Daily Kos protesters hold Democrats accountable for their Wall Street reform gutting votes [View all]

[madfloridian]

From longtime Kos blogger McJoan...Joan McCarter at Daily Kos today. I love this.

Daily Kos holds Democrats accountable for Wall Street reform gutting votes

In case you missed it, Paul Hogarth from our actions team wrote about the one encouraging data point in the defections of House Democrats who voted with Republicans to gut the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. When Republicans tried to pass the bill last week under a suspension of the rules (a move that limited debate and amendments, but required a two-thirds majority) 35 Democrats voted with them.

In response, the actions team set up a petition to those 35 members, blasting them for their votes. More than 118,000 people signed that petition, and thousands of you who lived in the districts of these 35 emailed them directly to register your disapproval of their votes. So when the bill came back up this week, 29 Democrats defected (you can see the list in Paul's story).

Four Democrats switched their votes from yes to no (Bobby Rush of Chicago, Hank Johnson from the Atlanta suburbs, Elizabeth Etsy of Connecticut and Suzan DelBene of Washington), three more did not vote, and one Democrat—Brian Higgins of New York—flipped the other way.

So our work clearly had an impact, but not enough. Every time a Democrat abandons the Party to shill for corporations at the expense of their constituents, we must let them know we are watching and won’t forget when it comes time for re-election.

The fact that a handful of these Democrats did the right thing doesn't mean we're letting any of the 29 who didn't off the hook. We want you to let them know that you'll be watching, as will the whole, large Daily Kos community.