The recent election results were a devastating indictment of the political status quo in our country. It has become very difficult to beat incumbents in Congress, so it really did require an uprising of energy, money and conviction to create those results.
One clear thing emerged from the elections: the gender gap is back. "If only men voted, Jim Webb (D-VA), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Claire McCaskill (D- MO) would have lost, and the Republicans would still control the Senate," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and publisher of Ms. Magazine. "In the 2006 election, in key races, women were the deciders."
Women's votes also led the way in key House races. According to the Ms. Magazine/Women Donors Network (WDN) nationwide exit poll, 55 percent of women voted for Democratic candidates while only 50 percent of men voted for Democrats, for a 5-point gender gap. In close races, this was the decisive margin (full press release).
According to Kim Gandy, President of the National Organization for Women (NOW): "While all of us have been celebrating the fact that Nancy Pelosi will be the first woman and self-identified feminist to become Speaker of the House, it has been little noticed that many progressive women (and supportive men of color), including Representatives Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Calif.), Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn..), John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), are in line to replace House Republican (and mostly white male) chairs of committees and subcommittees, and gain integral influence over legislation, budgets, programs and services important to women."
Conyers will chair the Judiciary Committee and Rangel will take the chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. One of the most significant of the new committee chairs is long-time women's rights supporter Louise McIntosh Slaughter (D-N.Y.) who will chair the extremely powerful House Rules committee (full analysis).
The Democrats now in charge have pledged themselves to an agenda that includes bringing the troops home from Iraq, raising the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour, changing the ethics rules, cutting the interest rate on student loans in half, and allowing the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients. How much of these and other measures they will be able to get passed remains to be seen.
As far as the federal budget goes, OMB Watch reports that the House has passed an extension of the stopgap funding measure known as the FY2007 continuing resolution since the current continuing resolution was set to expire on November 17. The House-passed version of the extension will expire on December 8. Continuing resolutions are sometimes necessary but are very bad government if you care about all the people in the U.S, and here is why: if you take inflation and population growth into account, extending this CR means that human needs programs are actually being cut.
After the Senate passes a similar extension of the continuing resolution, it will go to the President for his signature. When Congress returns in December, they will attempt to wrap up work on the FY2007 budget, or pass a long-term extension of the CR until the next Congress. Before the elections, Congress had already shifted $5.3 billion that Senate appropriators planned to devote to domestic programs of defense and homeland security.
Speaking of hope, we can only hope that the new Democratic leaders will commit themselves to more integrity in the budgeting process, including actually passing a fairer budget by the October 1 deadline next year.
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