and those who voted against cloture/filibustering Alito, tearing up your Dem registration cards, going on and on and on and on about abortion/spying and all the other issues that most Middle America voters do not give a fig about but which elitist liberals obsess over, the beleaguered so-called "sellout" Democratic Party was trying to desperately save catastrophic cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Student loans, welfare TANF reform, child support funding, foster care funding, and all those other things that have a direct impact on American lives in ways much more real to the average voter than Alito's membership in some stupid college club decades ago. The House today had to vote again on the $40 billion spending cuts known as the Budget Reconciliation bill...
Guess no one here or in the progressive activist world really gave a damn. Roy Blunt managed to avoid extreme humiliation by a 2-vote margin of 216-214.
http://thehill.com/...
This was the same rancid bill that Dick Cheney broke a tie on in Dec in the Senate. EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT, both in the Senate AND House, voted against this bill that will impact the poor and needy and elderly the most. while you were dissing Biden or Ford or other DINOs, for not being suficintly purist on Alito, or iraq or whatever other pet issue, the Democrats in Congress were fighting for the least among us. No blog posts here. No alerts in my box from NOW or the DCCC or DNC. Sure as hell got a lot about Alito.
i guess some group called the Emergency Coalition for America tried to put some lobbying together...
http://newstandardnews.net/...
Too bad the vaunted liberal "blogosphere" didn't see fit to think it was as important.
now back to more abortion, more spying, more dissing of religious theocrats, more crazy Cindy Sheehan, more anti-Dems diaries.
Pelosi held her ENTIRE CAUCUS together on this one. Even the ones we regularly scorn here (i.e. CAFTA or Bankruptcy sell-outs). that has to count for SOMETHING. but no, y'all will still keep dissing the Democratic party, even though they're standing up on the issues you all have forgotten....
oh and here is an earlier diary on how this bill contains the most radical changes to welfare reform in a decade. while ANWR got a hell of a lot of attention for being attached to teh Defense Approps bill, no one seemed to care about TANF reform being snuck into the Budget Reconciliation.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/22/112823/68
ADDITION: ok, i will say Pelosi and co could have done a better job of engaging the blogosphere on this, and most of the liberal activist groups (PFAW, NAACP, Children's Defense Fund) could have done better too, though i'm sure the Alito thing sucked a lot of energy out of them too.
it's just i've read a lot of bashing of the Democratic party and seen too many "Vichy Dem" slanders in recent days, and given how hard it is to control the House Caucus, and given that they all stuck together on a bill that really shows the difference between our side and theirs, i thought they should be acknowledged and hope folks will still see this party IS fighting, against all the odds. you can get mad at Harold Ford for supporting banning flag burning or Melissa Bean on CAFTA, but just remember this vote, where they did stand up for the poor, the disabled, the elderly and showed they are Democrats.