Ken Salazar to vote no on Alito
Say it isn't so!!!! I am so shocked. Not!During the last election I was lulled into thinking that my choices were a true centrist (Salazar) or a somewhat maverick hard conservative (Pete Coors). I voted for Coors mostly because I wanted to extend Republican control of the Senate to eliminate the judicial filibusters but thought that for the first time in my life I was presented with a national election vote that was not the lesser of two evils. (I do not mean to imply that Sen. Salazar is evil, it is just an expression). I really liked them both and thought either would be a much better choice than many people that "represented" me in the Senate for years despite my voting against them over and over. A few weeks after the swearing in I was reminded of another expression "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" when the newly seated Senator announced that his pledge not to participate in judicial filibusters (a pledge he gave many times in public, recorded, forums) was ill-informed and now that he understood better, he would participate in filibustering qualified judicial candidates with majority support.
I may still be being naive, but I actually believe that Sen. Salazar believed he was against judicial filibusters when he went to the Senate. And then the corrupting force known as the Beltway Blindness infected him. This force is the reason why there are so few committed centrists in Washington D.C. If you throw your lot in with the Republicans the far right is constantly trying to convince you that you should be a bible thumping absolutist whose voting direction is decided by Jerry and the boys. If you throw your lot in with the Dems, it is even worse. First, very few of the Democrat Senators are center-left, many more are on the extreme. Second, they will withhold positions of leadership and committees if you part company on what they deem to be "party" issues.
This is all politics as usual, except Colorado isn't red or blue. It is a bizarre state politically as I have learned in my 5 years here. We have some of the most liberal cities in America and some of the most conservative representatives from some of our suburban and rural areas. We are truly purple. We are seen as a Republican state nationally mostly because the Republicans have been smarter about running folks closer to the center. In the last election the Dems took control of the state house by getting a clue about this while the Repubs got lazy and stupid. Ken Salazar is on his way to being a one term Senator if he doesn't remember that extremist party parrots don't win state wide elections here, and unlike NY and CA, people here do remember if you kept or broke your word.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home