Democrat is as Democrat does- Part 2

Seems I spoke too soon in my last post about the Democrats backing off from cutting military funds and/or using the money to try to dictate foreign policy to the President. According to Politico.com, Speaker Pelosi did back off but she is now facing a major revolt among the hard left core of the Democrat Party. I haven’t paid very much attention to the inner workings or power divisions of the Democrats so I have no idea if this is a minor nuisance, a major problem, or something that can and will change policy. At the very least it will just add to the worries of the military as mentioned before.

However, whatever its end result this does bring up another issue, the importance of voting by party and not by candidate these days. The problem is that no one candidate will have a major effect on party policy. The major impact they will have is to increase the power of the very liberal or conservative elements of the Democrat and Republican parties respectively. Due to gerrymandering both parties have around 110-140 safe seats that are ideologically at the extreme of the party. They will usually make up the majority of their party, but more importantly they will occupy almost all of their party’s leadership positions. This will more often than not lead to the current situation where the voters elected a pro-military Congress but by also putting the Democrats in the majority they essentially put the anti-military far left of the Democrat Party in charge.