To win elections, parties often either pass their preferred policies or just prevent the other party from succeeding. Currently, the Democrat Party has chosen the latter strategy.
It makes enough sense strategically. In virtually any team sport, one team has to defend its chances of winning while the other attempts to improve its own. Running out the clock with a kneel-down is just the way football is played. But every once in a while, it is beneficial for both sides to win. Politics offers those moments more often, even in recent months.
Despite this, the Left has refused to help pass legislation with widespread popularity to keep Republicans down in time for midterms.
In the past week, Senate Democrats blocked a bill that would prevent data centers from raising electricity prices in surrounding areas, even though nearly every Democrat representative supported it, and it enjoys wide popularity.
Data centers are a hot topic with mixed support, but everyone agrees they shouldn’t interfere with daily life, especially when the power bill is involved. Everyone would have been happy to see this bill pass, but now it will remain dormant until after the midterms. Democrat senators allege the bill wouldn’t have done anything, but their colleagues in the House clearly didn’t believe that.
A similar example furthers this point. Another bill to stop insider trading passed the House overwhelmingly, but the Senate voted along party lines, with every Democrat voting against it. Some of the reasoning lies with the nationwide voter ID mandate packaged in the same bill. That doesn’t change the fact that these issues are wildly popular.
One of Congress’s worst-guarded secrets is that most people, regardless of party, take advantage of their inside knowledge to trade stocks. A study showed that 86% of people support preventing members of Congress from trading stocks while in office. I can’t imagine anyone outside of Washington would actually support letting congressmen control the stock market as they do. So, it’s definitely a big deal for someone in Congress to draft this bill and vote on it.
While the Democrat Party hates voter ID laws (curious, isn’t it?), these laws are very popular nationwide. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 83% of Americans support voter ID laws. Even 71% of Democrats support this issue. Why haven’t their elected officials listened to their constituents at all?
These two, alongside many other last-minute pieces of legislation, have been shut down by leftists, who have a history of placing their own agenda over the needs of their constituents. While it’s definitely true that the ordinary people who lean toward the Left have different worldviews from someone like me, both of us generally expect the people we elect to legislate what we want them to legislate. Most people don’t care about the political chess match being played in Washington, only that the issues they are concerned about are addressed.
These moves to prevent Republicans from passing anything important before everyone goes home to campaign for midterms are unethical at best. They are obviously meant to halt GOP momentum in these close races, but that runs fundamentally contrary to why these officials were elected in the first place.
The GOP members of Congress are arguably making the best effort they can with the cards they have been dealt. Most of them have to run and win elections while going against the flow of political momentum, on top of being kneecapped by Democrat leaders. If voters can see that the Democrat Party has spent more time focusing on stopping Republicans than helping them, then the Left might be in for a rude awakening.
