Up North Progressive

In case you don’t know what’s at stake in the 2014 election, the battle royale is in the US Senate. Republicans are waging a take-no-prisoners war to flip the senate to a Republican majority. Current polls show that Republicans have a good chance to succeed. If this happens, the US Senate will have a much easier time blocking President Obama on a number of important issues. It’s for this reason that the Democratic Party needs to keep their majority in this election.

Immigration reform is the civil rights issue of our time, but it’s also an economic issue. By providing a path to citizenship to people brought here as children, it would boost the American economy by over $300 billion. President Obama is ready to use an executive order to change immigration for these people. The Republicans want to stop the president because they know if he succeeds, then many of these young adults will become citizens, and younger voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic Party. President Obama recently announced he would wait until after the election before using this executive order, because he would rather have a congress willing to work with him rather than use the hail mary option of an executive order.

It’s very likely that within the next two years at least one Supreme Court Justice will retire from the bench. A Republican majority in the Senate means they will be able to block the president’s appointee, or force him to pick more conservative candidates that the Republicans would confirm. They may decide to just block any new appointments to the Supreme Court, waiting until 2016 and the chance a Republican will win the White House. Don’t believe the Republicans would do that? People are panicking about an Ebola outbreak in the United States, yet the Senate filibustered so many presidential appointees that we don’t have a Surgeon General whose job it would be to deal with something like Ebola.

While many Republican Senate candidates have run their campaign on the promise of repealing “Obamacare,” the reality is it will never happen. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay. Too many people are using the program for health care coverage and they like it. The Republicans have no alternative “free market” solution to the Affordable Care Act because the program, including the individual mandate, is the Republican health care plan. President Obama and the Democratic Party made it law, so now Republicans insist it’s the worst thing ever. 10 years from now when everyone’s really happy with their health care coverage the Republicans will be more than happy to forget they ever called it Obamacare, claiming it was their idea all along – because it was.

In Michigan we have many PACs and billionaire money buying ads, paying for polls, and robo-calling people to convince them to vote for the Republican candidate for Senate. Americans For Prosperity in the state, which is made up of Snyder’s former campaign staff have worked hard to spend money on Terri Lynn Land’s campaign despite her being a terrible candidate. Dick DeVos is another billionaire throwing money into the election and bankrolling Republican candidates. Money isn’t the only way to get people elected. We have the perfect replacement for our retiring Senator, Carl Levin, in the Democratic candidate Gary Peters. He will go to Washington DC and work with President Obama, not promise to obstruct him like Terri Lynn Land says she will. If you’re sick of the same old do-nothing Congress, then it’s vitally important that everyone go to the polls on November 4 and vote for Gary Peters for US Senate.