What Will Happen to America if the Dems Win by Jed Babbin

Source: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/challenges.php?id=303863&PHPSESSID=d1a83dfa1c89ce7ec0c8918401128467

Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: October 3, 2006


While currently there is much chatter about who will win the upcoming elections, FSM Contributing Editor Jed Babbin goes beyond the question to describing the most important element: what will our world be like if Democrats really do gain control? Not only will no bill limiting immigration ever come to a vote, no ballistic missile defense system will ever happen either..even as the majority of Americans very much want both. This is a MUST READ article that needs to be circulated widely.

What Will Happen to America if the Dems Win
Jed Babbin
October 3, 2006

Our parents taught us a lot about the world and about our government, intending to make us better citizens. And though most of it was right, so much of what they taught about the underlying subject – politics -- wasn’t. My parents were a mixed marriage. My dad was a rock-ribbed conservative and my mom was a labor democrat. My sister and I had politics for breakfast and dinner. In all my childhood, I never heard them really fight about anything other than, “your stupid governor” or “that idiot, your president.” (The most fun resulted from John Lindsay winning the New York mayoralty race. I never heard racial epithets or ethnic slurs from either parent. But “liberal Republican” was, I understood, the worst insult our language contained.). What I learned back then was what Tip O’Neill said later: all politics is local. That theory is obsolete. Some politics may be local but Senate elections are national.

Those of us who live in states that have senate races this year have a special concern: who runs the senate? Most people don’t know or care that (like every House member) every senator votes twice. At the beginning of every congress, senators and congressmen vote to organize their branches of government. They choose who will occupy the speaker’s chair (in the House), the Senate majority leader and committee chairman in both. The winner of the election, either the Republicans or the Democrats, choose the leaders and set the agenda. But the Senate is different from the House. Its special powers – confirmation of presidential nominees chief among them – makes it more important. Every senate vote – especially this year – is like a vote for a presidential candidate. Every voter’s choice in this year’s senate races is directly linked to the direction the country will go in the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

If the Republicans continue to control the Senate, nothing much will change. But for the fact that Arizona’s John McCain will become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, there would be no argument in favor of Democratic control. And there are some things that will happen if we do that should send chills up our collective national spine.

If the Democrats take the Senate, Nevada’s Harry Reid will be majority leader. Reid is a pure-as-Ivory-soap liberal, and that’s bad enough. Under Reid’s control, no bill that will limit illegal immigration will ever come up for a vote. But there’s worse.

Think about the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a Democrat-controlled Senate, Pat Leahy of Vermont will be chairman. And as long as he is, no conservative judge will ever get confirmed to any court. If Justice John Paul Stevens retires from the Supreme Court in President Bush’s last two years, the president will have to get the blessing of the ACLU before he can get any nominee to the Supreme Court through Pat Leahy’s committee. The lower courts? As Tony Soprano might say, “fuggedaboudit.” No judge who isn’t a liberal activist will be confirmed.

As bad as the judicial nominations problem will be, the Armed Services Committee – which would be under Michigan’s Carl Levin – will produce problems that are as bad or worse (even worse than what Mr. McCain would create). Levin has made a career of blocking the deployment of a ballistic missile defense for the United States. Most people think that after President Reagan said we’d build a missile defense in 1986, we’d done it. Not true. We have an experimental system that covers only a part of the country against a small part of the threat. If Carl Levin becomes chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, we’ll continue to be defenseless against almost any kind of missile attack.

You like pork-barrel spending? If you do, you’ll love the Senate Appropriations committee if West Virginia’s Bob Byrd takes over. Byrd – even under Republican control of the Senate – has been the Olympic champ of pork. If the Dems take control, he’ll have more highways and buildings named for him in West Virginia than Castro has in Cuba.

And don’t forget the Senate Intelligence Committee, which may have to be renamed if the other West Virginia senator, Jay Rockefeller, takes over as chairman. Rockefeller, like the other Dems, isn’t in favor of the NSA’s listening in on terrorists’ telephone calls to the United States. Republicans didn’t manage to pass legislation on the NSA terrorist surveillance program. They didn’t need to, as the president is acting legally and within his constitutional powers. The Democrats don’t like it, though. A Democrat senate will pass a bill requiring a search warrant before any conversations can be intercepted or e-mails read. There’s a slight problem with the Dems’ approach. If you don’t listen in, you can’t get enough evidence to justify a search warrant.

Congressional Republicans have done little to earn our gratitude these past five years. They’ve spent too much of our money and left too much urgent business undone. But if the Dems win, what the Republicans have left undone will either not be done – or will be done in a way that pleases the Democrats’ base: the hard-core Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Ned Lamont-Nutroots fringe.

The Republicans failed to close the border and control illegal immigration. The Democrats welcome illegals. They want to repopulate the welfare state with illegal immigrants who will vote for Democrats. Their idea – which Hillary Clinton supports strongly – is to add convicted criminals to the voting rolls. If you can’t get legal citizens who haven’t had their right to vote to choose you, why not rebuild your base with illegals and felons?

The other factor at play in a Democrat-controlled senate is that about half the Dem Senators are going to run for president. Just think: Biden (who would be chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee) is running. So are Kerry and Clinton. And they will all be trying to pass liberal bills to get an edge on the presidential race. The Senate will become an audition stage for the 2008 campaign. It’s probably going to happen regardless which party controls the Senate. But if the Republicans remain in control, there’s at least a slim chance that some urgent legislative business will be done. If the Democrats take control, their strategy of obstruction and delay will put an impassable obstacle between the White House and answers to the dangers America faces.

There are few certainties in politics, but here are two. First, American politics – regardless of who controls Congress for the next two years – are entering a period of unheard-of bitterness and nastiness. Second, control of the Senate is just as important as control of the White House. In the next two years, perhaps even more so.


FamilySecurityMatters.org contributing editor Jed Babbin is also a contributing editor for The American Spectator magazine, RealClearPolitics.com and the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think and (with Edward Timperlake) Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States.