{"id":1958,"date":"2011-02-09T08:35:02","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T13:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/?p=1958"},"modified":"2018-08-16T15:52:07","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T20:52:07","slug":"hultgren-votes-with-the-dems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/?p=1958","title":{"rendered":"Hultgren votes with the Dems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a thing I did not see coming from my new congresscritter: Randy Hultgren has voted, along with a handful of other new tea-partiers in the House, to block the extension of three controversial Patriot Act provisions. And they succeeded in doing just that.<\/a><\/p>\n

The motivation is actually quite consistent with tea-party logic – they see it as an unecessary intrusion on personal liberty – but the thing liberals need to think about is this: When’s the last time we saw a crack in the Repub block that resulted in blocking legislation that the Repubs wanted and the Dems did not? When? Anybody? Anybody?<\/p>\n

The incident has me pondering two things this morning:<\/p>\n

1. Where else can liberals find common ground with these Freshmen?<\/p>\n

2. What would have happened if Progressives in Congress had displayed a similar unwillingness to “play ball” when the game itself violated their core convictions?<\/p>\n

I could drive myself crazy pondering that latter ephemeral question, but the crack in the Republican block just delivered a tangible result.<\/p>\n

So let’s be practical: What else can we do with this interesting new crack in the world?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a thing I did not see coming from my new congresscritter: Randy Hultgren has voted, along with a handful of other new tea-partiers in the House, to block the extension of three controversial Patriot Act provisions. And they succeeded in doing just that. The motivation is actually quite consistent with tea-party logic – they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[78],"tags":[9,2869,509,316,398,305,370,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1958"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1963,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}