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Saturday, November 04, 2006

Checks and Balances...

I didn't know that some people would vote this way, but this is something worth looking at. Rush Limbaugh took a call on his show from a person who was talking about how people will vote for the opposite party of the President in Congress. Or that they will vote for someone of the opposite partys in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. So I'll just let some of this transcript do the talking...

CALLER: I have tried to explain this to friends and coworkers. I grew up in Ohio, but I also lived in Florida for about six years, and framingly [sic] enough I've heard from several different people the concept of, well, regardless of who is in charge of White House, whether it be a Democrat or Republican, that they chose to vote the opposite party into power in the House of Representatives for a checks and balances, without realizing that there's already checks and balances in place, so I thought maybe if it was coming from you it might be a little bit more persuasive to say, "Don't do that, it's not very smart."

RUSH: Well, see, I understand that sentiment. I don't think there are that many people out there. The media has put that notion out there, and they've done it for a number years. They tried it in 2002 and 2004 in the sense it would be good. "We have one-party rule. Why, that leads to corruption and leads to people becoming out of touch in Washington." They love one-party rule when it's them. The only reason they're against one-party rule is because they're not the party, and so they're trying to say it leads to all kinds of bad things. But that means they don't trust the democratic process. The democratic process delivers what it delivers, and if it delivers a Republican dominated House and Senate and a Republican president, then that's representative democracy at work.

That is what you get in a representative republic, and to sit there and complain about it is to complain about the system itself. I'll tell you what, Sean. I do not believe that Joe Six-Pack voter or Susie six-pack voter, when they walk into the voting booth says, especially in a congressional election, "We've got President Bush. I think we need Democrats to counter it," especially Republican voters. If Republican voters don't vote Republican this year, it has nothing to do with wanting divided government or checks and balances. That's not how people think when they vote. There may be some nabobs that do that, but it's such a small number as to be inconsequential.

If people vote against Republicans who normally vote for them it's going to be simply because they're mad at them, and I think that misses the point, too. There's so many things that are consequential here, and I've heard a lot of people say, "Rush, it's a mistake to go out there, and you should have been leading the charge in telling people what Republicans stand for, the lower taxes and all that." I have, and those things are working, and it's been an effort to try to convince people the economy is in great shape precisely because of those policies that we conservatives have long advocated: low taxes. We haven't gotten the smaller government. But I can't go out there.


Well he goes on and on after this about what this election is about according to the Democrats and he mentions a foreign reporter in this too.

It hasn't been often that naturally we see some form of divided government. We can talk about the Republican Congress fron 1995 to 2001 while Bill Clinton was President. Perhaps we can talk about the Senate changing from Republican to Democrat (because Sen. James Jeffords switch from Republican to Independent resulting in a composition of 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and 1 Independent) during the first two years or so of the Bush Administration.

I can even point to the composition of the Illinois General Assembly. In 1995 and two years after that the Republicans were in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. While after 1997, Democrats regained control of the House and the Republicans retained control of the Senate. By 2003 though Democrats have had control of both houses of the General Assembly.

The thing is though it still illustrates the point that there is still a check and balance of the power of the two branches of government. Indeed the Democrats have control of the General Assembly and the Governorship and there is still conflict. Indeed some have complained that there isn't much being doing in Springfield even though one party controls the governorship and the General Assembly. That's a subject I'll get into later though.

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