Cavey on caving

Note: per the request of “Honestabby” I’ve linked to a Red Maryland post with the five Delegates who sold out, as part of Chris’s message below.

I got an e-mail regarding slots from Chris Cavey, our state party’s First Vice-Chair, and with his permission I’m letting the rest of the grassroots know what he thinks. I did take a few liberties with the e-mail since there were a couple misspellings and I simply linked to the portion about Stockholm syndrome rather than leave the long explanation he had in. But the point he makes is definitely worth repeating.

Hello to all,

What a roller coaster the past three weeks have been for those of us who follow the politics of Annapolis. Beginning with a Republican rally of unity and ending, for all practical purposes with Republicans who left the fold; causing the O’Malley Democrat machine to win by just one vote. Or was it five votes?

Who would have thought on Monday, October 29th that five of the House Republicans would have sold their soul to Speaker Busch and Governor O’Malley? That’s right not one but five!

It begs to ask a couple of questions – what is a vote worth? Is it worth just proving a point to others that you can and will go against your caucus whenever you wish to gain favor with the Speaker? Is it worth bringing home a few crumbs and hollow promises from the Democrat Governor and pointing that it was you who gained his favors? Is it worth favors from Democrat-led Departments such as MDE to help your district or to look the other way for a project you need?

I don’t know…everyone has placed different values on integrity. It seems loyalty it is subjective based on where each person sets his or her own values. The irony is – they, the unfaithful five, made the deals on the same day Tommy Bromwell was sentenced. Man…he must have been smiling at how [expletive deleted] dumb those Republicans are!

Today reminded me too that Republicans suffer from the Stockholm syndrome…They have been so battered so long and so abused politically for so long that they show signs of loyalty to those who are the abusers…and I’m sure they will do it again.

It’s a pity at least twice in these three weeks we have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory due only to the fact no one can remember the axiom: united we can stand, divided we will fall.

Certainly there will be a thousand arguments as to why votes were cast on certain matters.  There will be debate over the fact slots are not a constitutional matter and representative government means we elect people hopefully with integrity to cast votes on matters for us…like taxation.  Eighty-six persons want you to vote for slots or not; because they want to pass job responsibility, however, they didn’t ask you about all the taxes!

Yep…you called to oppose taxes at a rate of 40 to 1 and will soon be hit face front with what you didn’t want.  Yet the “tough” vote for them was to pass off slots responsibility on you.  I’d rather we have a referendum on their salaries.

In the future we’ll now have higher taxes due to these five votes.  We have an O’Malley victory – again proving that Republicans are truly the minority party with legislators who can be bought with the promise of Democrat favors.  We will be soon hearing slots debate on every TV station more intense then election ads.

Republicans don’t have just the Evil Empire of Democrats to thank for their newest spanking.  The citizens of Maryland will pay more and eventually gamble more due to five votes; (legislators) who turned today to the dark side.

Thought you should know,

Chris

So the General Assembly has punted. What comes to mind is that this will be the second high-interest issue on the 2008 ballot – remember, adopting the early voting rules that were thrown out for the 2006 election is coming back as a ballot initiative for the 2008 general election as well. And we didn’t have to go through all this had the GOP stood firmly behind its own slots plan (HB25 just went ahead with the process) – we would be getting ready for the additional revenue more quickly and made at least $800 million off the top by selling the licenses.

The main point Cavey makes is that we acted like a scared minority, and he’s right. This was an opportunity to have a true say in Maryland politics because the leadership was having a tough time getting all 100+ Democrats on board. On a local level, there is a troubling tendency for Page Elmore to sometimes go off the reservation on issues and in this case he was joined by four others. It’s something to keep in the back of our minds for 2010, and another reason that any effort at “incumbent protection” should be rebuffed at our upcoming Fall Convention.

Crossposted on Red Maryland.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

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