Crossing Party Lines

Dr. Michael L. Ford

27 March 2008

            Recently a lot has been said by party hacks that crossing party lines in primary voting may be illegal and result in jail time. Well come and get me boys, I am ready to go to jail for the cause of democracy! I have crossed party lines in primary elections in the State of Georgia for years and am boldly unrepentant for doing so! Let me explain why.

            For years everyone running for public office on the city and country level ran on the Democratic ticket. If I wanted to have any voice in local politics I had to vote Democrat in the primary. Usually local offices were all settled in that election. But if I wanted to ever see the “good ol’ boy” network broken up in the State of Georgia, I needed to vote Republican in the general election. In other words the system forced me to switch parties between elections in order to have any real part in the electoral process.

            Frankly, I am sick and disgusted with two party politics in this country. The people in power shut out true conservative voices, as happened to Allen Keyes this year, and the formation of alternative parties is well nigh impossible because the parties control the system. Right now, we have two socialist liberals running for President on the Democratic side, and a One-World Federation liberal running for President on the Republican side. The so-called alternative (and ineffective) choices are running to the left of these except for the amoral Libertarians.

What the present system has gotten us is a diminishing of rights afforded us under the Constitution and unjust judges at every level of the American judiciary. The political parties are part and parcel to the scandalous legal system because many of them are lawyers. And, those who are not have given into the system in order to get anywhere in politics. It is a stinking cesspool of corruption in need of a political rotor rooter. Crossing party lines in order to have some impact on a corrupt system is one of the few ways the average person has of fighting back and trying to slow down the decline of what America once stood for.