Common Sense

“Democrats have control of both houses of Congress.” I have to keep saying it for it to sink in and really seem believable. I had to go right from the excitement of election night to hard work at the sports desk with new clerk guy. I couldn’t very well goof off and write on my blog in front of him and instill a poor work ethic in him. It’s bad enough I show up an hour late to work every night.

And because of that, I haven’t really reflected on what we can do and how we can go about it. I mean, we have an obligation to get certain things accomplished now and we’ll have to have a strategy in order to get our bills signed by the president.

I say we learn from the Republicans.

Every major piece of legislation that they worked on began with a big political campaign to sell the public on it. They would have nice cherry-picked examples of how this would positively affect the public. Then they would ram through whatever legislation they wanted in the House. They would get close to what they wanted in the Senate. And the conference committee would mostly be House members and likely no Democrats. And if you were Tom DeLay, even after the conference committee decided and voted on a final version to send back to both chambers, you could just walk in and tack on an extra billion and half dollars for your own private business consortium in Sugar Land without telling anyone.

I think we should run Congress the same way. Fuck ‘em, I say. They knew retribution was going to come and I don’t see exactly why we should be gracious winners. We should spend December putting ads on TV with poor mothers working two minimum wage jobs that can’t afford rent, let alone Christmas presents. Then the words ‘Raising the minimum wage by three dollars over the next three years can’t be your present to them.”

Then we ram through whatever we want in both chambers, exclude the Republicans from the conference committee and shame Mr. Bush into signing it. If he doesn’t, then that’s one more issue we bring up when we’re running our guy in ‘08.

The same thing for the 9/11 Commission reccomendations. Picture a guy in a flannel shirt and a hard hat sitting on a forklift on a dock. He says “You know, 95% of the containers that come through here, we don’t even check. The government won’t give us the money or the tools to check for biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.” Then the words “The 9/11 Commission reccomended federal funding to search the containers coming through America’s ports nearly two years ago. The stakes are too high to wait any longer.”

Picture Bill Clinton at a phot op at New York Harbor and Barack Obama talking to little old ladies in Chicago working at McDonalds because they can’t afford retirement after the stock market crash of ‘01-’02.

The Republicans understood that the campaign doesn’t stop after election day and we should, too. Not only do we need to accomplish something, we need to very visible in accomplishing it.

That’s the only way to get anything done and the only way we set ourselves up for another big win in 2008. We’ve won the Congress, now we’ve got to keep and win the White House. The job is just starting.

By the way, Rahm Emmanuel damn well better follow through on his threats of a civil suit for the robo calls across the country. We’re going to need some money to promote our legislative agenda and I can’t think of a better source than the RNC’s checking accounts.