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Opinion: Stop voting by party identity

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com
Reporter Kate Hayden
Reporter Kate Hayden

The so-called nuclear meltdown of the U.S. Senate was, by reporters’ accounts, pretty mundane to watch.

No gnashing of teeth, radioactive debris or symbolic tearing of the curtain from top to bottom. Just a dry, tense, historic procedural change.

It captured our newest reality as citizens.

We have to change our voting habits. Instead of voting based on ideology, we must vote based on foundational preservation. We have to slowly rebuild the rules that governed our elected representatives, and we must elect representatives who won’t toss aside standards for the sake of shoving through party agendas.

Thursday’s showdown really started rolling in 2013, when former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the “nuclear option” to eliminate filibustering of presidential nominees to any court except the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans were relying on the filibuster to block President Barack Obama’s nominees, and Democrats argued, essentially, that they couldn’t reason with the GOP.

You can send your representatives a thank-you note for that.  

“It had to be done,” Reid tweeted after the fact. Somebody, somewhere, allegedly promised that the push to eliminate the filibuster would never reach Supreme Court nominees, but largely because of Reid’s push, today we have U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

I’m not here to write about problems with Gorsuch. My problem is the way he got there. Today’s Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised not to kill the filibuster for legislation, but do we really have faith in that promise?

Look, this isn’t one party’s problem. This obviously and erroneously happened under President Barack Obama and Democratic leadership, and it transitioned along with the inauguration this past January.

The problem now is that we’ve set an outrageous standard for our future Congresses and presidents: the majority party gets all the power, until eight years later when the voting pendulum swings the other way.

This is not a sustainable model to run a nation under, especially if the majority party continues to block the minority party’s input.

I could write a grocery list of examples beyond last Thursday’s filibuster-buster, but it would be a waste of space. What we need is a voting body that decides that the “at all costs” strategy of governing doesn’t work for us now, and will never work for us in the future. We need Democrats to work with President Trump, and we need Republicans who work with Democrat leaders.

We need people running for the Senate and House who value the checks and balances put into place by past Congresses. We need voters in the 2018 election who push for politicians to restore the minority’s voice — or face the consequence of becoming, or remaining, the minority party.

We don’t need the filibuster by itself, but we need both parties to have tools for dialogue. We need a continental-sized intervention to get the train back on rails. That responsibility lies with the voters, who can begin educating themselves now on the value of balance.

 

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