Call it one for the good guys.
It was refreshing to see Bob Wirch and Jim Holperin returned to their Senate seats, as neither veteran Democrat did anything wrong except help block immediate passage of a bogus "budget repair bill."
Talk radio whipped up their temporary departure into a political sin - - "flee bagging" - - but in the end, voters, as they had done earlier with Dave Hansen - - returned the Dems to office.
Voters, however, did boot two Republican Senators, leaving them with a wobbly majority in the Senate.
Blocking the Senate vote on Walker's proposal, and forcing him to recraft the bill, was a public service that never fairly computed or conflated as equal to the sneakiness in Walker's approach to collective bargaining or the legitimacy of the bill in the first place.
So give the Dems credit, and the voters, too, for returning good legislators to the Senate and proving that talk radio is insubstantial and insincere.
BRAVO!
ReplyDeleteI've never understood why it's fine for Mitch McConnell to orchestrate continuous filbusters against everything in the US Senate, but it's terrible for the 14 to delay a single contentious bill for three weeks. Obviously, voters in the three Democrats' districts saw the "fleebagging" for what it was: the functional equivalent of a filibuster.
ReplyDeleteA fillibuster can actually stop legislation. Fleeing to IL did not stop anything
ReplyDelete