2008 House

By David Swanson

The largest caucus in Congress with 75 members is the Progressive Caucus. It even has one member in that bastion of regressivism, the United States Senate. The progressive caucus uniquely supports majority positions (majority outside of Capitol Hill, I mean) on domestic and foreign issues, on trade and the environment, peace and diplomacy, education and healthcare, speaking up for the poor, the powerless, and all the rest of us. Its positions are not perfect and often appear constrained by a desire not to stray too far from the Democratic leadership. But it's the best we've got, as far as caucuses go.

By David Swanson

How did a Democratic challenger defeat a Republican incumbent in an enormous rural district in southern Virginia? A Democratic group in Charlottesville called Left of Center organized a forum on that topic Monday night. Speakers included three staffers on Tom Perriello's victorious campaign: Brian Bills, his personal assistant; Kelli Palmer, who registered African American voters in the southern most part of Virginia's Fifth District; and Rachel Klarman, lead field organizer for the southern counties. Also speaking were two newspaper reporters, Will Goldsmith of the C'ville Weekly and Lindsay Barnes of the Hook. And providing some historical context was Fred Hudson, chair of the Fifth District Democratic Committee.

A Darfur-supporting, time-tithing, self-deprecating newcomer becomes Virginia's big electoral surprise.
By Dahlia Lithwick

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.—It's been more than 72 hours since the polls opened on Tuesday, and Tom Perriello is only 19 minutes away from the official declaration that he has won—in one of the most dramatic upsets of the 2008 election—the congressional seat for the 5th District in Virginia. Perriello is sitting outside a coffee shop in Charlottesville, besieged by voters dying to know whether they've stopped the ballot-counting marathon yet. "Can I say congratulations yet?" asks a woman. "What's the final count?" A man says he is getting tired of hitting "refresh" on the Virginia State Board of Elections Web site. Perriello grins, explaining that after days of what he calls "cinematic" vote counting, the official count now gives him a 747-vote lead. This after the AP prematurely called the election for incumbent Virgil Goode on Tuesday night, then called it for Perriello on Wednesday. Vote totals seesawed back and forth as military ballots, paper ballots, and write-in ballots were counted and recounted.

Read the rest at Slate.

By David Swanson

As of about 9 p.m. ET on Thursday, 316,476 votes had been counted in Virginia's Fifth District congressional race between incumbent bigotted xenophobe Virgil Goode and challenger Tom Perriello, with 158,562 going to Perriello and 157,914 to Goode, for a difference of 648 votes or 0.2 percent of the total.

According to a report on Charlottesville's NBC-29:

"There is no 'automatic' or 'mandatory' recount. If the results differ by one percent or less, the losing candidate can formally request a recount in court. If the difference is less than half of a percentage point, the same candidate still has to make a request and the state will pay for it."

By David Swanson

In Virginia's undecided Fifth District congressional race, Tom Perriello is now up 814 votes with possibly more still to be added, and a recount likely. But most of the over 300,000 votes cast cannot be recounted, since they were made on electronic machines.

Good bye, Virgil Goode, You left us all worse off and more hateful. May you become a nicer person in a line of work where you don't think bigotry is your key to success.

Welcome to Congress, Tom Perriello. May you actually represent us and be patient with us as we experience the shock of it.

By Dave Lindorff

The US Senate did what the Founding Fathers expected it to do when
they devised the idea of an upper house of Congress. Playing the role
of Britain’s House of Lords to the House’s House of Commons, it ignored
the rabble (that’s us, the voters) and voted the opposite way of the
House of Representatives, which on Monday had voted down the Bush
Administration’s proposed $700-billion to $1-trillion give-away to Wall
Street financial companies.

The Senate vote in support of the measure, which went 74-25 (the
ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy missed the vote), reflects the fact that, first
of all, Senators, who run representing entire states, are very
difficult to unseat because of the huge cost of mounting a media
campaign against an incumbent, and second that two-thirds of them even
don’t face voters this November, (and one third not for another four
years).

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

By Dave Lindorff

The most entertaining thing about this Wall Street crisis and the
refusal of the House of Representatives (not failure but refusal) to
pass a bailout bill negotiated by the Bush White House and the House
leadership is how shocked and upset those leaders and the pundit class
have been by the idea that members of Congress would actually heed the
wishes of their constituents!

The Founding Fathers always saw the lower house of Congress as
voice of the people—the elected body that, because its members had to
face the voters every two years, would be most responsive to public
sentiment.

By Dave Lindorff

It is going to be entertaining, to say the least, to watch John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom endorsed the crooked, stacked rip-off bailout bill being scaremongered into law by the Bush Administration.

Now that it is clear that the American public overwhelmingly
recognizes this bill as a corrupt attempt to rob them and reward the
crooks and shysters on Wall Street, how will McCain and Obama weasel
out of their endorsement of the proposal?

They can certainly count their lucky stars that the vote was in the
House and not in the Senate, where they would have already had to take
a public stand up or down on the measure, but let's be clear--both men
have said they suppport the negotiated proposal that was put to the
House today, and which went down to a stinging defeat, 228-205, despite
the solid support of the House Democratic leadership.

By Dave Lindorff

The Congressional switchboard is jammed. You can get through, but it
takes a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators
at the Capitol say it's been that way for a week now, as Americans
across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations
with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote "No" on the
Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today is no exception, after Democratic Party leaders (and both
major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama)
bought into the plan after adding some window-dressing measures
designed to make it look more palatable. This shows that the public is
not fooled.