A Look at the Republican Claim that "Democrats Have No Ideas"

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Wed Nov-01-06 05:59 PM
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A Look at the Republican Claim that "Democrats Have No Ideas"

Congressional Republicans, after 6 years of sharing power with and supporting President Bush, have nothing to show for it except an astronomical national debt, rising poverty rates, 46 million Americans without health insurance, a pre-emptive war based on a pack of lies, an epidemic of influence peddling scandals, melting polar ice caps, and a 16% approval rating. Having no positive accomplishments to run on, one of their most frequently repeated talking points has been their long standing lie that “Democrats have no ideas”. That is usually easy for them to say because they can be reasonably assured that our national corporate news media will rarely challenge them on it. Even worse, they can be reasonably assured that our corporate media will echo their charges and fail to cover the great majority of Democratic ideas that emerge, thereby ensuring that the Republicans’ claims will seem plausible to many Americans. So let’s consider the basis in reality for the Republican claim that “Democrats have no ideas”:

Reversing the damage done by the Bush administration and our Republican Congress

Republicans are fond of saying that if the Democrats gained power they would reverse Bush’s work. I don’t want to argue with them about whether or not a plan to reverse Bush’s “work” should be considered an idea. But more important, reversing Bush’s work would do a great deal of good for our country and its people. For example:

By reversing Bush’s $2.4 trillion in tax cuts (over ten years) on powerful corporations and wealthy individuals, we would make substantial headway on addressing our national debt. Democrats would do that.

By following through on John Kerry’s plan for a phased withdrawal from Iraq we would go far towards reducing our national debt, while at the same time preventing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and making our country safer by slowing the recruitment of new terrorists and virulent anti-American feelings throughout the world.

By reversing the federal ban on funding for stem cell research, Democrats would enable potentially life saving medical research that has been needlessly stymied by our current President and Republican Congress because of baseless ideological beliefs.

By reversing the Republican Congress’s prohibition on federal negotiations with drug companies for the price of Medicare drugs, Democrats would make life saving drugs more affordable for our elderly citizens.

By rolling back subsidies for oil companies, which Nancy Pelosi has promised to do in the first 100 hours after taking control of the House, Democrats would lower energy costs for American consumers and at the same time make funds available to develop alternative energy sources, which would simultaneously counter global warming and make our country less dependent on foreign oil.

And let’s not forget that Democrats would not only reverse much of Bush’s damage to our country, but they would also prevent pending damage, such as the demise of our Social Security system.

Call all these things “ideas” or call them something else. The bottom line is that Democrats would do these things and we would benefit greatly from them.

The War on Terror

Democrats have repeatedly called for the Bush administration to follow the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the purpose of which are to prevent further terrorist attacks against Americans. On the 9/11 Commission’s Report Card of December 2005, our government received Fs for failures regarding the following tasks:

Provide adequate radio spectrum for first responders: Former Democratic Presidential candidate, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), proposed plans to do this as part of a larger plan for national security – plans that were mocked by professional Bush ass kisser Bill O’Reilley

Allocate homeland security funds based on risk: The 9/11 Commission chastised Congress for distributing funds without regard to risk, vulnerability or consequences of an attack. Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have played major roles (See page 6) in blocking legislation aimed at addressing this 9/11 Commission recommendation.

Improve airline passenger pre-screening: The Bush administration still has not created a uniform terrorist watch list

Declassify the intelligence budget: Since the Bush administration has failed to declassify the overall intelligence budget, Congress cannot provide meaningful oversight of intelligence.

Coalition standards for terrorist detention: Instead of working with its coalition partners to develop civilized standards for detention of prisoners, the Bush administration has ignored international law to engage in systematic abuse of prisoners’ rights, including torture. This practice has served only to fuel the insurgency in Iraq and help al Qaeda in the recruitment of new terrorists, without providing any compensating benefits. By passing the Military Commissions Act, our Republican rubber stamp Congress gave official sanction to these disastrous practices.

In addition to the 5 Fs, our government also received 12 Ds on the 9/11 Commission’s Report Card. After several years of inaction by our Republican Congress, Democrats are prepared to address these issues.

Election Reform

It has been obvious for some time that our election system is in great trouble, consequently posing a serious threat to our democracy. The greatest threat is posed by the proliferation of electronic voting machines that count our votes without providing a record of the vote or any certainty that the vote is cast as intended by the voter. In fact, a great deal of evidence has emerged to indicate that indeed these machines are often programmed to cheat. In 2005, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), along with several other Democratic Congresspersons, co-sponsored the Count Every Vote Act of 2005, which addressed the threat of electronic voting, as well as several other election integrity problems. However, our Republican Congress refused to consider their proposed bill.

More recently, with elections almost upon us and still no remedial action from our Republican Congress, Senators Boxer and Christopher Dodd (D-CT), with Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), sponsored a stop gap measure to make paper ballots available to voters on an emergency basis when electronic machines visibly fail.

Economic well being and poverty

In an economy where CEOs “earn” an average salary of 431 times the salary earned by their employees, statistics such as “average income” and standard indicators such as “economic growth” lose a great deal of their meaning. The Democratic Party is much more concerned with the well being of individual Americans and fairness of economic opportunity than statistics of that sort.

John Edwards, Democratic nominee for Vice President in 2004, has been outspoken about the need for us to address the growing problem of poverty in our country, and he has developed several ideas for doing so.

Near the top of the list for improving the economic well being of American citizens is raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stagnant for nearly ten years and is currently below the poverty level. Republicans have defeated Democratic attempts to increase the federal minimum wage on numerous occasions, most recently by utilizing a parliamentary maneuver to require 60 votes for passage of a minimum wage bill, so as to allow a handful of vulnerable Republicans to feign approval of the bill. Nancy Pelosi, who will be Speaker of the House if the Democrats win control of the House on November 7th, recently promised that Democrats will block passage of any further Congressional pay raises until a decent minimum wage increase is passed.

A practice that has caused many formerly middle class Americans to fall into or deeper into poverty is predatory lending, which was made more lucrative by the passage of the so-called Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 by our Republican Congress, which repealed protections against bankruptcy for American citizens. Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Mel Watt (D-NC) and Brad Miller (D-NC) have introduced three proposals to address this problem through prohibitions against predatory lending.

As of 2004, the number of Americans who have no health insurance had risen to 46 million. The massive attack by American insurance companies against Bill Clinton’s national health plan of the early 1990s killed the possibility of enacting a national health plan in our country for quite a while. But depending on how big a victory Democrats win several days from now, that idea could be resurrected with the election of a Democratic President in 2008. In the meantime, Democrats continue to try to chip away at the margins, as Reps. John Dingell (D-MI), Pete Stark (D-CA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and John Barrow (D-GA) did in 2005, when they introduced a package that would have helped more than 20 million uninsured Americans.

Another Bush administration activity, abetted by his Republican Congress to put substantial economic strain on average Americans, has been the reduction of federal grants to assist with college tuition. Nancy Pelosi has promised that making college more affordable for average Americans will be a priority of House Democrats if they gain control of the House.

The need to develop sources of alternative energy

The Bush administration, with the full support of his Republican Congress, by denying the reality of how our energy policies influence global warming, refusing to sign the international Kyoto protocol, and failing to take any measures to reduce the production of greenhouse gases in our country, has contributed substantially to our failure to address a potential catastrophe of monumental proportions, as well as our dependency on foreign oil.

Former Democratic Vice President and Presidential nominee Al Gore has been talking and writing about ideas to deal with this issue for over fourteen years. With his new documentary film and book, “An Inconvenient Truth”, he has become the leading voice in the United States, and possibly the world, encouraging action to address this serious problem.

Earlier this year 43 Senate Democrats wrote a letter to George Bush asking him to join with them to support the Clean EDGE Act of 2006. That act calls for investment in research, development and production of alternative energy vehicles, fuels and technologies, rollbacks in subsidies and protections for oil companies, and protection of American consumers against oil company price gouging.

Protection of our Constitution

Perhaps the most important result of a Democratic takeover of Congress with this election will be the opportunity of Democrats to exercise oversight of the numerous abuses of the Bush administration, which have encountered virtually no oversight by our Republican Congress. And of all the scandals call for serious investigation, the piece by piece shredding of our Constitution should be at the top of our list. If the Democrats take over the House, Rep. John Conyers will become Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and he has promised to exercise oversight of the Bush administration’s many Constitutional and other abuses. He already has made excellent progress on that, with his recent report, “The Constitution in Crisis – The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance”.

Final thoughts

What could Republicans possibly mean by their oft-repeated claim that Democrats have no ideas? Democrats have a wealth of excellent ideas, and over the past several years they have repeatedly tried to put those ideas into action for the benefit of the American people, while being repeatedly struck down by our Republican president and Congress. If the corporations that control the great majority of news heard and seen by the American people considered issues that affect the well being of American citizens to be even one tenth as important as celebrity sex or murder stories such as the Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson trials, the American people would know a great deal more than they do about the ideas of their Democratic (and Republican) elected officials. And that calls to mind another point: If the Democrats take over Congress, taking back control of the news media from multi-billion dollar corporations and giving it back to the people should be a major priority.