Elections Have Consequences

I need to vent for a moment. This has been lingering since the transition began. I am a Democrat. I am proud to be a Democrat and proud to represent the 130,000 Democrats in York County, Pennsylvania. I am also both particularly pleased and proud that my party won a commanding victory in the 2008 elections. A solid mandate for a very popular president, sizable gains in the House, and a nearly filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate.

So why is it that, of late, having a "D" next to one's name seems to be a negative? I'm not saying that it's become a scarlet letter; it's not like having an "R" next to your name in the past two election cycles, but our leadership seems to be forgetting that while bipartisanship is a nice thing to talk about during the State of the Union, Americans actually like partisanship; they just dislike the partisan bickering.

There is no reason that John Boehner or Eric Cantor should be having as large a role and presence in the recent debates as they have. Why should what Boehner thinks even matter? They lead the party that Americans threw out four months ago, under the impression that by electing Democrats to run the country, oh I don't know, maybe the country would be run by the Democrats.

Asserting too much power and completely shutting the other side out, to be sure, is dangerous. But we don't have to pretend like this is a 50-50 country at the moment. We, the Democrats, won. We are in charge. We are supposed to be getting what we want. And that's not partisanship for the sake of being partisan, that's doing what the voters asked for when they went to the polls on November 4th.

The GOP is responsible for the terrible mess that we're in; the American people won't mind if the opinion of GOP leaders matters substantially less. After all, elections have consequences.