I’ve been getting a lot of mail on the question of whether progressives should hold their noses and vote for Kerry, despite his pathetic campaign and his failure to condemn the Iraq war as a fiasco that should be immediately ended, or vote for Ralph Nader, who laid out a full anti-corporate agenda and who has called for a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

I’m not going to deal with that issue here, beyond saying that in my view the Bush administration poses such a uniquely serious threat to American democracy and civil liberties that exorcising it has to be the priority in this election—and voting for Nader does not do that, unless you happen to live in a state like California, New York, or Massachusetts. (Nor does voting for Nader do anything to end the war in Iraq; on the contrary, by helping to elect Bush, it assures increased bloodshed and mayhem in that tortured nation—a reality that peace advocates need to consider very seriously.)
What I want to focus on today is Congress.

The reason that the Bush administration has been so able to shred the Bill of Rights, drag the nation into a war of aggression, and hand over $1 trillion dollars of tax breaks to corporations and the rich, has been that it has complete control over Congress. Had Democrats been in charge of even one of the houses of Congress, the dynamic of opposition would have made it likely that, even given the pro-corporate stance of both major parties, there would have been a brake on the actions of the administration. Now it’s true that the spineless Democrats in Congress, Kerry among them, buckled when presented with a resolution authorizing the president to attack Iraq, and when presented with the USA PATRIOT Act, but the former was the result of massive disinformation presented by the administration, and the latter was passed in the shadow of the 9/11 attack. It remains true that on many issues, from tax measures and the appointment of conservative judges to the bill that slashed overtime for millions of workers, Democrats as the minority opposition party have stood in opposition.

At this point progressives, if they were to turn out in large numbers across the country, could help restore Congress as a check on a re-elected Bush. It is still within reach for Democrats to regain control this November of the Senate, and even, conceivably, of the House (admittedly a long-shot). What works against this coming to pass is the lackluster and issue-avoiding campaign of John Kerry, which is likely to do little to energize voters, and which has actually alienated many potential voters.

Progressives need to get beyond their disgust and anger at Kerry and the conservative leadership of the Democratic Party. If you cannot bring yourself to vote for Kerry, it is all the more important to energetically work to get out the vote for Democratic congressional candidates. I would even argue that at this point it matters little what the political positions of those Democratic candidates are. Even less-than-progressive Democrats in Congress will help, because once a party has majority status, it gains control of all the committees and of the legislative process.

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