In a debate last week in the hotly contested Sixth Congressional District race, Republican challenger Richard Tisei branded US Representative John F. Tierney a do-nothing lawmaker.
“You’ve been in Congress for 16 years. You’re the only member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation who’s never sponsored a bill that’s been signed into law,” Tisei said, encouraging the audience to search C-Span’s online archives for bills sponsored by Tierney.
Comments
John Tierney is a workhorse not a show horse. While his opponent dances and prances around the issues like one of Romney's show horses, Tierney plows the fields and sows the seeds of better health care and better educational opportunities, things that matter to the lives of the people he represents. My wife and I are retired people with children and grandchildren who will suffer the consequences of a right wing Republican victory. If Tierney is defeated it will empower the worst of the Republican Party who now control it. It is astonishing to me that Mr. Tisei, a gay man living with another gay man should make a career in a party that has stood against the civil rights not only of women, blacks and the handicapped, but a party that has consistently demonized gay people and continues to do so. Perhaps after this election Tisei and his partner will get married, it's legal in our state, but they still will not be entitled to benefits other married couples enjoy because of DOMA. Mr. Tisei doesn't make me uncomfortable as a gay man. He makes me uncomfortable as an extension of John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy.
If Mr. Tierney respected his party, he would have resigned when his family's financial scandal hit the papers. He clings to his paycheck. It sounds like you'll vote for any Democrat, regardless. Rather small minded. Perhaps your mind will be broadened on Nov. 6
Actually, I voted for Bill Weld against John Silber who did little to hide his thuggishness. I have admired Republicans like Elliot Richardson and Frank Sargent, my former neighbor John Volpe and his friend Frank Hatch. These were honorable men with whom you could agree or disagree in an honorable way. With the arrival of Sheldon Adelson, the Koch Brothers and the pitiless crew of Goldman Sachs and hedgefund managers betting hundreds of millions of dollars on the worst of the Republicans, I have to say the world has changed. Now we have three million dollars spent in my congressional district by the Young Guns and others. That is a LOT of money. Look what happened to Senator Lugar, a respected, conservative Republican Senator who worked diligently for the interests of the United States as he saw them, including with Senator Kennedy. Thrown under the ideological truck by these same people. No, Bedford9999, I don't think I'm small minded. I think most people with an open mind should be appalled at the levels to which Mr. Tisei's handlers have stooped.
Bottom line - Tierney has been in Congress too long (16 years) & can only say he 'works behind the scene.' That is not an encouraging statement for the tax-payers who pay his salary. Tierney could NOT have lasted 5 years in the private sector with his work record - and both he & the Globe think MA voters should support do-nothing employees?
Sorry Tierney, that line may have worked for three or four years, NOT 16 years!!! After 16 years, even with THAT excuse, you should have your name on a bill by now... even by accident you should have a bill by now...
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Nahantjim cleverly throws a backhanded dig at Mr. Tisei's sexual orientation. But he doesn't account for DOMA's being proposed and sponsored by the Clinton administration. Nor does he admit that the Democratic party stalled civil rights legislation from the Roosevelt years through the early 1960's. Harry Truman integrated US military forces , but Republican Dwight Eisenhower made integration work in his eight years in office.
Democrats would often have us forget or rewrite history to suit the present. They would have us forget that Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Al Gore's father voted against the US CivilRights Act of 1964, as did Bill Clinton's mentor and liberal doyenne, Senator J. William Fulbright. And let's not forget that beloved West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd was a kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan. Other prominent Democrats with KKK roots included Georgia Senators Herman Talmadge and Senate power house Richard Russell. And former Supreme Court Justice and Georgia Governor Hugo Black ' Klan background shouldn't be forgotten. The Democratic Party had to be transformed in its Civil Rights sensibilities not by the Kennedy brothers,John and Robert but by Lyndon Johnson and a Republican Martin Luther King who pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And let's not forget Democrat and Dixiecrat Presidental candidate Senator Strom Thurmond.
Less than ten years before in Little Rock, Arkansas, The Republican Eisenhower administration faced off against Democratic Governor Orville Faubus and his stand for segregation at Central High School. Arkansas Senators Fulbright and Sparkman backed Faubus against chidren of color. Unfortunately the Democratic Party came late to the Civil Rights struggle. That is the upleasant truth. It is infrequently told.
Points taken but, as I suspect you know, they miss the greater point After the Goldwater faction of the Republican Pary stood against the civil and voting rights acts of the 1960s, those elements of the Democratic Party that were unashamedly racist were welcomed into the Republican Party with wide open arms via Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy. He and John Mitchell wanted to take advantage of the social and political unrest of the 1960s to become the white people's suburban party. In the Sixties you saw George Romney walk out of the 1964 Republican convention because they would not support civil rights and it would be very hard to argue that Republicans were at the forefront of social progress in the 20th century.
President Eisenhow looks better and better over the years. He appointed Earl Warren (which he regretted) but then did what he had to do as far as enforcing a law that he was not comfortable with. As far as MLK being a Republican, there would be some irony there if it were true. I don't think that it is. But in the South blacks were drawn to the Party that was not oppressing them THERE. By the 1960s and certainly by the 1970s, it had become clear that the Democratic Party was the home of people who believed in equal civil rights for all and which would more or less forthrightly address the worst of our social ills.
As a nation we all came late to the Civil Rights struggle.
Finally, it was not a dig at Tisei's sexuality. I just think he should make an honest man of his partner.