Questions for those Dems who think Nader and Third Party Voters are [View all]

[truedelphi]

The big reason that we lost in 2000 and 2004.

First of all, some 6 to 18% of all voters are voters who consider themselves allied to progressive causes. Even at 6%, that is a lot for a party to lose to Nader or some other third party progressive candidate.

So here's my questions -

1) Since the republican efforts to secure new gerrymandered districts have indeed thrown more than 6% of elected offices to the Republicans why aren't the Democrat Party Leaders on this issue like white on rice?

Here's the citation for damage being done to the Democratic Party via Republican gerrymandering in a recent Rolling Stone magazine article:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-republicans-rig-the-game-20131111

2) Why aren't there any damn bones, even little ones, thrown to those of us on the progressive side? If the Party needs that 6% of us, then why not concede a little bit here and there?

Almost everything that Congress and the President have refused to do on major items, including socking tough regulations at the Banking Crowd, and refusal in honoring promises not to target medical marijuana clinics and users in California, somehow does get done for the Things The Dem Leaders Hold Sacred.

Example: Obama refused to hold forth on a bully pulpit on the issue of public option, during the health care reform debate months, but totally held forth on the bully pulpit when it came to Syria. Senator Reid refused to go nuclear option on the issue of the majority vote and the filibuster when it came to the public option (Which would have easily passed if 51 was a majority!) but suddenly is inspired to do this with regards to allowing Obama to have Federal Appointments be made.

We were promised by Obama in 2008 that he would somehow see to it that there was transparency. However, there is nothing at all transparent about a Heath Care Reform piece of legislation that comes in at over 2,000 pages.

Maybe there is no way that an American President could actually bring us around to transparency, but isn't there someone somewhere who can do this?

Worse still, in the good old days of the 1980's, a person could call their Senator or Congressional rep's office and usually a staffer could explain the meaning of any piece of legislation.

Now if you call for help in understanding a bill, the staffer will immediately give you the dot gov URl for that piece of legislation.

And that is where understanding ends. You are royally screwed. Once at the URL, there is little way to know what the bill means, as usually by paragraph three, you are reading legalese like this:

"In this section, HR 25677 Section Eighteen included in sub section 42 will be amended to divert those funds from that program to the program represented by HR 21222 Section Five Subsection 31, but reduced by 10%."

Unless you are somehow able to "crack the code" on this, you have little better understanding of what a bill means than before you went and visited the appropriate URL. Of course, in the matter of the ACA, we can visit different web sites and get different points of view, but in less important pieces of legislation, we will never know much more than the Title of the new piece of enacted legislation and what it says in forty pages of legalese over at the dot gov URL.