dduane:

So here’s my last bit of politics until the dust has settled.

This isn’t so much about the Presidential race. But if you care about the ability of a President to actually get things done… or you feel that one party has been mostly acting to keep things from getting done, and you’ve been frustrated by that party’s commitment to strangling useful, life-changing legislation in the cradle… then this is payback time. And you can make a difference.

Take a look at this, from the front page of the poll analysis site at the Princeton Election Consortium.

Some of these races are INCREDIBLY close. But if enough people get out and vote to change them, they can be changed… and those Senate seats can be handed to people who’ll use them responsibly and in line with the oaths a Senator must swear to uphold the Constitution.

Especially as regards the Supreme Court, and not letting a seat sit empty because they’re pissed at the President for being not a Republican. Or black. Or a woman. (Some of the Republican senators have already started telling people that they intend to block every nominee a new President Clinton would nominate. Others say they intend to do their best to make sure that vacant Supreme Court seat is never filled again until a Republican sits in the White House. Or, in some cases, just never filled, period. One or two of these guys have been saying the Supreme Court should just be allowed to die off by attrition, thereby chopping off the head of one of the three branches of government… a vital part of what the Founders considered an essential element of the system of checks and balances.)

The Supreme Court matters. If you want to keep same-sex marriage and the associated hard-won rights from being overturned and stripped away in future, the Court needs to be maintained and staffed up to full… and ideally, have retiring or deceased justices replaced by others who will uphold those rights. Doing nothing about this, failing to act, will come back to bite people you know in the future, and potentially ruin their families and their lives.

In any case, about half the US senate have not been doing their jobs. It’s time the power to stymie legislation and stonewall the filling of Supreme Court vacancies was taken away from them.

If you’re voting today, look to see what your state’s senator has been doing and whether they’ve stood in the way of important legislation that could improve people’s lives. Look to see if they’ve been obstructionist just because the President is the “wrong color”…  or will be, because she’s “the wrong gender”.

Then, with your one vote, do something about it. Today, it comes down to you.