The Democrats did this once before
I am shocked by the passage of the health care bill. There isn’t one poll that shows it has majority support of the American people. There is a fair amount of evidence that it will cost us all more than we’re paying now. And then there’s the underlying belief that government really doesn’t do anything efficiently.
And while I’ve never seen anything like this, it has happened before. In 1854 Congress passed a law that would allow the territories of Nebraska and Kansas to determine whether of not they wanted to legalize slavery in those future states. The South didn’t like it and the North hated it. It didn’t end well for the Democrats.
In the congressional elections of 1854, the Democratic Party suffered the greatest defeat in its history. At the beginning of Congress in December 1853, Northern Democrats had ninety-one members; after the elections of 1854, they had twenty-five. Only seven out of forty-four Northern Democrats who had voted for the Kansas Nebraska Act were reelected. It took the Northern Democrats twenty years to recover from this disaster.
The American public was so outraged that a new party was born. The Republican Party. Remember the Whigs? Neither do I. They disappeared.
What can we learn from those times 150 years ago? Change is coming. Not the kind President Obama envisioned in the 2008 campaign, but the kind the Colonists started when they dumped all that tea into Boston Harbor.
I expect mostly peaceful outrage, with all the stubborn passion of an angry mom at a school board meeting. I expect it to have the irresistible power of a stampede at a soccer game. And I expect many Dems will face future furious attacks from angry voters in wide-eyed bewilderment. Like those in 1854, they do not yet realize what they’ve done.
