Pete Sessions (R-TX) Has A GOP Alternative To Obama

Pete Sessions hosting a recent GOP fund-raiser for lobbyists in Vegas

Republicans are hysterical over the possibility-- remote as it is because of corrupt, reactionary Republican-like Democrats such as Max Baucus and Arlen Specter-- of Congress passing real health care reform. What, asks the Republican Party's in-house newspaper would Democrats have done if Tom DeLay had forced through the GOP's all-time biggest dream, abolishing Social Security? No doubt one or two of the worst of the worst Blue Dogs-- say a Gene Taylor (MS) and an Alan Boyd (an actual co-sponsor of the failed Bush plan to do away with Social Security) would have gone along for the ride, but most Democrats would have waited happily for the next election day to watch the voters decimate the GOP even more than they have since DeLay was kicked out.

The last time the GOP responded to a Democratic president trying to solve a dire national crisis created by GOP excesses by claiming his proposals-- like Social Security-- were socialism, was in the 1930s at the depths of the Great Depression. Not one single Republican in the House voted for Social Security and, in fact, they were exactly as obstructionist as the current crop of like-minded reactionaries are today. The voters didn't approve of these tactics and the GOP found itself, over the course of 4 election cycles and unstinting lock-step obstructionism, losing almost two hundred seats!

When Hoover won re-election in 1928, the GOP won 270 seats in the House. Then along came the culmination of Republican policies, the 1929 stock market crash and Depression, and the next year the GOP lost 52 seats (giving the Democrats a one vote majority). The GOP went on an orgy of obstructionism and all you heard was "Socialism!" screeched every time any of them opened their mouths. The voters responded in 1932 with a landslide for FDR and a well-earned defeat for another 101 Republican congressmen. They didn't learn a thing and, like Cheney, Limbaugh and the rest of the kooks, angrily struck out with more obstructionism and more lies about socialism. The voters had really had it with them by the 1934 midterms and the GOP lost another 14 seats. By this time there were no Republicans left in the House but the craziest extremist fringe and they actually got worse, not better. When 1936 hit there weren't many Republican seats left for the Democrats to target, but the GOP still managed to lose another 15, bringing their total to 88 seats (as opposed to 334 for the Democrats (and 13 for progressive minor parties).

What brought the history lesson on? One of the most corrupt shills in the House, Texas congressman Pete Sessions must have found an old GOP briefing book from 1933 and decided to read it out loud to the New York Times, not having had the foresight to figure out the results of when the "argument" was used last time. Sessions used the same tactic on Obama that the Republicans had tried against FDR-- namely that he was aiming to "diminish employment and diminish stock prices" so as to "inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it" and then "divide and conquer" America in a power-grab!

Is it any wonder that only 1 in 5 people identify themselves as Republicans or that the approval rating for the Republican congressional leaders, like Sessions, is so low that it's heading to statistical margin of error territory? You can't say Sessions has lost his mind because that would presuppose he once had one which a careful examination of his record shows clearly he never did. He represents a conservative North Dallas district (TX-32) that he helped Tom DeLay gerrymander for himself. That said, George Bush won 64% of the vote there in 2000 and 60% in 2004 and last year McCain only managed to scrape by with 53%. The district's burgeoning Latino population should end Session's career within a few years; he was one of only 4 Republican incumbents (of 19) in Texas to fail to reach the 60% re-elect number last year. Only 8 Republicans have perfect zeroes (100% obstructionist on everything for the current congressional session-- Pete Olson (R-TX), Kenny Marchant (R-TX), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), Todd Akin (R-MO), Steve King (R-IA), Sam Johnson (R-TX), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), and, of course Pete Sessions.

Sessions is the head of the NRCC and his counterpart at the DCCC, Chris Van Hollen responded to his outburst today:

The American people want leadership to address our economic challenges, yet the Republicans are responding with one ridiculous sound bite after another while refusing to offer a constructive alternative to their failed economic policies of the last eight years. The latest remarks by NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions have no place in our current economic debate and reflect a Party more preoccupied with offering bizarre conspiracy theories than offering credible solutions to get our economy back on track. Families coping with the loss of a job, their home, or their health care need solutions from Washington, not more of the same broken politics embodied by Chairman Sessions and the Republican Leadership in the House, and talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

If the Republican Party is serious about offering credible alternatives to Obama's proposals, they should stop fighting among each other, dump divisive extremists like Sessions (and Michael Steele) from their leadership and replace him with a sincere mainstream conservative. Otherwise they really are going to be looking at a 1936 scenario in 2012.



Oh, yeah, and they should be man enough to get out from under the poisonous clutches of a drug-addicted radio clown who makes a living by being a demagogue for a tiny sliver of a fractured media market. Needless to say, Sessions and Limbaugh see eye to eye... on everything.