Excerpt
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks analyze the week's top political news with Jeffrey Brown, including the failure of the farm bill, the progress of immigration reform in the Senate and its prospects in the House, plus President Barack Obama's speech about nuclear arms in Berlin
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated columnist: New hurdles in the House are this, that the House is out of control, that the leadership has lost control in the House.
And what we basically have is a situation, Jeffrey, that is very analogous to where the Democrats were in the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1968 and 1992, the Democrats had five presidential elections in which they averaged getting 17 percent of the electoral votes and carrying an average of eight states.
They lost -- they got one state in two elections, in '72 and '84. But in all that time, they had the House. And so members of the Democratic House didn't really care. It would be nice to win the White House, but they didn't care. The Republicans right now are in that position. They are -- they have the House. That's all they care about, the House members care about.
And they are different to the plight, as expressed by Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, if we don't do something on immigration, if we don't reform ourselves, if we don't enable ourselves as a party, the Republicans, to be able to speak to Latino voters, we're dead in 2016.
And I think that right now is falling on deaf ears among House Republicans.
No comments:
Post a Comment