-----Original Message----- From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Saturday, November 07, 1998 8:43 PM Subject: Re: Why the Left Crys even When We Win (Re: Gingrich falls
>Where is your head, dude? You're not in Germany. This is *America*
>The Dumbocrats say all those things, and when they're in power, they (1)
failed >to pass a ban on scabs while pushing overtime for the biggest
piece of scab
>legislation in history, namely NAFTA,
>It works the other way, too: the Republicans under Newt voted *for* a
>minimum wage increase. By your logic, we labor activists should be
>mourning Newt's, ah, decomposition.
It is precisely because we are not in Germany that this kind of analysis is simplistic and ignores the party differences. In the two cases above, the answer is known as the Senate filibuster- maybe you've heard of it?
When the Dems had the majority from 93-94, the House passed the anti-scab bill. And a majority of the Senate were willing to vote for it. But a Republican filibuster prevented it from every coming to a vote. If we had had six more "Dumbocrats" in the Senate, permanent replacement workers would now be illegal in the United States. So yes, I think it matters whether the Republicans control the Senate (and why we can't really say the Dems controlled the Congress when they did not have 60 Senate seats).
Conversely, under Newt it was the filibuster in the Senate that pushed forward the minimum wage. Dems like Kennedy and Wellstone in 1996 began attaching the minimum wage to every bill and filibustering the whole operation until the Senate agreed to vote on the minimum wage. It was that degree of Democratic power using the filibuster that pushed the minimum wage onto the agenda (as Kennedy has done repeatedly) and it is preserving that filibuster leverage that made the Dem victories in the Senate so important. If the Republicans had gotten their 60 votes, all of the leverage by folks like Wellstone would have been lost.
That is the difference from Germany. With party discipline and majority rules, the governing coalition has essentially an elected dictatorship. That is very different from the US with a whole series of super-majoritarian rules and intraparty power dynamics.
The latter makes the statement that the Democrats "pushed" NAFTA also nonsensical, since Clinton did push NAFTA but over two-thirds of House Democrats voted against it. Again, it was Newt and his Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for NAFTA. And the Democratic gains in 1996 made sure that fast-track would not have the votes needed for passage when three-fourths of Democrats voted against it.
If you are against NAFTA and for anti-scab legislation, why don't you support the two-thirds of House Democrats who voted against NAFTA and for anti-scab legislation (and a host of the other legislation you listed)?
--Nathan Newman