Vote Democratic on November 7 - It Still Matters (11/1/06)
Dean Hartwell
There is so much to unite the two parties these days that one can be commended for wondering what difference the vote on November 7 will really make. Both parties supported going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither will pull our troops out now and neither will impeach President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.
Other pressing issues will go by the wayside even if the Democrats win November 7. The Democratic Party, for all its talk about universal health care, has never passed major legislation on the subject, even when it had control of the executive and legislative branches. The last time they tried, Democrats like the late Senator Patrick Moynihan, blocked Hillary Clinton’s plan. This year, no leading Democrat has campaigned on it.
There will be polite bows to environmental concerns, but no one will push to ratify the Kyoto Treaty (rejected by the Senate 99-0 under President Clinton). And forget about campaign finance reform, whose supporters have moved the fight to states like California after winning in Maine and Arizona.
When the two parties clash, it is less and less about political issues and more and more about who is to blame and who is weak. Gone are the days when a Democrat like Speaker Tip O’Neill would visit Republican President Ronald Reagan at the White House after work every day. Radio talk show host Stephanie Miller says her father (1964 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate William Miller) had several Democratic friends in Congress. Now we have “cat fights” on political talk shows, where each side’s representative tries to shout down the other.
It appears that the Democrats have stopped being friends with the Republicans but have started voting with them. So why vote Democratic?
The best reason to vote Democratic is to roll back the loss of our civil liberties over the past six years. Bush has brought us the Patriot Act, which diminishes the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments to the Constitution. The President and his lawyers quickly rammed the vote through Congress without giving everyone the chance to read it, saying only that it would help stop the terrorists.
One of the few Democrats brave enough to vote against it, Dennis Kucinich, Representative from Ohio, says on his web site: “Without a warrant or probable cause, the FBI can now search your private medical records or access your library records. Your doctor or local library is forbidden from notifying you when these searches take place. The government may search your home while you are away and in some cases even confiscate your property.”[i]
More recently, on October 17, 2006, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the President or the Defense Secretary to designate U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants.” They could detain these citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime and without an attorney.[ii]
What’s next if we keep electing Republican majorities to pass these unconstitutional laws? We could wait for the courts to strike them down (which could be years). Or we could watch our distance from a totalitarian regime become shorter. Reports say that Halliburton has already won a contract to build detention centers for these “enemy combatants” and others the people in power judge to be malcontents.[iii] I don’t want to even think of what comes after that.
But think about these things we must. To deny the possibility of losing our freedoms would be to deny the reality of the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. It would be to deny the reality of a war in Iraq fought under false pretensions. It would be to deny the reality of overwhelming evidence of GOP voter fraud in the last two national elections.
Of course, we will still debate emotional issues like abortion, the environment and health care, which continue to divide our nation. These issues matter deeply. But if we don’t confront the larger issue of whether we will even have the freedom to discuss issues any more, we are no longer citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave.