This… things do not work this way.
.@OrmanForSenate told me he could pick 1 party to caucus with & switch after “4 or 5 months”..”we’ll be able to change our allegiances”
— Kelly O’Donnell (@KellyO) October 6, 2014
More here. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that Greg Orman manages to win election this November. If he tried this scenario, the only thing that he’d do is volunteering to never be considered for any sort of leadership position by either party. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would be willing to give him any kind of subcommittee Chairmanship/Ranking Membership: for that matter, they wouldn’t want to give him a seat on any worthwhile committee at all. That’s true even if Orman’s switching wouldn’t actually result in the Senate flipping, no matter how briefly: this guy would endlessly roil the day to day operations of any committee that he was actually on.
So either Greg Orman is an idiot, or else he’s trying to avoid admitting something that the rest of us already know: which is that Greg Orman is the Democratic party’s creature now, and he’d look to come to his true masters’ collective heel the first chance that he’d get. Permanently. :shaking head: I am constantly amazed at just how low an opinion the Democratic party has about its own base voters. It’s far lower than mine: I know plenty of rank-and-file Democrats that I like just fine. Orman apparently does not.
Moe Lane
*I am not inclined to pretend otherwise, and neither should you be.
PS: Threatening political blackmail like this is less likely to foster action in the Senate than pretty much any other action that I can think of, offhand. Then again, it is an argument designed to appeal to rather stupid people…
PPS: You can switch parties in the Senate and negotiate committee seating in the process. Once. Try it twice and all of your colleagues will be ready to strangle you. Nobody loves a political turncoat.
Well, he could be lying and stupid– stupid enough to believe that people won’t see him as a transparent phony.
Regarding your PPS: Yes, remember Arlen Specter? When he went back to the Democrats, they let him keep his seniority…right up to the moment he went off the reservation, like the Republicans kept letting him do. The Democrats, not being the Stupid Party, did what the Republicans SHOULD have years earlier, and stripped him of his seniority and committees.