Whupped!!! Democrats Take Over Congress — Texas A&M President Replaces Rumsfeld

Texas A&M President Replaces Rumsfeld

WASHINGTON President George W. Bush called his party’s loss of the U.S. Congress to the Democratic Party last Tuesday as a “thumping.”

A “Texas whupping” is how former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) described the Republican Party’s defeat in the highly volatile mid-term election.

Either way, the American voters gave the Democrats the seats they needed to regain control of the House and the Senate, the latter of which wasn’t expected to be easily accomplished.

The Democratic Party’s victory in the Senate came down to extremely close races in Virginia and Montana that featured vote canvassing that lasted until late Wednesday.

The last time the Democrats held both houses was 12 years ago prior to when the Republicans staged their “Contract with America” campaign during the middle of President Bill Clinton’s first term of office.

Since then, the Republican Party attained total control of the legislative and the executive branches of the United States government in some cases like in Texas tried to seal this grab through mid-decade congressional redistricting initiatives.

With this concentration of power, the GOP-led moves to pass taxes cuts for the wealthy, okay an unfunded mandate that imposed high-stakes testing requirements on public schools, adopt an initiative to partially privatize the government’s prescription drug plan for seniors, approve the eradication of citizens’ constitutional rights with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 not to mention an attempt to privatize Social Security.

But the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq and a string of high-profile corruption scandals ultimately caused the GOP’s popularity to wane in the eyes of the American public.

Last April, former Rep. DeLay resigned from Congress to face campaign finance misdoings in Texas. The Republicans lost his seat Tuesday night when Nick Lampson nudged out Shelley Sekula-Gibbs.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) will remain in office after fighting off controversy surrounding his knowledge of a sex scandal that forced Rep. Mark Foley (R-Flordia) to resign.

Hastert will not seek to be the leader of House Republicans come January, though.

The Democrats recaptured the Senate with close-margin victories from Jim Webb, a former Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan, and Jon Tester, an organic farmer and state senate president.

By a difference of 7,236 votes, Webb took the Senate seat in Virginia from incumbent George Allen.

By less than 6,000 votes, Tester in Montana bested Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, a three-term incumbent who had ties to Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist under investigation for campaign finance fraud.

Incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut argued that if this election had been a referendum on the Iraq war, he would have lost his seat to his anti-war challenger, Democrat Ned Lamont. Lieberman supported the administration’s so-called “war on terrorism” policy, even as it fell out of favor with the public and forced him away from the Democratic Party to run as an independent candidate.