Daily Archives: 13 May 2024

Vice Presidents Don’t Matter Much

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Karl Rove’s Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed centered on the theme of optimal criteria that a potential Vice Presidential running mate should meet in order to be effective should that person be selected as the ticket’s VP candidate. The subheadline of his piece set the tone:

Running mates don’t matter much, but they should be prepared to fill the top office.

Rove expanded on that, conclusively, toward the end of his piece:

Really though, there’s one criterion that matters: whether Mr Trump’s choice reinforces the voters’ perception that he would be a strong, effective president.

Vice Presidents actually do matter, very much, especially in a closely divided Senate. VP Pence cast a potful of Senate tie-breaking votes, and he was effective in shepherding many aspects of Trump’s agenda through Congress. VP Harris has cast a potful of Senate tie-breaking votes in support of Biden’s agenda.

Part of being a strong, effective President is having a Vice President who can be relied on in that sort of crunch.

To Hell with Bipartisanship

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Arizona Progressive-Democrat Senator Mark Kelly has made Party’s disdain for us average Americans clear (as if it isn’t already, for some time). He said in an NBC News interview,

that he favors overriding the Senate filibuster to pass national abortion protections.

And

two years ago he [Kelly] argued for passing progressive “voting rights legislation” with 51 votes.

This position jammed my irony meter needle hard against the stop. Progressive voting rights are “rights” of non-citizens to vote in our elections. It’s hard to get more undemocratic than that. Indeed, that’s tautologically completely un-American.

Of course, Party won’t stop there. They’ll always have a Very Good Reason® for carving out Just One More® exception to the filibuster rule.

Just shut up and do things our way. That’s not just Kelly’s purpose—it’s the Progressive-Democratic Party that’s pushing to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster. Outliers like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema will soon be gone.

The WSJ thinks the Senate filibuster is on the ballot this fall. The news outlet is correct, but only in a limited way. The filibuster matter has put our free-market economy on the ballot, along with the concept of limited government with limited regulation of our lives.

Our two-party system of governance is on the ballot.