What Is A Majority Anyway?
Deborah Venable
11/15/06
Okay,
I think it’s a legitimate question, and I’m not the first one to ask it. Everyone has been so quick to jump on the
Democrat bandwagon proclaiming a “sweep” of Congressional power in the House and
Senate. But let’s get real. A Democrat majority was NOT elected last
week in the upper house of congress.
With 49 Republicans and 49 Democrats, most folks that have passed first
grade math would call that a tie.
Without
the two Independents, Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, there is an equal
number of Democrat and Republican representatives in the Senate. Now everybody knows that the two
“independent” independents have said they will caucus with the Democrats. Of course they will – they are both liberals
after all. But, if these guys want to
be known as “independents” then why do they have to commit to either
party? I’m certainly not one to split
hairs or play on semantics, but the Democrat Party REJECTED Mr. Lieberman in
the primary. Mr. Sanders has served 15
years in the House as an Independent, so I don’t see any Democrat shackles on
him – liberal definitely, but not Democrat.
So why do the Democrats get to call the shots in the Senate for the next
two years?
The
Constitution does not address the question of party power. This concept has evolved as American
governance slipped further away from the Constitutional principles of a
Representative Republic. If I am
beating a dead horse here, it is with good reason. As I have said before, we will fail to preserve American Heritage
if we continue to squander it on party power squabbles. The idea of Majority and Minority Party
leadership only came into being in the second decade of the twentieth century. That is when party privilege overtook equal
representation in the U.S. legislature.
The problem with this system of government that we have allowed to
evolve is the single most important contributing reason for government
corruption.
As
for the Independents – the only president ever elected as a true independent
was George Washington. Every other has
acquired the office through affiliation with a party of some sort. Parties come and parties go depending on how
effective they are at maintaining a power structure in government procedure. The truth is that party politics is usually
always in some sort of “meltdown” because politicians increasingly refuse to
divorce the party concept.
Don’t
get me wrong - I certainly can see the value in a two party system, as can most
observers with any ability to think clearly about politics. The party becomes an identifier of sorts as
to even an honest politician’s core beliefs.
That is until that identifier gets lost in a power war instead of the
code of ideals it is supposed to identify.
The
bottom line in this dissertation is that for all the hoopla immediately
following this election, for all the proclaiming of political power victory,
the one glaring fact is this: the most
powerful politician in the legislature today is, without a doubt, Joe
Lieberman. He is holding all the cards
in the game of party power, and he currently wears the definitive label of neither major party. He is a liberal, but he is a liberal with
some principles. He is also very good
at playing the power games of Washington.
The electorate of Connecticut handed him a personal victory, which was
made possible by Herculean bipartisan
efforts to elect him. The long and
short of it is that Joe Lieberman was kicked to the curb by the party of his
choice and got a hand up from the other one.
Time
will tell if Mr. Lieberman is as independent as he could be. Stranger things have happened in politics
than a politician who decides to grow a spine in the eleventh hour, but we
shouldn’t hold our breath. Meanwhile,
I’ll ask my question again. Just what
is a majority anyway?