Balance isn’t a bad thing. But there’s a fine line between trying to achieve political balance and capitulation.
“The vacillation between parties is probably a good thing. We need a good conservative party in this country to make sure that the good liberal principles don’t get out of hand in that direction. We need a good liberal party in America to make sure that the good conservative principles don’t get out of hand in that direction,” said Andy Schmookler, a Shenandoah County author and blogger and candidate for the Sixth District Democratic Party congressional nomination.
What troubles American politics right now, Schmookler said in an interview with AugustaFreePress.com, is that the Republican Party is “an unprincipled party,” so focused on winning the next presidential election that it is willing to turn on its own policy proposals even weeks after rolling them out.
“I don’t know of any opposition party in American history that has been so willing to sacrifice the nation to try to get power back to itself,” Schmookler said.
Republicans have turned on themselves most notably in the area of health-care reform, where the purchase mandate brought into the policy discussion by Republican leaders is now being attacked as being “unconstitutional,” and where a key talking point in the runup to the 2010 vote on reform that had Republican lawmakers trying to stir up seniors over how the bill would supposedly gut Medicare has turned into an active gutting in the much-talked-about budget reform of Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan.
“You don’t want to have a one-party government. One-party systems always get corrupt. It’s good that you have a lively democracy where each party gets a chance to correct the mistakes of the other. But we’re in a position now where one political party is running roughshod over American ideals and damaging the American polity and American society on everything that it touches,” Schmookler said.
And the other major political party is not standing its ground, to Schmookler.
“We could have allowed the tax cuts to expire and dealt with that situation. We could have allowed the government to shut down if the Republicans had made good on their threats. This is the elephant in the room problem. We’ve got one party that behaves badly, and we’ve got another party that is failing in its responsibility to expose publicly so that the American people get it what they’re up to,” Schmookler said.
Listen to the rest of the interview via our YouTube channel.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at [email protected].
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