Happy Tax Day, everyone. I walked my four-year-old to school today and explained what was so special about April 15 that I needed to carry a mug with me for my free cup of coffee at Starbucks. "Principles of this country that a four-year-old can understand better than the Republican Party" is perhaps a diary for another day (which would also point out how much easier FDR's Four Freedoms were for him to understand than for so many of us).
Anyway, Starbucks had the printed version of Politico, so I picked one up and read the following:
But Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is leading the effort to craft the document, says that including specific legislation in the contract would smack of the backroom deals the GOP accuses Democrats of making, so "you won’t see it written out."
Hmmmmm. Elect us to Congress, to positions we can use to write laws. We will give you a "Contract" to evoke the good old Gingrich days of 1994. But if we propose to use our legislative powers to pass laws & could even show you a tentative sample of what those laws would look like...that would be "backroom deals."
No, backroom deals are when you run on platitudes that have superficial appeal to a large number, with the intention of getting elected and then putting whatever nefarious stuff the corporate lobbyists tell you to put in your bills.
Let's imagine an alternate universe in which the GOP said: Vote for us. Here are specific proposals -- not set in stone, for we are sure we have much to learn from citizens and public-spirited experts alike, but specific enough that we may be fairly judged against the alternative -- for what we would do about
- preventing catastrophic financial meltdowns;
- assuring the nation's long-term fiscal health by balancing revenues and expenditures on defense, Medicare, and Social Security;
- reducing the nation's carbon footprint swiftly enough to make a credible start on preventing the worst climate change nightmares;
- making a world where our capitalist principles aren't hijacked by CEO's usurping shareholder rights and working citizens who can't contribute to our economy and society with their full potential, indeed who in large numbers cannot find work at all.
Oh, wait...if they even believed in the possibility of solutions to the nation's problems, they would be...Democrats.