On March 23, 2010, then-President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Getting there was a bit of a rollercoaster given the makeup of the Senate at the time. Although Democrats controlled the House by a wide margin in January 2009, the party was still one seat short of the 60-vote threshold necessary to avoid a filibuster. This includes the seat won by Al Franken, whose victory would become official in July 2009, and the two Independents, Sens. Bernie Sanders, (I-V), and Joe Lieberman, (I-CT), who caucused with the Democrats.
Several months later, however, when Sen. Arlen Spector, (R-PA), switched parties, Democrats got their 60th vote.
The death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, (D-MA), in August 2009, complicated matters. In September, then-Gov. Deval Patrick, (D-MA), appointed Paul Kirk, a Democrat, to serve as the state’s interim senator until a special election scheduled for the following January would determine a permanent replacement.
That fall, the House passed a radical version of the ACA. And on Christmas Eve, the Senate passed a similar, but more moderate bill. According to Forbes, lawmakers planned for the Senate bill to be “tweaked considerably to conform more with the House bill.”
Democrats were confident that candidate Martha Coakley, then the Massachusetts attorney general, would prevail over her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, in the special election. Brown’s upset victory left Senate Democrats, once again, short that one critical vote and forced party leaders to modify the House bill to match the more modest Senate bill.
U.S. political history is rife with instances where one senate vote meant the difference between two completely distinct outcomes.
Had Republicans rallied behind then-Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in Georgia’s January 2021 runoff elections, we could have mitigated much of the damage caused by the Biden administration’s dangerous agenda.
Although it’s highly likely that Republicans will win back the House majority, the Senate is too close to call. While we’d be foolish to put too much stock in pre-Labor Day polls, most current polls predict that Democrats will retain control in the Senate.
The party considers the Pennsylvania Senate seat currently occupied by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who is retiring, to be the easiest to flip. The RealClearPolitics average of polls in this race shows the far-left John Fetterman up by 8.7 percent against his Republican opponent, the Trump-backed Dr. Mehmet Oz.
There is a major enthusiasm gap between the two candidates. Despite his three-month stroke-induced hiatus from the campaign trail, Fetterman is wildly popular in the state. The former long-time mayor of Braddock has repeatedly attacked Oz as a carpetbagger from New Jersey and those attacks are resonating.
Fox News reported, “A big problem for Oz is consolidating GOP support. By a 16-point margin, fewer Republicans stay loyal to him (73%) than Democrats to Fetterman (89%). Same story on favorable ratings, as many more Democrats view Fetterman positively (88%) than Republicans view Oz (67%). Just 35% of those backing Oz say they support him enthusiastically, while 45% have reservations. For Fetterman, 68% back him enthusiastically and only 18% hesitate.”
Republicans have been slow to warm up to Oz. Pointing to previous statements he’s made on guns, abortion, and fracking, many don’t consider him to be “conservative enough.” The bottom line is that Republicans can’t afford to snub Oz because control of the Senate is at stake.
Life is full of choices between two suboptimal options.
During a November 2019 Democratic primary debate, candidate Joe Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a pariah nation. He declared he would make the Saudis “pay the price” for their brutal October 2018 assassination of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi. “I would make it very clear we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them,” he said. “We were going to in fact make them pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”
Three years later, after squandering U.S. energy independence, Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia to beg Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to boost his country’s oil production.
We are at DEFCON 1 (the highest level of defense readiness). The pistol is cocked.
Please vote for Dr. Oz and any other Republicans you consider to be “squishy” conservatives.
Republicans don’t have the luxury of challenging the purity of Oz’s conservatism. Any Republican, RINO’s included, is better than a Democrat. Even so-called “principled” Democrats, moderates like Joe Manchin will eventually cave to party leadership for the right price.
A previous version of this article appeared on The Washington Examiner.
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If Fetterman is so “Wildly popular” in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania has had a collective brain transplant from “Young Frankenstein.” I don’t doubt a word you say, but that is just ridiculous. What’s really ridiculous is the determination of those results from RCP. It looked, to me, that someone was flying on the high trapeze, to come up with those stats. I hope that is not the case. Fetterman is a communist.
I don’t even know how polling can be used to determine that stuff, without a whole lot of tweaking, which is just screwing around.
Braddock has a population of about 1,700. It sits on the banks of the Monongahela River, about ten miles south of Pittsburgh. It is an old, dead mill town. Most have moved out. Some restaurants have opened because of the cheap real estate.
Fetterman moved there to start his political career because there would be easy to win the mayor race. He was receiveing about 40-50 grand a year from his parents as his allowance. Trust fund lefty.
While in Braddock, in 2013. he pulled a shotgun on an unarmed black jogger. This just came out, and the Reps need to hit this hard.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/08/17/john-fetterman-right-thing-pulling-gun-unarmed-black-jogger-2013/
Republicans need to get agresssive to campaign against Fetterman. He has not accomplished anything
Challenging Oz’s purity as a conservative is kind of beside the point, after the fact. If Oz won the primary, what is all this about him being slow to be warming up to, as a conservative? In some states, it’s just a fact of nature that much of the time the process gives them RINOs, if indeed that is the case. To m, someone is either a conservative or they aren’t, in which that makes him a RINO, not a conservative, but everyone tosses around that they are conservatives when they run as Republicans. We just have to live with it. Maybe, one day, that will change.