So I went to the Republican caucus tonight, which was a nice mixture of being both depressing and disappointing. First, I walked in slightly late, then stood at this table by the very front door of a local elemiddlery school, waiting to check in. Inside the room behind the table was an impressively-sizeable group of active voters. Finally it was my turn to be helped. I went up, and they couldn’t find my name in the list. Unless, the lady asked…are you here for the Republican caucus? Um, yes, yes, I am. That one’s way down there, she said, then pointed at something too far away for me to see.
I walked down the hall, then into a mostly-empty gymnasium, where my precinct (six of us in total) had already gotten started. The precinct next to me, the one we shared the table with? Well, none of them could be bothered to show up, so the saddest packet of all time laid there, waiting to be opened. I hope I never hear you complain about Obamacare, you lazy bastards. That was the depressing part.
The disappointment? Well, that was the whole rest of it. First we picked precinct officers and election judges and all that. I’m an alternate for some kind of delegation that they’d better not call me for. This was all very boring, but at least our ringleader kept things moving at a nice clip. Really, he did great in a pretty thankless job. But the resolutions…oh, the resolutions. I don’t know what manipulative hack penned them, but I’m very disappointed that I can’t find them online so you can see them in their full glory. So I’ll just give some examples. One was to make it part of our platform—my party’s platform in my county—to eliminate automatic salary increases for Congressmen, so that they’d have to vote themselves a new pay bump every time they want one. Sounds good to me. And it even had this awesome part in the intro, about how Congressmen currently get automatic pay bumps even when their actions harm the economy, a nice little crack I loved. Except then in the last line, they threw something in about how every Congressman should also be capped at 200% of the median income in the district they represent. What? Where did that come from? (And because, well, we’re Republicans, one guy immediately decided he was going to move to Manhattan and run for Congress.) We didn’t really like the idea of creating class distinctions in Congress.
Another fun one was about laws in Congress, and how so many of them are written by lobbyists, and how we should require them to read every bill aloud before voting on it. Yeah. That’s practical.
The one that really got me was about letting the Patriot Act expire, because, you know, it’s 2010 and all. OK by me. Except it went completely off the rails at the end, where the resolution said that IF some other law had to passed in its place, it HAD to be Senator Feingold’s JUSTICE Act, which gives the government powers to spy on suspected terrorists. Seriously, it used the word spy (and the word Feingold). Like any of us were going to vote for it at that point. But for some reason, we started to discuss it. After a minute, I asked, what is up with these resolutions? I got a laugh, but then I said, “Seriously, it’s like they wrote it this way just so they wouldn’t have to support getting rid of the Patriot Act,” which got me a bunch of blank stares. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that's the only thing that makes sense. Elefants, I’m on to you. Cut out the grandstanding crap and focus on some issues that actually matter, like fiscal responsibility (not that I support the balanced budget amendment we were also polled on). I mean this was a friggin’ caucus in a non-presidential election year, a gathering of only the most concerned citizens (& me), and we’re still playing word games with members of our own party and making the whole process feel as undemocratic as possible from the start. Give me some individual rights, some states’ rights, some money-saving ideas and some candidates who can actually prevail in a modern-media showdown. I want winners, not excuses. And then the party can get back on track and get back to making a difference in this country. That’s all I ask. Thank you, and good night.
