A PREVIEW OF PRESIDENT ROMNEY'S FIRST HUNDRED DAYS?
A lot of people look at the unpopularity of GOP governors in Florida, Maine, and elsewhere, and look at some of the successes their opponents have had in such states as Ohio and Wisconsin, and assume that Republicans know they overreached in 2011.
Apparently not:
A Gathering Storm Over 'Right to Work' in Indiana
Nearly a year after legislatures in Wisconsin and several other Republican-dominated states curbed the power of public sector unions, lawmakers are now turning their sights toward private sector unions, setting up what is sure to be another political storm.
The thunderclouds are gathering first here in Indiana. The leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature say that when the legislative session opens on Wednesday, their No. 1 priority will be to push through a business-friendly piece of legislation known as a right-to-work law....
Right-to-work laws prohibit union contracts at private sector workplaces from requiring employees to pay any dues or other fees to the union. In states without such laws, workers at unionized workplaces generally have to pay such dues or fees....
This is presented as "business-friendly" legislation, but at least as important is the fact that it's Republican-friendly legislation. It's pathetic that the very existence of even a nominally liberal major political party in America depends on the continued payment of union dues by a certain percentage of the population, but that's the way it is, given the way money works in our politics -- and the GOP and its allied fat cats know that the Democratic Party can literally be destroyed, or turned into an ineffectual minor party, if right-to-work spreads, in combination with other assaults on Democratic voters and funding.
My prediction? We'll see this nationally after President Romney and a GOP House and Senate are sworn in in 2013 -- there's going to be a drive for a national right-to-work law, and it'll go through so fast no opponent will have properly prepared for it. All the insider journalists and pundits will be shocked that this will be Romney's first major effort as president. (He never mentioned this when we were schmoozing on the campaign plane!)
Maybe it can't happen. Maybe even a terrified Democratic Party, having lost the Senate and the presidency, will still be able to muster enough votes in the Senate to filibuster this. But that assumes the GOP won't suspend or eliminate the filibuster after taking over the Senate -- not a safe assumption.
I believe the GOP's power brokers -- Murdoch, Rove, the Kochs -- have nothing less in mind than turning America into a one-party state. I don't see why they couldn't accomplish that with a few more GOP-friendly campaign finance rulings, a national RTW law, more voter ID laws, and perhaps a Supreme Court overturning of birthright citizenship, which would make it difficult for many U.S.-born Hispanics to register and vote just as Hispanics numbers swell in America. Yeah, I'm being apocalyptic here, but I really don't think Republicans are just playing around. I wouldn't put anything past them.
(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)
5 comments:
The Maya actually never said anything about "The End of the World" in 2012, but then again nothing's been said about The End of the World As We Know It.
If people are going to go all Y2K on ought-twelve - and it has long been my conviction that the Y2K nuts had it right, they just didn't quite get their fingers wrapped around it: "America" as we knew her ended with the appointment by an ideologically stacked activist court of the offspring of Hitler's financiers, a dynastic AWOL frat-boy of moderate intellect, questionable sexuality and unquestionable loyalty to The Corporation to highest office of the land - but if people are going to go all Y2K on ought-twelve they certainly have a whole lot more at hand to go at it with than they even had at hand for Y2K.
These people have been trying to destroy "America" for going on eighty, ninety years, and it seems like I've been called a "crank" as many for pointing these things out. It's all out there, just got to find it and put it together. And the Lib/Dems are as guilty of dismissing such out of hand as the bimbo bottle blonde bobble-heads of the multi-millionaire mainstream media.
Interesting Times, we live in.
Steve,
You know that I, for one, am with you 100% on this one!
Republicans are the sort of people who look like you and me, but take very different lessons from life.
It's as if they see the same movies as we do, but take the wrong message from them.
They feel sorry for Dr. No, and the fact that a government worker came between him and his dream of world domination.
And they pity poor Mr. Potter, because that nasty Liberal, George Bailey, kept him from building his Randian dystopia.
And people wonder that they hate "Sesame Street" and the "Muppets?"
They think people have same right to live in garbage cans as puppets do.
And that frogs should stay with frogs, and pigs with pigs, and look upon Ms. Piggy's crush on Kermit as some sort of Muppet Miscegenation.
These are really twisted, hurt, and hurtful, people - bent on lashing out at their own inadequacies by taking their anger, frustration, and self-hate out on everyone but the ones who deserve it - themselves.
So, yes, they will do whatever they can to grab and hold onto power if they should get it again. Especially now that they can see the generational and demographic changes coming.
Democrats - there's no triangulating between good and evil.
Pick a side.
But it seems like some of you already have - the wrong one.
You'd better be ready if they keep, or increase, their power. You've been blindsided too often in the past few decades. WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!
"All the insider journalists and pundits will be shocked that this will be Romney's first major effort as president."
Oh, I don't they'll be shocked at all. They'll probably applaud such an effort and demand Democrats be all bipartisany in the Senate and allow an "up or down" vote on such legislation, as the requirement for supermajority votes in the Senate these past four years will be forgotten.
You might hope that some of our idiot reporters remember that they are members of 'The Newspaper Guild.'
Nah, that would be too much to ask...
Why, that would be like hoping that the cops in Wisconsin would have remembered that they were unionized public employees too. Nah.
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