Can people PLEASE stop referring to Joe Lieberman as a Democrat? You lose your right to call yourself a Democrat when you ignore the results of the Democratic primary and run against the person chosen by the Democratic voters to represent the Party. You lose your right to call yourself a Democrat when you campaign for another party’s candidate for President. And you definitely lose your right to call yourself a Democrat when you appear at the Republican Presidential Convention.
Once the new Congress starts, the first action should be to bar Lieberman from caucusing with Democrats and remove him from his committee chair positions. Parties need to punish this sort of behavior because it is what blurs the lines between the parties and makes it harder for voters to hold parties accountable. I accept that with our institutionally demanded two-party system that parties will be less coherent, but they should still be distinct.
