Mandate, You keep using that word...

Today on Morn­ing Joe the magic word is “mandate”

The peo­ple around the table are insist­ing that the pres­i­dent has a man­date for tax increases. Strangely enough the MSM didn’t have that opin­ion after a dif­fer­ent pres­i­dent had a larger mar­gin of vic­tory:

Begin with the facts: A 51 – 48 per­cent vic­tory is not a mandate

That EJ Dionne in 2004 as opposed to Dionne in 2012

Obama will have the strongest argu­ment a politi­cian can offer. Repeat­edly, he asked the vot­ers to set­tle Washington’s squab­bles in his favor. On Tues­day, they did. And so a pres­i­dent who took office four years ago on a wave of emo­tion may now have behind him some­thing more valu­able and durable: a major­ity that thought hard about his stew­ard­ship and decided to let him fin­ish the job he had begun.

Now what peo­ple are for­get­ting is that there was not one elec­tion on Nov 6^th, there were 470 elec­tions on the fed­eral level and the result of that elec­tion was a GOP major­ity in the house but this appar­ently doesn’t count as a mandate.

@morning_​joeSo the Pres­i­dent wins reelec­tion = “man­date” the dems win the sen­ate = “man­date” the GOP wins the house…crickets #p2 #tcot

— Peter Ingemi (@DaTechGuyblog) Novem­ber 14, 2012

And appar­ently some on the left seem to have for­got­ten just how this works:

@dat­e­chguy­blog @morning_​joe GOP lost the pop­u­lar vote in House elections.

— Richard Saun­ders (@organicdemocrat) Novem­ber 14, 2012

Appar­ently now we elect the house based on the national pop­u­lar vote, and if chal­lenged on that fact the left has an inter­est­ing reaction. :

@dat­e­chguy­blog @morning_​joe Man­date is not a legal con­cept. It is a moral one. If you lost pop­u­lar vote you have no man­date. Simple.

— Richard Saun­ders (@organicdemocrat) Novem­ber 14, 2012

So we are talk­ing “Moral” man­dates? I won­der who just decides what laws are “moral” and which are not, does that now mean we can safely ignore the man­date of Oba­macare? Gun laws? Tax laws?

The bot­tom line is our friends on the left can speak about man­dates till they are blue in the face. The fact is that the GOP hold the house now, and after Jan 3^rd will still hold the house, all spend­ing bills must come from the house. What is required now is nerve.

If the house keeps it’s nerve they will be able to make the best pos­si­ble deal for the both the party and the Amer­i­can Peo­ple. And if you must have tax increases, some good sug­ges­tions are out there.