The American people believe the Senate is broken, and I believe the American people are right… It’s time to get the Senate working again.
After months upon months of threatening to invoke the “nuclear option,” Sen. Reid finally pulled the trigger this week. Judging by the reaction of Senate Republicans, you’d think that Reid had legalized garroting kittens on the Senate floor. “What about the rights of the minority?” has been a common brand of whine. That’s as laughable as it is disingenuous, but for the sake of argument, let’s take that argument at face value, shall we?
What about the rights of the minority? If you mean the right to obstruct, obfuscate, and gum up the ability of government to function…well, I’d submit that’s not a right. It’s the legislative equivalent of a spoiled child throwing a tantrum when they don’t get their way. They lost an election, and so they’re going to make sure nothing happens because the American Sheeple didn’t vote them into power. Certainly, the minority has the right to dissent, to offer alternatives, and to have their voices heard. What they don’t have the right to do is bring government to a halt when they don’t get their way. The American Sheeple have the right to expect their representatives to do the job they were elected to do. All Sen. Reid is trying to do is help ensure that this actually happens…and yet Republicans with a straight face decry this as the “tyranny of the majority.” Uh, no; that’s called “democracy.”
Let’s look at the “rights of the minority” in a different light. What about the rights of the majority? What about the right of a democratically elected pluralty to carry out the will of the people who elected them? What about the rights of Americans to expect that Senators will do the job they were hired to do? Do Republicans hold those rights in lower esteem simply because they don’t reflect their narrow interests? They might be surprised to discover that there’s no right to hold the Senate hostage because they weren’t given the key to the Senate.
When you get down to it, there’s no right to throw an eight-year-long temper tantrum because your party didn’t win elections.
The best analysis I’ve heard of Reid’s decision to employ the nuclear option was something I heard on NPR. It went something like this: elections have consequences. When one party wins an election, that party has the right to work to institute their agenda. That’s what “majority rules” means. The minority has the right to advise, to dissent, and to try to temper any perceived excess. What the minority doesn’t have is the right to bring government to a halt via parliamentary tricks and obstructionism. This is true whether the minority is Republican or Democrat. If you win an election, the people have chosen your agenda over that of your opponent. That’s where “elections have consequences” comes into play. If you lose, you don’t get to throw sand into the gears of government to the detriment of the country and the American Sheeple.
Republicans can bemoan their fate and cry about their “rights” being trampled. What they conveniently ignore is that the majority also have rights. By virtue of winning an election, their agenda was selected by the American Sheeple. The minority doesn’t get to throw a tantrum because they refuse to accept the results of that election.
I’m not riffing on this because I’m piling on Republicans…though that would be easy to do given their immaturity and childishness. These principles are simply democracy at work. To the winner goes the opportunity- and the right- to work to put their agenda into place. If you don’t like being the majority, then get to work and win an election. This is as true for Republicans as it would be for Democrats, though you can bet Democrats would be handling minority status with far more class and maturity than Republicans have demonstrated since 2009.
That’s the democracy works, y’all. That’s what the nuclear option is about. No minority- Republican or Democrat- has the right to throw a tantrum because they refuse to accept the results of the most recent election.
Elections have consequences. It’s time Republicans stopped acting like spoiled, immature children and get down to doing the People’s business.
