Once again I give you Steve Grant…

This week’s Permanent Damage asks the questions I’ve been wondering about: why aren’t (and haven’t) the Democrats acting like they stand for something?

Scroll down in this week’s column until you reach the With Democrats Like These header:

Since losing the election and seats in both the Senate and the House, the Democrats have been on the defensive, facing a Republican onslaught in Congress that threatens to render them superfluous. Aware of this, have the Democrats at least used their current position to register protest votes against Republican policies they claim to oppose, and use the opportunity to generate a new image for the party? Here are a few of their accomplishments during the current term:

• Supported a bill written by the credit card industry to strip ordinary Americans of the right to file bankruptcy while leaving wealthy Americans loopholes and shelters to avoid debts, opening the possibility of many Americans currently able to manage their debt becoming the equivalent of indentured servants to the credit card companies should the dollar continue to bottom out overseas and interest rates rise rapidly, as has been predicted by many economists, to “offset and slow inflation”
• Pledged support for any efforts to “stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” despite continued and growing evidence that no such program exists and administration claims of such are a repeat of the lies that took us into Iraq
• Supported, after decades of thwarting, the opening of the Alaskan National Wildlife reserve to oil drilling
• Supported a bill to shift class action lawsuits, currently tried in state courts, to federal jurisdiction where prosecutions are much tougher and awards generally much smaller – a present for American corporations and the crippling of a key protection for consumers
• Supported the tort “reform” bill designed to effectively eliminate legal remedies to slipshod corporate behavior

Bear in mind that they weren’t simply outgunned by Republicans on these. In each case, Democrats stepped up to the plate to throw their weight behind Republicans.