Dems Can Kiss Senate Goodbye

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

The Democrats will lose the Senate this year — and they know it.

The evidence is so obvious that even Inspector Clouseau couldn’t miss it: When liberal pundits defensively declare that "The 2014 Midterms Don’t Mean Anything," in reality, the stakes are very high and the conclusion foregone.

If that weren’t persuasive enough, in recognition of their vulnerability, Senate Democrats have spurned legitimate legislative efforts and resorted to cynical political stunts – none of which have a chance of passing – to change the subject, misdirect and rally their easily-distracted liberal base.

But passage doesn’t really matter. Democrats prefer to demagogue "issues" which mobilize voters rather than pass legislation.

For example, even though the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision was based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress and signed by a Democratic president, the current Senate, including some Democrats who voted for the 1993 law, is considering a new bill to undo the Court’s decision. Transparently directed at their base, the bill is a meaningless messaging scam permitting Democrats to extend their threadbare "war on women" meme while restricting religious freedoms.
Senate Democrats have also revived the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2013, which would eliminate broadly popular measures that protect women in addition to unborn children, including most of the legal, modest, generally-accepted state-level abortion restrictions that have helped reduce America’s abortion rate to a forty-year low.

The bill would imperil state restrictions on late-term abortions, regulations governing abortion clinic health, sanitation and safety standards, directives that only licensed physicians perform abortions, allowing women to view ultrasounds and Supreme Court-upheld waiting periods.

President Bill Clinton once famously said that abortions should be "safe, legal and rare." As an election year stunt, Senate Democrats – including Pennsylvania’s Robert Casey, Jr. — propose to eliminate "safe" and "rare."
Americans understand that flipping the Senate is necessary in order to address top voter priorities like the economy, jobs, the border illegal immigration/public health crisis and the corruption and dysfunction at government agencies like the VA and the IRS.

Democrats, instead, are talking about relative trivialities. Income inequality is an issue for only 3 percent of Americans. Birth control and abortion don’t even appear on the Gallup Survey’s list of voter priorities.

Democrats used similar small-beer diversionary tactics in 2010, before losing control of the House. They’ll fail again.

Voters understand that, if Democrats keep the Senate, the Capitol Hill stalemate will continue, an outcome the president will take as a mandate to continue ignoring both voter priorities and his opposition.

A Republican-controlled Congress, on the other hand, would pass legislation addressing the issues important to Americans which, in turn, will force the president to cooperate with, negotiate with or stonewall Congress. Providing leverage in both chambers, a Republican Senate presents more favorable prospects for economic progress.

But, even with a Republican majority, congressional Democrats understand that a recalcitrant president will prolong economic stagnation, and Democratic prospects for 2016 will sink even lower than they are today.

Then, congressional overrides of presidential vetoes become conceivable.

http://www.ldnews.com/opinion/ci_26289844/democrats-know-u-s-senate-leaves-their-control