Today's election: Martha Coakley

[cos]

[ Recap for people not in Massachusetts: Today is the general election to fill the US Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy last year. ]

Since I made it clear how much I don't like Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee, I feel I need to say this: Please vote for her today.

Most of those things I don't like about her? Scott Brown's positions are as bad or worse. Whatever her tolerance for shoddy prosecutions and low regard for civil liberties protections... Brown thinks the president should just be able to declare someone guilty and avoid the whole "fair trial" process altogether, and as far as I can tell, torture is just fine with him.

Have you been frustrated at the way every decent piece of legislation Obama has asked for, has been hacked into bits in the Senate in strained efforts to get the support of Olympia Snowe or Joe Lieberman to get through the Republicans 39-member "filibuster every damn bill no matter what" block? If Brown gets elected, that block will grow to 40, and nothing will get past the Senate unless it can get both Snowe and Lieberman's support. Lieberman will become an even more unavoidable roadblock.

Health care: Here's what will happen if Scott Brown wins today's election: the US House will vote on the Senate's crappy bill as is, because it's better than passing nothing, and since the Senate has already passed it, that will be the only way to get health care reform through without going back to the Senate. The House's ability to demand improvements would likely collapse instantly as soon as a Brown election victory is announced.

Yeah, I still don't like Coakley, but all the good candidates in this election already lost last month. Sometimes you lose elections, it happens. Now, though, we determine just how much of a loss it will be.

Martha Coakley will champion equal rights for women and LGBT people, work for more health care improvements, support infrastructure investments for economic recovery, fight financial fraud and predatory banking practices, support Obama's policy of diplomacy and engagement while also supporting efforts to remove American troops from Afghanistan, and support clean energy legislation. Brown would be her opposite on all of those things.

Polls are open 7am - 8pm. Find your polling place at WhereDoIVoteMA.com.

Comments

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Hi, cos. I came here from brynndragon's journal. I've seen you around, and you seem like a sincere and thoughtful person whose opinions I can trust.

Please tell me why this is wrong:

Scott Brown will go away in 3 years, and we can spend that time supporting the candidacy of someone good and honorable. Coakley will be a Democrat from Massachusetts, which means she will not go away until she commits a felony or dies. Having someone twice as bad for three years and then replacing him with someone decent is preferable to having her for life.

Please tell me why this is wrong:

The Democrats have a fillibuster-proof majority and the Presidency, but on the two issues that matter to me:

- ceasing to commit war crimes and civil rights violations and punishing those responsible
- creating a health care system that allows people to avoid being murdered by insurance companies

they have not made anything resembling a credible effort. If they do nothing when they hold all the cards, it isn't worth pulling for them; better to form another party, focus on means other than electoral politics, or focus on fixing things locally rather than nationwide.

[cos]

I think your main error here is thinking of "the Democrats" as a single generic blob. The group of Senators who support the things you say you want may or may not have a simple majority (certainly so for health care, probably a little short of a majority for rights) but absolutely do not have a filibuster-proof majority. I addressed this in my post above: this is why you see people like Snowe and Lieberman (and Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln) have so much power to ruin anything decent Congress tries to pass.

Electing Coakley will leave us in approximately the same place we have been. We can then try to make some real improvements in 2012 (for example, Lieberman is up in 2012).

Electing Brown would be disastrous. Lieberman & Snowe will have that much more power to make everything Congress passes in the next couple of years that much worse, and we'll live with the consequences of that for a long time.

Since health care is one of your priorities, note what I said above: One likely effect of electing Brown would be that the Senate's crappier version of health care reform would have to be passed as is, eliminating any chances of the House improving it with elements of their far superior bill.

[laurion]

I'm not convinced of your assertion that Brown will go away in three years. The term ends in three years, yes, but our state has a relatively high incumbency momentum. And incumbents can garner more political and financial capital due to the position held.

In the meantime, there's no reason why we couldn't pull for a better Democratic candidate (or even independent if needed) for the next election. I agree that seated Democrats are unlikely to be challenged by their own party, but given the incredible urgency behind some of the current legislation, I'd not want to put it off for three years. Every time legislation gets c***blocked, it looks bad for the party purportedly in power. I'm willing to let MA have a mediocre (by MA's standards) democrat that can help get things done than to let a sub-mediocre republican take the win, and give the republican around the country ammunition in the chambers of political guns they won't hesitate to pull the trigger on.

Because right now, what you phrase as not resembling a credible effort is better than no effort at all, or having things swing back in the other direction again. (Although, yeah, I wish they could get it together and actually -do- rather than -say-.)