A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday also indicates that 7 in 10 Americans believe that the Democrats’ loss of their 60 seat supermajority in the Senate is a positive move for the country. Forty-five percent of people questioned in the poll said Democratic control of Congress is a good thing, with 48 percent disagreeing.
That’s remarkable, following the pronouncements by the punditocracy that the 2008 election represented a sea change in the electorate and a mandate for a radical restructuring of government. Americans got a whiff of that and of an unchecked Democratic majority and didn’t like what they saw. Had Obama not lurched so far Left, or had he not delegated his agenda to the bitter partisans Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the public might have been more inclined to give him free rein. If Obama had restrained his Left, the public wouldn’t feel compelled to restrain him.
But no more. It is not easy to get 70 percent of Americans to agree on anything, but putting the filibuster back in play seems to be a winner. That, once again, demonstrates just how far out of touch with ordinary voters is the Left, which has gone after the filibuster as “anti-democratic.” Many things in our constitutional system are designed to act as a brake on the power of untrammeled majorities. What is amusing to conservatives, and no doubt distressing to the Left, is that the vast majority of voters want that brake.
