The Majority (Is Supposed To) Rule [View all]

[babylonsister]

http://www.politicalgarbagechute.com/the-majority-is-supposed-to-rule/

The Majority (Is Supposed To) Rule
November 28, 2012
by James Schlarmann

A new ABC/Washington Post poll shows that 60% of those polled want to see taxes on those households earning $250,000 or more annually to go up. So that of course means that Congressional Republicans will see the poll results, combine them with the election results of a couple weeks ago, and have an epiphany. They’ll all figure out that they need to drop the anti-tax nonsense they’ve been holding onto with white-knuckles and agree to some kind of deal with the President that allows rates to go up, right?

And then everyone reading this laughed so hard that fluids shot from their noses.

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What I can’t seem to wrap my head around is the notion that a party can lose an election run on a very clear ideological question, and still insist they have the mandate. I don’t understand when this country decided that the majority does in fact not rule. Instead, we’ve all become hostages to the right wing’s sycophancy when it comes to taxes. They are completely ignoring the fact that rates were exactly where President Obama wants to put them back in the mid 90?s when Bill Clinton was in office. They are ignoring the fact that those tax hikes, combined with sensible budget balancing that Clinton and Congressional Republicans and Democrats worked out, gave us a massive surplus. Of course, given that they are conveniently glossing over the fact that their rampant Defense spending on two unfunded wars helped blow a hole in the budget that has yet to be repaired. But who needs to focus on that when you can continue to demagogue the president into oblivion?


This week we’ve learned that Republicans care more about tossing the political football of four dead Americans around than fixing the economy. We’ve also now seen that the GOP has no intention of actually listening to the will of the people who spoke on November 6th. Their ideals lost. Their insistence that President Obama’s plan for the economy was wrong was rejected. And yet through it all they remain stubbornly entrenched in the “no new taxes” shelter they’ve built around their party.

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Why on God’s Green Earth would President Obama budge on tax hikes? He won just over 50% of the popular vote, and got three million more votes than Mitt Romney. In places where reality is not sublimated by rhetoric, in other words outside of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and other right wing media outlets, Obama did in fact obtain a mandate through his victory over Mitt Romney. That mandate is further protected by the fact that he now can focus solely on his job, and not on winning another term. Maybe it’s time for another petition to hit the White House’s website. Perhaps a petition to insist that John Boehner and the Congressional Republicans yield to the American way, and the American people and allow the majority to rule.