By S. Barr

Less than a week before the midterms, it’s almost taken for granted that the Democrats will take back the House and gain a handful of seats, if not a majority, in the Senate. But the reason they deserve to win your vote has almost nothing to do with any serious policy initiatives they might undertake. After all, the Democrats will still have to contend with President Bush for two years, and he seems to have become desperate enough to veto even the most reasonable bills (like the recent stem cell research one). The reason to throw out the Republicans is not that the Democrats will salvage the Iraqi quagmire, provide a boon to our economy, or pay down the massive debt. The reason to throw out the Republicans, I’m sorry to say, is that the Democrats could not possibly do any worse.

The pundits say that the Democrats can’t hope to win on a “we’re not Republicans” platform. These pundits will be eating crow on November 8th. In a two party system, the alternative to a bad government is almost never worse. As large majorities of people are coming around to the realization that the Republican-dominated government of the past six years has been disastrous for our country, they cannot be blamed for assuming that the Democrats (yes, those cut-and-run, family-hating, gay-supporting, Volvo-driving Democrats) couldn’t possibly be worse. Worse than what, you ask? This is all subjective of course, but I’d like to provide a not nearly comprehensive list of the things the Republicans have done to harm us.

They have gotten our troops bogged down in a war that was never justified to the American people except on misleading and false grounds. They have approved of the torture of anybody suspected of terrorism, violently tossing us from whatever moral high ground we may have occupied in encouraging the Iraqi people to adopt democracy. They have wasted our troop and monetary resources on an unprovoked lark in Iraq, while serious threats from North Korea and Iran have been either ignored or toothlessly denounced.

They have cut taxes for the highest income groups, while the middle and working classes suffer from rising gas prices, inflation, and falling wages. They have ignored the issue of health care, while more than 40 million Americans, most of them children, remain without insurance. They threatened Social Security with “reform” that would ultimately choke it off and leave elderly Americans without a safety net. They passed an educational initiative that lavishes our resources on already successful schools while draining funds from poorly functioning ones, providing them an incentive to improve but withholding the means to do so.

They have cut funding and federal support for stem-cell research that might destroy already discarded embryos, and thereby impeded the progress of a technology that could save actual human lives. They have posed as medical professionals while moralizing on the decision of a Michael Schiavo to follow his wife’s wishes and his own conscience in ending her life. They have appointed judges to the Supreme Court who will likely overturn Roe v. Wade when it is challenged. They have stripped devoted gay couples of dignity by opposing their marriage, their civil union, and their adoption of children, apparently based on the conviction that homosexuality is a disgusting moral choice and not a natural human condition. They have promoted the merger of religion and government, denying the validity of evolution and apparently basing many of their political decisions on the belief that they are following God’s will.

Perhaps most offensive of all, they have been utterly inactive on and sometimes downright hostile to any attempts at energy reform. They talk about “energy independence” from the Middle East, while the real issue is our dependence on greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels from every country, including our own. They have not only refused to do anything about global warming, but have actually denied the existence of this crisis, about which the scientific community has absolutely no doubts.

This laundry list is by no means complete, and it must be as tiresome for you to hear these common complaints as it is for me to write them. But understanding that the Republicans’ sins have spanned every area of policy is crucial to understanding why, even if the Democrats seem weak-kneed or wobbly, we should all be glad that they will be retaking Congress next week.