one thing: Like in the decades before the Arab Spring, it has been a long, cold, American winter. In the 30 years since coming to power here, Republicans have used their initial ascent to power to seal themselves into office as tightly as the pharaohs. Smart commentators have noted how lawless the conservatives are in making substantive decisions, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how they use their tenure to make it increasingly impossible to oust them.

With this week’s Supreme Court hearings — which will end, liberals worry, with the justices overturning healthcare reform — we are nearing the apotheosis of conservative power. Let us recount how we got here: In 2000, a mob of conservative thugs stopped the vote recount in Florida. And that was before the court got involved, the five conservative justices seizing the election and handing the White House to George W. Bush. Secure in the tenure of their undemocratically selected president, the two older conservative justices, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, retired from the bench. Bush replaced them with two young conservatives, destined, by constitutional design and the miracles of modern medicine, to dominate the court into the foreseeable future. At the Supreme Court, it’s always winter (and never Christmas).

The stunningly inept performance by the Bush administration unforeseeably produced the first Democratic federal government since 1994. Immediately thereafter, the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that the GOP’s wealthy sponsors could spend an unlimited amount of the money putting conservatives in office. Now, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, appointed, in part, by the conservative president they put in the White House, is preparing to wipe from the statute books the only piece of meaningful progressive legislation in the last half century, passed during the brief Indian summer of a two-year Democratic majority. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/the_conservative_grip_on_power/singleton/

[libtodeath]

1. They are this countrys real enemies.

[mmonk]

2. It is the truth some of us know.

That is why we now turn to the Occupy movement, civil disobedience, legal strategies, Constitutional convention and amendment ideas, etc. The game is almost hopelessly rigged at this point, at least for a generation. Sorry for the pessimistic view.

[CrispyQ]

3. I agree with everything she says about the repubs,

but she lets the dems off too easy.

True, the Democrats have not been models of political virtue. Cowardly when confronted by their powerful adversaries, confused about the moral grounding of their political vision, faithless to their allies, racketing from one trendy policy initiative to another, without anything resembling long-term planning — with enemies like the Democrats, who needs friends? But blaming the victim is way too easy. Democrats made the mistake of behaving as if the American rules of representative government still applied. Confronted with the lawless conservative Republicans, their fate was sealed.

The dems are not the victim, the People are. Being cowardly, confused & faithless makes the dems complicit, not victims.

Edited for clarity.

[Zalatix]

4. Republicans are in power because we lack courage.

Let's be honest here.

Occupy Wall Street is out there protesting for the 99% like we Democrats should have been doing back when the Tea Party first showed up. Fact. We're not striking and demonstrating and raising hell like the folks in France and Greece. And some DU posters even attacked Occupy Wall Street, calling them counter-productive and all that BS.

Of course, you can argue that the above is not true, if you haven't been around much. But what you cannot ever say is that a lot of Democratic Party leaders came out to address OWS, or that large swaths of Democrat voters and liberal activists joined them in protest. If they did, many, many OWS protests would be MILLIONS strong. Simple as that.

And... worse than that is the fact that our elected officials are too busy reaching across the aisle to Republicans and compromising. As a result we have people being forced to purchase private corporation health insurance on pain of a tax penalt-er, wait, we can't even call it a penalty because that'll offend Democrats. We couldn't even get our own elected officials to fight tooth and nail for the Public Option, much less Medicare For All. We can't even tell fellow Democrats that forced health insurance purchases was originally a MITT ROMNEY IDEA without inciting drama - it's as if they believe this is a lie. We've even sunk so low as to cheer the use of drones to kill unarmed American citizens without even a pretense of due process (which Democrats will sorely regret when this power passes into Republican hands). Do you think Tom Hayden or the post-1950s new left would approve of using drones to do that? Hell no. That's how far to the right we've shifted. Our elected officials have even chosen to continue Bush's domestic spying programs. What, us worry? We sure did when Bush was doing it; now? Not so much. And now the Government has even looser rules for cracking down on protesters than we had during the Bush years. Again, when Republicans get a hold of this law... we will regret it.

No wonder the Conservatives have so much power. We're not hard-assed like the GOP. We're not even united; but the Conservatives are. Our elected officials are hooked on compromise; the GOP does not back down at all.

We need The Rock Obama, but more importantly, we as the constituents need to descend upon the GOP like a ravenous swarm of flying political piranhas. We need to live by two simple rules: no surrender, no backing down, not ever, no matter what the cost. Nothing ever gets won by compromise or backing down to an enemy like we're facing.