Let’s start off with some of the opening text from this article, written for The Campaign for America’s Future by Natasha Chart:

Sen. Claire McCaskill said last week that the Senate wasn’t going to tackle the Clean Energy Jobs and American Protection Act this year because it would be “really, really hard.” If the Senate doesn’t handle it this year, will they deal with it in an election year? I think everyone working in progressive politics has heard the ‘it’s an election year’ excuse for why something terribly important can’t be done.

While McCaskill’s comment in particular was frustrating, she has a lot of colleagues in the Senate who obviously feel the same way. So I’d like to talk about some of the hard things people who aren’t Senators are facing that the CEJAPA legislation could begin fixing.

Chart goes on to discuss a number of amazing points – all things that the Senate really needs to take up before they get bogged down in election-year politics in 2010 and wind up doing little, if nothing at all in order to try and save their skins for re-election. Whether it’s health care, climate change, jobs, or transportation, all the Republicans need to do in order to prove to the public that the Democrats haven’t brought the change they swept in promising is continue to be obstinate and block any progress they can, and all the Democrats in the Senate have to do to play into their hands is do nothing for fear or not being bipartisan. At the same time, if they’re too aggressive, they risk earning the same rep that Republicans earned when they tried to push through changes using dirty tricks. It’s a fine line, but I’d rather see them push the barriers of progress than do nothing at all.

Let’s take a look at some of those issues that need to be addressed, shall we?

Earlier this year, a report came out on how the bottom 15 percent of the work force was having its wages stolen to the tune of $2.9 billion per year in, if you can believe it, three US cities. Workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are getting almost $3 billion dollars per year stolen from them by their employers. Workers can try to fight wage theft, but they can lose their jobs in the process, and face having to fight court battles against employers who lie and falsify records.

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Speaking of climate, scientists’ concerns over the state of our planetary life support system are growing. While the scientific community was hopeful even three years ago that we could hold warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a global temperature increase that would already mean the loss of the Arctic sea ice and heat waves that might end corn production in the US Midwest, more of them are seeing signs that a business-as-usual approach will get us 6 degrees Celsius in global warming. If 6 degrees of warming happen, not only will many coastal cities go under water, but the North American and Eurasian temperate zones could become uninhabitable.

As some 350.org activists wrote, “There is no Planet B.”

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The world can’t wait, and neither can Americans who need good jobs and fair pay. Our leaders need to step up and correct these problems responsibly, which they were hired to do by a public that is increasingly too sick, broke and tired to keep hounding them about it all the time.

The Senate needs to do its duty by the planet and their voters. They need to start cranking the gears down on emissions and get America back to work with all possible speed.

This is critical – the issues of climate change and jobs and unemployment are closely related – they can be fixed with some of the same forces, and those forces don’t involve leaving people to fend for themselves or shaming them into vanishing into the shadows away from the light of the public. Smarter energy solutions and green energy technologies could go a long way to putting the millions of Americans currently out of work back to work in high-paying, high-skill jobs that, as the President so often says, cannot be outsourced. It’s absolutely true – if only we have the political will to make it happen and private industry would get moving on it.

I’m doing Chart a horrible injustice here by snipping her post up to snag some of what I think are her most poignant paragraphs. You should very definitely head over and see her post in its original context. In the end though, her critical point is that the Democrats in the Senate can’t shy away from the issues in front of them because they’re “hard,” or because they require a great deal of political will. We elected them to do the hard things, work through the difficult problems, and help make America a better place. There’s a lot of work to do, I understand, and there are some seriously obstructionist Republicans on the other side, I understand that as well, but if anything that only adds to the urgency.

[ The Hard Things We Elect Them To Solve ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future