Alan Grayson: "Bipartisanship Has Become Code Word for Appeasement"

[YankeeLeft7x]

Democracy Now!

Rep. Alan Grayson: "Bipartisanship Has Become Code Word for Appeasement"

Alan Grayson Interview on DN! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez

November 05, 2010

REP. ALAN GRAYSON: “....Well, my defeat was part of a wave across the country that had Republicans winning because Democrats didn’t vote. We have the results from the pre-election turnout; we don’t have the results from the Election Day turnout yet. In my district, when you compare that to 2008, the Republican turnout in the early voting was down by 20 percent, and the Democratic turnout in early voting was down by 60 percent. And that wasn’t true just in my district; that was true all around Florida and pretty much the whole country, except for the West Coast and New England. And as a result of that, virtually every Democrat who won in 2008 by less than ten points loss this year. There was only one exception out of twenty-four. And there were forty-four more Democrats who won by more than ten points in 2008 who managed to lose this year, because their Democratic voters didn’t turn up. It’s not a situation where Democrats—Democratic voters decided to vote Republican; it’ a situation where Democratic voters didn’t vote. And when Democrats don’t vote, Democrats can’t win....I think it’s because the Democratic leadership has failed to deliver to core constituents of the Democratic Party the thing that the Democrats wanted when the Democrats had sixty votes in the Senate, 59 percent of the House, and control of the White House. That’s my view of it. We didn’t vote on the Employee Free Choice Act. We didn’t vote on immigration reform. And we controlled the agenda. This isn’t a situation where we had votes and loss them in the House or the Senate. We simply didn’t bring up these matters of crucial importance to various elements of the Democratic coalition, when we had complete control of the agenda and enough votes to pass anything....”

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, yet now, you have the reality that with the Republicans controlling the House, the likelihood of being able to get any of the progressive planks of the Democratic Party through Congress become dimmer. How do you—how do you—what’s your counsel to those Democrats who are still there, because obviously the Progressive Caucus didn’t lose as many—nearly as many folks as did the Blue Dog Democrats, how they will move—how they should move forward in the next two years?

REP. ALAN GRAYSON: By exposing the Republicans as obstructionists who have no solutions to anyone’s problems. You know the
words "bipartisanship" and "cooperation" have become code words for "appeasement" and "capitulation." We gave the Republicans over a hundred amendments to the healthcare bill. They remained implacably opposed to it. Not one Republican member ever said to anyone in the Democratic Party, "If you give us X, Y, and Z, then we’ll vote for this bill." Instead, they took X, Y, and Z as concessions on our part and then voted against it anyway. And this is something that the American people just don’t seem to see or understand, because we don’t publicize it.

I saw effort after effort after effort for the past two years, in the silliest ways possible, to keep matters from coming up to a vote and to stall and to procrastinate and to prevaricate on the right-wing side, and they were never exposed for it. I remember one day, we had the largest number of votes in history in a single day. We voted from morning until late at night. And the reason for that is that every time we had a vote, the Republicans insisted on a recount. So we ended up, instead of having something like thirty-five votes, we ended up having something like seventy votes, simply because the Republicans literally wanted to waste our time, asking for a recount every single time on every single vote. I lived through that. I didn’t see it on Fox. I didn’t see it on CNN. But I had to live through that, knowing that the Republicans were consciously wasting our time, stalling, hoping to drag it out, and not being called to account for it. And I can give you other examples, too. There was one day when dozens of Republicans pretended to have forgotten their voting cards, so they’d all have to vote by hand, and every five-minute vote became a thirty-minute vote.

Read and Listen to Full Interview @:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/5/rep_alan_grayson_bi_partisanship_has

[kestrel91316]

1. Appeasement, hell. It's collaboration.

[Kolesar]

2. Collaboration, hell, it's appeasement

[FiveGoodMen]

3. Tastes great! Less filling!

[Ghost in the Machine]

4. It's a collaboration to appease!

We, the People are being gamed. Congress today is a lot like watching Professional Wrestlers "beat" the hell out of each other, then leave the arena in the same car together. The Congressional Fraudsters put on a show for us. They act like they're fighting each other, trying to get "something" done, but what they're really doing is just killing time, not doing a damned thing, collecting a check and voting themselves raises while sticking to those on Social Security and Disability.

What's the opposite of PROgress?? CONgress!