About the Roadblock

What the Roadblock Republicans are all about

The Roadblock Republicans have a very simple strategy: obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.

For the sake of only a few, they obstruct the passage of laws that would benefit everyone — such as affordable healthcare, clean energy legislation, tax reform, government accountability, a sane foreign policy, and protection of civil liberties for all.

By manipulating rules and procedures in Congress, they obstruct the passage of legislation to pursue their own partisan political agenda at the expense of our country’s common goals.

Using filibusters as a weapon and vetoes as a final solution, they obstruct the flow of legislation through the Senate in a deliberate plan to keep the Democratic majority from pursuing the public policies its members were elected to enact.

Their agenda is clear: block the passage of any and all progressive legislation until the current President has left the White House and the current Congress has made it through another election cycle.

The problem is that as long as they have at least 41 Senators who are willing to march along in lock-step, the Roadblock Republicans can keep right on filibustering until they’re red (but not blue) in the face.

And as long as they have at least 34 Senators and 146 Representatives who are unwilling to stand up to the White House, the Roadblock Republicans can keep right on vetoing until the cows (but not the troops) come home.

And they’re not going to stop until they’re forced to. The only way to undo the damage of the Bush II years and get America back on track again is to get rid of those roadblocks and clear the way for progress.

And the only way to do that is by changing the counts in Congress. The Democrats might be in the majority on paper, but the minority on the Hill is still big enough to obstruct anything and everything it wants to.

The problem is obvious. The math is simple. So is the solution.

In order to defeat the Roadblock Republican agenda, we have to replace enough incumbent obstructionists with incoming Democrats to overcome their filibustering, vetoing, dog-in-the-manger tactics.

Some of them have already seen the writing on the wall and have announced that they would not be running for re-election in 2008. Others are stubbornly insisting on staying the course, and they won’t stand down unless they’re forced to.

And that’s the reason we built this website and launched this campaign to clear the Republican Roadblocks in Congress — to help people like you work together with people like us to get rid of people like them.

Mitch McConnell, R-KY

Mitch McConnell is the literal leader of the pack when it comes to the obstructionist elephants of the Roadblock Republican party. In his current role as the GOP’s Senate Minority Leader, he is the Roadblocker-in-Chief, the Biggest Block Head of them all, and he is absolutely determined to let nothing that’s even remotely tinged with Democratic Blue get passed during the term of the 110th Congress.
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Norm Coleman, R-MN

Norm Coleman is still in his first term as a Senator, and it looks to be his last. His national career got off to a dubious start when Karl Rove convinced him to challenge incumbent Senator Paul Wellstone, and it’s just gotten even more dubious since then. He called himself a Democrat in the beginning, but then he found it more politically expedient to jump ship and sign on with the GOP instead. And he’s been an ardent supporter of their agenda ever since.
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Susan Collins, R-ME

Susan Collins manages to give the impression of being a moderate Republican who’s willing to work both sides of the aisle, at least on issues that are of lesser importance outside her Maine bailiwick. But she’s really an obstructionist elephant in moderate’s clothing, a closet Rubber Stamper, and when the chips are down you can always count on her to toe the RR line and back up the Bush Administration’s egotistic arrogance every time.
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John Cornyn, R-TX

John Cornyn is another first-termer who’s already racked up an impressive record of diehard obstructionism in the Senate. He’s considered to be one of the four most conservative Senators and is a staunch ally of George W. Bush on practically every issue that arises. This is hardly a surprise, considering that he was the Texas Attorney General before running for the Senate, and has even more ties to Big Oil than the President’s daddy does.
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Elizabeth Dole, R-NC

Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina may be best known in some circles for being married to a former Senator, but she’s no stranger to the Washington power elite in her own right. She’s another single-term Senator who flip-flopped from donkey to elephant like Coleman did. She started out working for LBJ, but when Nixon came to power and took over the White House, Dole opted to stay the course and work for him instead.

John Sununu, R-NH

John Sununu is straight-up rank-and-file GOP all the way, but at least he comes by it honest — his father was Chief of Staff in the Bush 41 White House, and had been governor of the Granite State before that. And like granite, Sununu II is rock-solid Roadblock Republican when it comes to his politics: adamantly obstructionist about Iraq and civil liberties, and dismal when it comes to environmental issues as well.