Stonewalling America

It has been frustrating to witness the ongoing efforts of the Republican Party to implement their stated primary political goal of denying President Barrack Obama a second term, to the point of trying to block anything and everything the Administration has tried to do to lift our economy out of the doldrums created during the disastrous eight years of the Bush Presidency.    In the Senate, minority Republicans have invoked the filibuster to avoid even up/down votes on measures some 360 times in a little over three years, a use of the filibuster unprecedented in American history.    With regard to the new health care law, Republicans suggested almost 200 amendments to the law, most of which were included in the bill, and then ALL Republicans turned around and voted against the bill.     Then they went about the country claiming that they had no input into the law, the basics of which were the Republican proposal from the 1990s.     Now they loudly proclaim that President Obama has not gotten the country back to full employment, even though they have done everything possible to keep him from trying.   As a Democrat who voted for President Obama in 2008, I have been somewhat disappointed, mainly that he has tried so hard to work with Congressional Republicans that he has watered down the progressive agenda that many of us thought we were voting for in 2008.    However, the Republican Party should not be rewarded in the 2012 Presidential election for three-and-a-half years of stonewalling the country for their own political purposes.  

 

 

Note:   This was originally a Letter to the Editor of the Kansas City Star that was published but that was edited without my permission to the point that I hardly recognized my own letter.