Last Week To Stop A Disaster

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By Carol Morgan

For voters still waffling, come on! When early voting ends on Halloween, whether it’s a trick or treat will depend on the voting choices you’ve made. Call it selective memory loss or motivated forgetting but, I’m afraid everyone’s recollections are a little foggy about the egregious acts of the GOP in Texas and Washington since last midterms.

Perhaps all need a heaping dose of classroom drill and kill to relearn what you missed the first time around. Last week, people on Twitter did exactly that.

#StopTheGOP trended on-and-off for several days, approaching a hundred thousand Tweets; refreshing the repressed memories of voters.

Tweeters revisited the trillion dollar deficits, massive unemployment and economic collapse at the hands of the GOP. Down memory lane we went, to the Tea Party crippling Congress, sabotaging economic recovery and shutting down the government. Who could forget selling our country to corporations, making trade agreements in private meetings, refusing to expand Medicaid, the war on women, blocked immigration reform, equal pay, minimum wage increases, gun control, and student loan reform?

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior and the GOP’s recent past is the prologue for the next two years. I shudder to think of the specifics.

Look here, it’s taken six long years for the stock market to go back up, for unemployment to go down, for home values to go up, for the number of uninsured to be reduced, for more money to be placed into Pell grants, for gas prices to go down, for exports to go up, for the deficit to go down, and for the GDP to rise again.

And just keep in mind, the GOP had no part in this. When it comes to solutions, they’ve got nothing, except plenty of criticism.

It’s no wonder that in an August 2014 Gallup poll, the 113th Congress had the highest disapproval rating of any Congress since 1974, and it was the lowest during the government shutdown, courtesy of the GOP.

Despite all of this, some voters will willingly give the keys back to the irresponsible drunken teenager who crashed the family sedan and we will be back at square one, feeling a little like Sisyphus at the bottom of the mountain.

Washington Post's Katrina Vanden Heuvel describes the catastrophe that a GOP-controlled Congress would bring. Although she deals in specifics in her article, we can imagine what will happen. Of course, it would be two years of non-stop obstruction, distraction, and conjuring up non-existent controversies. It would be the final chapter in destroying the presidential legacy of PBO, which is exactly what they promised in 2008.

More important than any party fallout, however, would be the GOP-inflicted damage upon the environment, the American worker, women and minorities.

Our Congressional pet turtle, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised a gathering of donors hosted by the Koch brothers that “We’re not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals .?.?. things like raising the minimum wage .?.?. extending unemployment .?.?. the student loan package.” He’s already laying out the strategy in advance.

Imagine the possibilities of nominees that will never be confirmed, qualified judges that will never make it to the bench, the lack of oversight of financial institutions and consumer protection, not to mention any foreign policy negotiations about nuclear weapons or national security, and then, add the fear-filled solutions in public health also.

Make no mistake about it, a government shutdown is in the cards with health care and social security as the hostages.

Vanden Heuvel sums it up perfectly:

“Many progressives are not satisfied with today’s Democratic Party; they want it to be more populist and progressive. But they also know it is absurd to suggest that there are no differences between the two major parties, and it is madness to suggest that little will change if Republicans take the Senate…A Republican Senate, working with a Republican House, will be a wrecking crew. There is only one way to avert the devastation: Vote with a vengeance on Nov. 4.”

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Carol Morgan is a career/college counselor, writer, speaker, former Democratic candidate for the Texas House and the award-winning author of Of Tapestry, Time and Tears, a historical fiction about the 1947 Partition of India. Email Carol at [e-mail] , follow her on Twitter and on Facebook or visit her writer’s blog at www.carolmorgan.org

http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/carol-morgan/2014-10-27/last-week-stop-disaster#.VE8U3RbuPoE

Posted in its entirety with permission.

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