| User Blox 4 |
|
- Put stuff here
|
Barack Obama  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
|
|
Thu Dec 20, 2007 at 20:18:16 PM MST
|
| While we're talking about Republican obstructionism, the latest impedimentary effort from our Friends of Fettering is the blocking of recent FEC nominations. There are four nominees - two Democrats and two Republicans - and Senate Democrats want to nominate them individually, while Senate Republicans want to nominate the group as a block, and if they can't, well, there'll be no nominating at all. Which means no FEC during the upcoming election year.
What's the big fuss? you ask. Why are Republicans stubbornly refusing to allow an up-or-down vote on each of the four nominees?
Meet Hans Spakovsky.
If you've followed what I've written about GOP voter suppression efforts, you know his name. In fact, his degradations against voter rights as a member of the politicized Bush Department of Justice are so myriad and plentiful, that it would take days of work to paint an accurate profile of the man.
Luckily Dahlia Lithwick has already done the heavy lifting. |
| Jay Stevens :: Would you obstruct Congress for this man? |
| This is a man who was nominated for the FEC last June, rejected by the Senate, and then later installed onto the commission by President Bush as a recess appointment. (Which explains why the Senate is going to stay in session over the holidays.) This is a man, according to Justice officials in a letter for his June confirmation hearing, who helped transform the DoJ's civil rights section's "historic mission to enforce the nation's civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section." This is a man who engineered at least two government efforts - in Texas and Georgia - to disenfranchise minority voters, and which were later found to be unconstitutional.
Lithwick:
More than almost anyone else-perhaps even including Alberto Gonzales-Hans von Spakovsky represents a Justice Department turned on its head for partisan purposes. Even if a seat on the FEC is merely symbolic, the last thing Democrats should be doing is confirming to that seat someone who symbolizes contempt for what it means to cast a vote.
Senate Democrats agree, and rightfully think Spakovsky - a partisan political hack with a history of using nonpartisan government resources to promote the political agenda of his bosses - has no place serving on the Federal Elections Committee. And Senate Republicans would rather have no FEC next summer than have an FEC without Spakovsky.
If "causes" like Spakovsky are what the Republican party is fighting for, then maybe it's true what Steve Benen wrote a few days ago of the GOP:
The problem isn't that the party has great ideas that it's having trouble selling or a brilliant agenda lying just below the surface; the problem is the party has no ideas, has consistently backed a disastrous war, is led by the least popular president of the modern political era, and would rather obstruct than govern.
Private-sector marketing concepts are usually built around accentuating positives. What's the GOP good at? Smearing people? Feigning outrage? Using bumper-sticker slogans?
Dems may be struggling to overcome GOP obstructionism, frustrating their base, and giving the appearance of weakness, but it's the minority party that has deep, long-term structural problems right now.
Maybe it's time that our Republican friends got together and came up with something to believe in, other than vile party hacks. |
|
| Poll |
| Purely Hypothetical, of course, but - The best candidate for the Republicans for US Senate is: |
|
|
|
Results
|
|
