It's
Time For Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold And Other
`Progressives' in Congress To Take A Stand
25 January 2010By Dave Lindorff
What's missing in Congress these days is real
progressive leadership and real political courage.
Over the past several decades, the Democratic Party
has been entirely taken over by corporate shills and
money-grubbing sleazes while those who might still
have some vestigial remnant of a conscience or genuine
concern for the plight of the common person have been
co-opted or intimidated into silence or powerlessness.
Look at Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). He says all the right
things. He's fought all the good fights. And yet after
15 years in Congress, he is chair of what? The House
subcommittee on domestic policy of the Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform. Heck, his post
doesn't even merit capitalization in the AP Stylebook!
And when he submits an important bill, like his
articles of impeachment of both former President
George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney,
he can't even get a hearing in the House Judiciary
Committee.
Which, of course, is chaired by another long-standing
allegedly progressive House member, Rep. John Conyers
(D-MI). Conyers, despite being chair of the House
Progressive Caucus (the largest, and least powerful
Democratic Party caucus in the Congress) and despite
his having served 22 terms in the House, couldn't even
manage to get "permission" from the Speaker (Rep.
Nancy Pelosi--once a member of the Progressive
Caucus!) to hold a hearing on impeachment during the
Bush/Cheney years in the Judiciary Committee that he
chairs. And more recently, he was even barred from
having his own health reform proposal--an expansion of
Medicare to cover all Americans--get a lousy hearing
in the House.
Progressives in the Democratic Party are both joke and
oxymoron.
It is time for any real progressives in House or
Senate to admit the truth--that they are boxed in and
effectively neutered by the Party leadership--and that
if they really want to be defenders of the public
interest and the progressive cause, they must give up
their sinecures, cut themselves loose from the
shackles of the Democratic Party, and form a new and
independent national progressive party. They have a
model: Bernie Sanders, the independent self-described
socialist senator from Vermont. Of course, even
Sanders is boxed in, given that he is alone in the
Senate as an independent progressive , so that if he
wants a committee assignment he has to agree to vote
with the Democrats on the key issues of party control.
But that is because there is nobody standing with him
in the Senate.
This could change if the progressive caucus members of
both houses were to quit the sell-out Democrats and
form the nucleus of a new party, instead of just a
caucus within the sclerotic and rancidly corrupt
Democratic Party.
There is a huge ferment across the land. Americans of
all political persuasions are angry, fearful,
frustrated and ready for change. That's why so many of
them voted for a black presidential candidate
promising "real change" in 2008. The trouncing of
Democratic senate candidate Martha Coakley this week
in the Massachusetts special election to fill the seat
of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy was a direct result of
the anger that those same voters feel at being
betrayed by that president, who instead of change has
given them more of the same pro-corporate,
anti-common-citizen politics that they were trying to
escape.
We on the left know that nothing much is going to
change in America until there is a genuine people's
party on the ballot, but for years we have watched in
despair as well-meaning third parties like Peace &
Freedom, the Green Party, the Socialist Party-USA and
others (including parties not on the left like the
Libertarians) have tried and failed to become national
political forces. These efforts have been stymied
because American voters, sensibly, have not wanted to
"waste their votes" by casting ballots for Third Party
candidates who stand no chance of being elected. They
have been stymied because Americans have either been
forced to accept a "lesser of two evils" approach to
voting, or to simply not vote.
But true progressives in Congress who have the
advantage of incumbency--people like Kucinich,
Conyers, Feingold and others--could run as
independents, or better, as third party candidates and
win. And if they were to choose to run as a new third
party, they would open the door for many other new
candidates to run with them. They would give
legitimacy to the idea of voting for something other
than a corrupt Republican or a corrupt Democrat.
Americans are not stupid. They recognize that the two
big parties are both acting in collusion in selling
them all out to monolithic corporate interests, and
that Washington is thoroughly owned by the rich and
the powerful. That's why only half of Americans even
bother to vote (actually far fewer than that in
off-year elections like the one coming up this
November). And those who do vote, vote for major party
candidates, for the most part not out of enthusiasm,
but out of desperation.
If they had candidates on the ballot whom they really
thought were on their side, and who really had a shot
at winning, they would abandon the Democratic Party
frauds in a heartbeat.
A secession by true progressives in Congress from the
Democratic Party and the formation of a new party by
that group of rebels--and remember, there are 80
members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus--would
hit the Democratic Party like a perfectly placed
explosive charge detonated in the foundation of an old
building slated for demolition. The whole edifice
would collapse in a cloud of smoke and dust. No
Democratic incumbent would be safe. Upstart candidates
would come out of the woodwork to challenge them from
the left in virtually every state in the country.
Republican candidates too would face real challenges,
not from centrists, but from real left candidates.
Too much can be expected of electoral politics, and
certainly, even in the highly improbable event that
every member of the Progressive Caucus were to quit
the Democrats, run for re-election as an independent
or as the member of some new progressive party, and
win the first time out, the dominant Democrats and
Republicans and the corporate lobbyists behind them
could still keep the government in the hands of the
existing corporate power structure. But even if only
some of the caucus were to bolt, the door would
suddenly be open for a new national politics. Workers
and their labor unions would no longer feel bound to
support Democratic hacks, and many could be expected
to shift their allegience and financial backing to the
new party, as could environmentalists, health care
reform advocates, anti-war activists, education
reformers and all the other progressives who have had
nowhere to turn politically for years.
So here's the call: If you have a so-called
progressive as your Senator or Representative, tell
him or her that you will no longer giver them your
vote unless they first quit the Democratic Party.
It's time for the Progressive Caucus in Congress to
put up or shut up: Quit the party! You ain't doing no
good for nobody serving in Congress as a Democrat!
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