Deep problem for South Florida Democrats: Republican 'allegiance'

This was a headline loaded with pain: “Democrats torn between party, GOP allegiances.” Page 1 of Sunday’s Miami Herald. I already knew about this, but seeing it there made me sick. Now is the time to look at this deep problem we have in South Florida, and see if we can fix it – well before we have to vote in November.

In a nutshell, as I see it: We have two Democratic members of the House of Representatives who will not do anything to help three fine Democrats run against the three Republicans who misrepresent about 1.5 million people in Miami-Dade, Monroe, Collier and Broward counties. Their two seats are so safe that Republicans run no one against them, yet they will not venture out to help fellow Democrats.

How wrong can things get? This is pretty far down the spectrum of why people do not understand politics and why they stay away. I’m not going to speculate here as to why Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20) and Kendrick Meek (FL-17) do not support their local Democratic Party. It’s written about in the Herald, and I understand Ms. Wasserman Schultz was asked about it Sunday in Michael Putney’s show on ABC Channel 10.

What I want to look at here is the people they are in allegiance with, to use the Herald’s word in that headline. A disgusting thought, really, to be “in allegiance” with Lincoln Diaz-Balart, his brother Mario Diaz-Balart, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, when you say, as our two Democrats say, that you’d like to end the Iraq war and to see expanded health insurance for children.

The Republicans voted with President Bush repeatedly on the war, and they voted to sustain his vetoes on the children’s health insurance bills.

Mario Diaz-Balart’s District 25 includes the Everglades, a treasure of great value on the environmental scale. He’s a creature of Big Sugar, which is one of the biggest problems for the Everglades. He’s a creature of the rock-mining industry, another big problem for the Everglades. This is a congressman who deserves defeat on his environmental record alone (15 percent rating by the League of Conservation Voters (www.lcv.org) in 2007, lower in earlier sessions). His opponent, Joe Garcia, is poised to take a pro-Everglades stance. Will he get help from Meek and Wasserman Schultz? They talk nice about the Everglades, but not about Joe Garcia.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) has an environmental record just as bad. And like his brother and Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18), he votes for torture. And for immunity for telecoms and the president that tapped our phones illegally. And for the end of habeas corpus.

Yet our two Democrats in the U.S. House supposedly feel bound by some collegial allegiance – Oh, how I hate to see that word used to describe ties between Democrats and these three Republicans – and will not work to get Democrats elected in their place.

What about the Republicans’ rationale for voting against the SCHIP bills: It’s “an attack on the Cuban-American community,” Mario Diaz-Balart said last October (Herald link no longer works). What attack? It would hurt cigar-rollers by increasing tobacco tax.

That is the crap that passes for legislative thinking among the Republicans we’d like to see defeated. My eyes well up, but our two Democrats are not moved.

Mario Diaz-Balart even brags about this allegiance on national television. After Fidel Castro announced his resignation, Diaz-Balart was on CNN and, pressed by Wolf Blitzer about waning support from younger Cuban-Americans, he declared that his constituents supported his harsh policy on Cuban family reunions and that his two Democratic colleagues supported it, too. So it must be right, he implied. Well, there’s a logic to that. And that’s the problem.

Now let’s consider whether the Republicans feel bound, like the Democrats, to be nice to the opposition. Ros-Lehtinen is known for having raised or donated nearly $1 million in the 2006 election cycle to the Republican drive – in vain, thank goodness – to retain the R majority in the House. Our two Democrats run and do the same for Democrats in other parts of the country, but we in South Florida are … pounding sand.

And what about the Republicans’ national security thinking? I like to go back to an article Ros-Lehtinen wrote last fall, published in National Review Online Oct. 5, 2007. (Alas, I looked through the digital archives of the National Review for traces of this neo-con fantasy bylined Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and could not find it.} The title was “The Right to Survive,” and she was referring to the U.S. right to survive. As opposed to what? Answer: Iran’s supposed drive to get nuclear weapons.

Now, of course, we need to keep track of what Iran is up to. And our intelligence organs do just that, and they sometimes throw a wrench into the neo-cons’ works, as with the recent finding that Iran wasn’t really working on a nuclear weapons program.

Ros-Lehtinen’s article was published before that verdict, but she probably hasn’t changed her mind one whit. She wrote that military and civilian nuclear processes are about the same, and she makes it seem that we’re in a “suicide pact” to let Iran wipe us out – unless we take her admonitions to heart. ”For no ‘paper right’ should be allowed to trump our right to exist,” were her last words.

A path to war is many steps long. If we ever go to war with this fourth-rate country Iran, Ros-Lehtinen’s article will be one of the steps along that path. Why are prominent young Democrats in the House not trying to get her out?

I launched into this post only after consulting the three candidates to be chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, Daisy Black, Bret Berlin and Kevin Burns. I asked if they opposed airing this topic in this blog, which is in a way the creation of the county Democratic Party. They all said it was OK to bring it into the open, though I didn’t tell them exactly what I would write. In fact, I didn’t know what I’d write then, when I spoke to them. It was pretty clear, though, that I’d be critical of our two Democrats in the U.S. House. I regret that it’s necessary. But if you look at the on-line comments to the Herald article, you’ll see that I’m not alone.

And we’re attracting national attention: The Swing State Project blog picked it up on Sunday with a piece suggesting that our two Democrats were “all too eager to kneecap these Democratic challengers.” Read it here and weep at what folly seems to have fallen onto our political situation.

The question is: Why are Democrats in perfectly safe seats not showing political courage?

The question is: Why are Democrats in perfectly safe seats following a harsh policy on Cuban family reunions instituted by the worst president in U.S. history?

Tell me. This space is open to you. (Though I’ll say here that I’m not open to publishing comments alleging corruption. I don’t think that’s the issue, or appropriate.)