OP ED: Young Democrats Call Out Senator Brown

As you get older, you look back on the wisdom and advice adults offered to you as you grew up.  There are a lot of things grown-ups always like to say to children. Values and wisdom so commonly repeated they are accepted as axioms.  Education is the key to your future. Stand up for what you believe. Treat people like you want to be treated.

One of the most difficult realizations I’ve come to lately is that some of the adults who preach these lessons don’t really mean it.

Over the last year, we called, tweeted, and emailed our two U.S. Senators to ask them to vote for a bill that would help improve our schools and put people back to work.  It was President Obama’s Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act, a bill that would have supported 6,300 education jobs in Massachusetts. We’re proud that our Senator, John Kerry, voted for this important piece of legislation, but we were quite disappointed to hear that our other Senator, Scott Brown, refused, joining Senate Republicans in blocking it just because it would ask millionaires and billionaires (or the 1 percent) to pay an extra 0.5 percent. 

When Scott Brown is on TV, he’s throwing around terms like "bipartisan," "creating jobs," and "independent." But its plain to see that while Sen. Brown talks the talk when the cameras are rolling, he doesn’t walk the walk.  

A couple of weeks later, Scott Brown once again sided with Republicans to block the Rebuild American Jobs Act, which would have created 11,100 good Massachusetts jobs. Scott Brown once again sided with the rich because in order to create those 11,100 jobs, the wealthiest Americans would be asked to contribute an extra 0.7 percent. 

When you learn about democracy in school, they teach you that elected officials are supposed to represent the people who elect them. But Scott Brown isn’t representing Massachusetts’ best interests, he isn’t representing all of us; he’s just standing up for the interets of Wall Street executives, CEO’s and hedge fund managers.

We may be young Democrats but we’re old enough to know that the only way to keep our economy growing and returning a sense of security to the middle class is with a balanced approach that calls for shared sacrifice. I guess Scott Brown disagrees.

—Courtney Elgart on behalf of the
MetroWest Young Democrats