Last Tuesday, the voting public dropped a big block on the Republican party as the Democrats charged ahead and took back the House of Representatives and the Senate. This gives Democrats complete control over Congress, which they haven’t had since 1994. Also, the next day, Democrats got the head of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld handed to them by the president himself.
With this election, Americans gave President Bush and the Grand Old Party a very public spanking.
“I think the American people clearly sent a message, and it’s a message we need to understand and we need to listen to, and we as Republicans need to follow,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said in an interview on Fox News.
The problem is that Democrats weren’t upfront about what their goals in Congress would be if elected. Instead, they simply stuck to the mantra of “We need a change.”
In the next to years, Democrats will have to stop blaming Bush and the Republicans because they will also be a big part of the decision-making.
And that’s the main problem.
As the first woman Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi will bring with her all her San Francisco left-wing values. Pelosi has already shown herself to be the most liberal member of the House. She’s voted against cutting taxes, renewing the Patriot Act, reducing the death tax, and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Pelosi has already said that we must begin to redeploy our troops out of Iraq. She’s also diminished the war on terror, saying it is only a situation to be solved and winning can mean whatever you want it to mean.
Apparently, in Pelosi’s world, “cut and run” can also be called “wining.”
Pelosi will also control who is appointed to committee chairmanships. She has made it clear that any Democrat that was close to the Bush administration will be blocked.
She didn’t want Jane Harman, a conservative Democrat, being head of the House Intelligence Committee. Pelosi would rather have a man like Alcee Hastings in the job. Hastings was impeached and removed from his federal judgeship in 1989 for conspiring to take a $150,000 bribe and handing out light sentences to two convicted swindlers.
As chairman, this criminal would have access to the most sensitive national security secrets. Pelosi is willing to risk our national security just to be able to appoint one of her friends and banish Harman for being close to Bush.
Well there goes that bipartisan feeling.
Pelosi is in good company among Democrat leadership. She’s working with people like Charles Rangel who wants to cut off funding for our troops and rid us of Bush’s tax cuts. She’ll work well with John Conyers who’s going to initiate impeachment and waste time investigating every aspect of Bush’s presidency. And with John Murtha heading up the Defense Subcommittee, his calls to pull out of Iraq will get louder.
With these and other Democratic leaders at the helm, we will get nothing but higher taxes, a weak military, social give-aways and unprotected borders.
With this type of Democrat leadership, getting anything done in the war on terror will be next to impossible. No wonder the heads of the leading terrorist groups have all praised this election. Their type of people have been elected.
Also, Iran should be cheering after the results of Tuesday’s elections. John Bolton, who Bush appointed to be the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, will likely be tossed out on his ear once the new Democrat-controlled Congress convenes.
Bolton has been the only one who aggressively pursued rouge states like Iran and tried to stop them from developing weapons of mass destruction. If Bolton is removed, this type of pressure will be eased. This will empower Iran and other rouge nations to pursue nuclear weapons.
Another thing Pelosi and other Democrat leaders need to remember is that the public showed their disapproval of current Republican policies, not conservative values. Republicanism took a beating but conservatism still came out the winner. Many of the Democrats elected are anti-abortion, pro-gun and pro-military. This is a stark contrast to those that are in Democratic leadership.
These new moderate and conservative Democrats will make the next congressional session interesting. We’ll have to see if the moderate and conservative Democrats stand and fight for their ideas or just bow down to their leadership.
If they fold, no one will be left to protect the United States, because Pelosi and San Francisco-type liberals think they can negotiate with terrorists.
I believe this is how Neville Chamberlain thought about Hitler, as well.
This article appears exclusively on La Voz Online.
