Filibuster Follies

Republicans continue to play the "make changes and we won't support the bill anyway," as the Disclosure Bill now seems destined for a premature death: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/14/dems-see-hope-without-bro_n_646654.html. The party was courting Scott Brown to again defect and support a sensible bill, to at least partially offset the terrible Campaign Finance decision from the Supreme Court, but he appears to have decided against supporting the bill. This follows a strategy that they hope to take to election glory in November, undermining economic recovery, financial regulation, environmental policy, judge nominations and anything else that might help democrats hold the line in the midterm elections. But what is the cost to the country? Continued unemployment, the real risk of falling back into recession, or if we are to believe Krugman depression, more foreclosures (already over 1,000,000 this year), families that fall into disarray and dissolve under acute financial distress and failure to deal with problems across the social and political landscape. They are still blocking unemployment benefit extensions and are calling for, you guessed it, more tax cuts for the rich (who, by the way, can now spend as much as they want through corporations to make sure the cuts keep coming). The idea of American democracy was to create a balance and separation of powers to ensure that tyranny never returned to America. Republicans have confused this with having a weak Federal government that can't do anything -- except support the interests of corporations and the wealthy. That was not what our forefathers had in mind. Representative democracy depends on the representatives actually representing the interests of their constituencies. Not merely the most powerful members of their constituency, but the will of the majority and the interests of all, including those who lack a voice and those suffering under the tyranny of that majority. It is time for democracy to fight back and reclaim its most important function, beyond protecting the population, which is to cultivate and support the common good.