Reasons not to vote Republican--Part 1: Uncompromising, Filibustering

Reason #1: Moving Goal Posts, Refusing to Compromise for the Good of the Country, and Taking Filibustering to Incredibly Belligerent Lengths

Especially in the last few years, Republicans have moved the goal posts over and over again as Democrats have sought compromise on issues. As Kevin Drum writes in a blog post today: "Is it any wonder that so many Democrats are no longer in any mood to appease the right?" 

Drum links to Matt Steinglass's May 1st post in The Economist, in which Steinglass writes that Democrats have moved toward (and past) the center and away from issues they pursued in the past: "gun control, defence budgets under 3% of GDP, banning oil exploration off America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a public option or single-payer solution to universal health insurance."

Steinglass continues:

Today these positions have all been abandoned. And we're talking about positions held under Bill Clinton, a "third way" leader who himself moved Democratic ideology dramatically to the right, the guy responsible for "ending welfare as we know it". Since then, Democrats have moved much further yet to the right, in the fruitless search for a compromise with a Republican Party that sees compromise itself as fundamentally evil. The obvious example is that the Democrats in 2010 literally passed the universal health-insurance reform that had been proposed by the GOP opposition in the Clinton administration, only to find today's GOP vilifying it as a form of Leninist socialist totalitarianism. [my emphasis]

The fight over the debt ceiling and Republican vilification of "Obamacare" were the final straws for me. I just quit taking the Republican party seriously as a party working for the good of the country. Though there are individual Republicans who think and act responsibly, the party as a whole has gone too far right and has become intransigent.

Republican leadership is fond of claiming that they have tried to work with the President, that they are open to compromise, but the claim is a lie. (There. I've written the word--lie) On the very evening that Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration, Robert Draper records in his new book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, a group of Republican leaders were meeting to map out a plan to stymie Obama's legislative leadership. (Newt Gingrich was present.) Kevin McCarthy (Republican Rep., Calif.) is quoted as saying, "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign." 

As Draper says in an interview, this group of Republicans began to strategize, and what they ultimately came up with was a plan to attack the president's agenda, say no to everything and stick together." Now, of course each party should work to pass legislation it thinks is best for the country, but this is pigheadedness to the extreme, with a focus on one party's one-upmanship rather than on governing and doing the will of the people. 

Saying "no" to everything also means distorting the constitutional power of the majority in the Senate. As Thomas Geoghegan points out in his New York Times op-ed, "Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution," "the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments." However, in the last few years, and especially during the Obama administration, filibustering has increased exponentially in the Senate, with Republicans being the worst abusers of the filibuster. And supermajority vote has become the norm in passing legislation rather than the outlier.

Geoghegan writes that "[t]he filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent." [my emphasis]

He continues:

". . . we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states — just over 10 percent of our population — can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.

Simple legislation or judicial appointments that should pass with a simple majority are now filibustered to the extreme by the minority party so that a supermajority is required to break the filibuster. (And Senators don't even have to be present to say they're filibustering; they can call in their "filibuster.") What is truly ironic about this unconstitutional use of filibuster votes is that Republicans are really big about holding up the Constitution and the intent of our founders as inerrant, yet they are the worst abusers in filibustering, thus bringing the work of the government to a grinding halt in order to force the political will of a MINORITY in the Senate. [See more statistics that show the rise in unconstitutional use of the filibuster vote here: The U. S. Senate's posted chart "Senate Actions on Cloture Motions."]

James Fallows has written extensively on his blog about the increasing use of the filibuster to circumvent majority rule in the Senate. His blog posts on the filibuster are here: Filibuster

Do Democrats use the filibuster vote? Yes, of course. But Republicans have carried that use to the extreme. And now, we might expect a future Democratic minority in the Senate to do the same because the procedure has become so commonplace.  

As Norman Orntein writes in  his article "Worst. Congress. Ever.,", in Foreign Policy:

Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier.

"House Republicans," Ornstein writes,

are adamant about refusing to compromise with the president, and are able in most instances to make good on the threat. When they are not able to maintain this unity, they are simply unwilling to bring up or pass measures that would lose significant GOP votes and require as many or more Democrats in support. This is a formula for gridlock, or worse is the Republicans are simply declining to govern.

[See also Thomas E. Mann's and Norman J. Ornstein's recent article in The Washington Post: "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem." ]

Republicans' admitted plan to say "NO" to everything, to "challenge every single bill," has not been good for the country. Why reward them by voting for them?

Low Information Voters and Republican Strategy

Some of the most distressing descriptions of American citizens I've read lately have been detailed by two retired Congressional staffers, one a 28-year veteran of the Republican party and the other who worked for a moderate Democrat. These are not people on the fringes of the right or left. And now that they have retired, they feel free to write what they really believe, what they have actually experienced and observed. This is what Mike Lofgren, who served 28 years as a Congressional staffer and "16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees," writes :

There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Lofgren goes on to describe how "the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends." People who think government doesn't work decide that their vote doesn't count, too. And so they stay home while the far-right minority, "whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News" increases its clout in elections. This strategy of weakening trust in government institutions to create citizen malaise goes hand in hand with another Republican strategy, that of disenfranchising voters who are more likely to vote Democratic:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies)**; by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

Lofgren says that other folks are very upfront about these strategies:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption [the more recent Republican strategy to filibuster every confirmation and routine procedural motion] .... By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

 So what Republicans cannot succeed in doing by rigorous debate of the issues and communication of those issues to constituents, they plan to win by subterfuge and destruction of democratic institutions. Again, this is not some leftie talking; this is a guy who witnessed Republican strategy for years from the bullpen and who mourns the demise of Republican virtue (if virtue exists in politics). He is no supporter of President Obama, he says, but he wanted Obama to succeed in the worst economic crisis the country has faced in years because he wanted his country to succeed. The Republicans--those leading now--want the country to fail so that Obama will fail. The country fails, millions of Americans suffer--but they will blame the current president. Why? Because they are low information voters who have no idea how government works.

The second negative description of American citizens comes from a Congressional staffer who worked for years for a moderate Democrat. This staffer wrote in response to James Fallows' post about Mike Lofgren's essay.

The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters' minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.

 Although the pollster mentioned above is referring to Congressional races, I grimaced a little when I read how inattentive voters are in making their choices. While I understand my own ideals and how those ideals have affected my voting record in national elections and state level elections, I have been less attentive to local elections. Yet that's where many politicians get their start, in their being elected to the school board or to mayor. From the city level, they may go to the state level and then the national level--though, more often than not these days, the already-rich jump directly to representing us at the state and national level.

If anything should convince those disaffected voters to get out to vote, this should: there are people hoping that you won't vote so that their ability to whip up the anger and fear of the fringe will have a stronger impact. And that's not good for our country...or for ordinary Americans.

**I have read that the push in Wisconsin to close Department of Motor Vehicles offices has been tabled. A spokesman said that there was no intention to shut down offices in Democratic constituencies, but a Democratic spokesman said that a look at which offices were planned to be shut down counters that claim. However, a recent Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles memo came to light in which employees were directed to provide material when people ask for the free ID but that they should not readily provide information if not asked. So it's pretty clear what the intent is.

More on the Wisconsin voter ID conflict: This guy evidently should have used his personal e-mail to send out his message, but....."Wisconsin Employee Fired for E-mail Defying Voter ID Policy," posted on TPM. More at the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: "State Employee Fired After Telling Co-Workers about Photo ID Policy," 8 Sept. 2011.

Cynicism Redux

I've been following the debt ceiling debate with growing--and now matured--cynicism. Today, House Minority Leader Harry Reid has evidently offered the Republicans a debt plan that includes $2.7 million in spending cuts, with no new taxes, with the stipulation that the debt ceiling be raised through 2012. (h/t Brian Beutler at TPM). As Matt Yglesias points out, however, the House Republicans don't want to accept this plan that nominally meets their publicly stated requirements because it doesn't repeal Medicare and it doesn't take future tax increases off the table. The Bush tax cuts are supposed to expire in 2012:

In particular, the plan doesn’t cut Medicare, which means that Democratic party candidates for office in November 2012 and 2014 can accurately remind voters of the content of the Republican budget plan. In case you forgot, this plans repeals Medicare. Having repealed Medicare, it then gives seniors vouchers to purchase more expensive private health insurance. And having replaced Medicare with a voucher system, it then ensures that the vouchers will grow steadily stingier over time. It was only after voting for this plan that Republicans seem to have realized that repealing Medicare is unpopular. Since that time, they’ve been trying to entrap Democrats into reaching some kind of Medicare détente with them, which would immunize them from criticism. Reid’s plan doesn’t do that. "Harry Reid Calls House Republicans' Bluff"

Politicians hope that people won't REALLY understand what they're up to: Repealing Medicare is unpopular with the American people, so Republicans have tried to sell their voucher plan. Yet the Republican voucher plan for Medicare will increase costs for old folks and thus result in denial of services. Republicans hope that no one will notice the switcheroo in their plan. (Ca-ching--another coin in the cynicism bank)

And, dang it, those tax cuts are SUPPOSED to expire. Not only that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data. That’s true whether it comes to their federal income taxes or their total federal taxes." "Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Families at Historically Low Levels."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also points out just what is responsible for our current debt crisis:

If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time. "Economic Downturn and Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficits"

And a graph in the New York Times handily compares the results of new budget policies under Bush and Obama, based on data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Policy Changes Under Two Presidents"--A $5.07 trillion increase under Bush and a $1.44 trillion increase under Obama.

As Steve Benen points out: "And now these same Republicans [who helped turn a large surplus into a massive deficit] claim the high ground on fiscal issues, and demand that President Obama clean up their mess immediately. Worse, they demand he do so in a way they find pleasing, or next week, they’ll crash the economy on purpose." "Blame Where Blame is Due"

Kevin Drum describes the Republican narrative that too many people are buying into:

Up until very recently, Republicans were mostly taking a hard line on the deficit and weren't shy about making sure everyone knew it. The hard line itself hasn't changed since then, but over the past few weeks they've come to realize that it doesn't make for very good PR. So now their enablers in the media are furiously pushing the story that it's really Obama who's completely intransigent and insincere, rejecting deal after deal no matter how much Republicans try to accomodate his crazed desire to punish the rich. This narrative, as near as I can tell, is now virtually unanimous among conservative commenters.

So the question is, will anyone buy this? It's so self-evidently preposterous that it doesn't seem possible, but then, I wouldn't have figured that they could successfully make the world so quickly forget that they were responsible for the deficit in the first place, nor that they were also responsible for the most epic financial meltdown since the Great Depression. But they have. Their ability to shape popular narratives can hardly be underestimated. "Republicans and the Deficit Narrative"

It's amazing to me that anyone still takes these Republicans seriously. Oh, I know that there are conservatives who are speaking out against the rash policies of these radicals, but those folks aren't in power.

It's like a bunch of whiny kids who trashed a house at a party. Another group of kids come in to clean up and have to buy supplies to do so. The ones responsible for the mess then scream about the costs of the clean-up and convince bystanders that the clean-up crew is responsible for all the costs and damages. Unbelievable.

By Their Leaders You Shall Know Them

So the National Tea Party Convention is underway in Nashville, Tennessee, and one of the touted speakers is former Congressman, Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado). In the speech he gave at the Convention yesterday, Tancredo claimed that Barack Obama was elected president because our country does not have a "civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country." Ummmm..... when and where in this country was a literacy test required for voting? And who was the target of that literacy test? Mr. Tancredo, standing in a city in the South, demands a literacy test for voters?

What century is he wishing he lived in? Or to what century does he wish to drag back the country?

Good. Lord.

Oh, for Pete's Sake!

Sometimes the short-sightedness, weirdness, and stupidity of people and organizations leave one sputtering, speechless:

• First up, a story of the Bureau of Prisons, which had at first refused to let a prison inmate read Barack Obama's books, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The bureau's reasoning? "The books contained material 'potentially detrimental to national security,' prison officials said in two separate rejections from August and September." However, in November, the Bureau allowed the man to read the books.
  
  
• Next, another fight is brewing in Texas over curriculum standards for public schools, this time in social studies. Three men appointed by Republicans to a panel to "help guide" the teachers, community representatives, and academics who are charged with writing the standards have complained about the credit given to some civil rights leaders. One of them has "questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure." Another thinks Cesar Chavez "'lacks the stature, impact, and overall contributions of so many others'"--and thus is not as worthy of discussion.
  
  The condescension of these men is captured very well in the tone evangelical minister Peter Marshall adopts toward the inclusion of Anne Hutchinson in the social studies text. (Hutchinson was "a New England pioneer and early advocate of women's rights and religious freedom." She was later invited by Roger Williams to "help establish a colony in what became Rhode Island.") According to Marshall, Hutchinson "does not belong in the company of these eminent gentlemen" [William Penn, Roger Williams and other early leaders]. Can this short-sidedness and stupidity be topped? Oh, yes, for David Barton, a former vice-president of the Texas Republican Party, "said that because the U.S. is a republic rather than a democracy, the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be 'republican' rather than 'democratic.' That means social studies books should discuss 'republican' values in the U.S." (from "Conservatives say Texas Social Studies Classes Give Too Much Credit to Civil Rights Leaders," published in The Dallas Morning News, 9 July 2009, and written by Terrence Stutz)
  
  
• Oh, and, finally, Sarah Palin. I know that she is the darling of certain conservatives, but, please, give me a break. She speaks of responsibility and leadership, yet she resigns her governorship before her term is up--and blames her shortcomings on others: just another person falling back on the politics of victimhood. While I certainly disagree with Peggy Noonan on many issues, I think her criticism of Sarah Palin in The Wall Street Journal is pretty accurate: "In television interviews she [Palin] was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. 'I'm not wired that way,' 'I'm not a quitter,' 'I'm standing up for our values.' I'm, I'm, I'm."
  
  Noonan ends her editorial with a call to arms for the Republican party: "Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think." I may lean liberal, but I'm behind you on this one, Peggy.

More of the Same

In the first year after Baghdad fell to American forces, the American Coalition Provisional Authority set up its offices in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace. The Bush administration chose young, inexperienced Republicans to put together the shattered Iraqi nation. George Packer describes the group in his book The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq:

Most of them seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad, few knew anything about the Middle East, and that first summer only three or four of the Americans spoke Arabic. Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application. (184)

While these young people were enthusiastic and devoted Republicans, they were unprepared for the seriously important work at hand. They were chosen because they were ideologically correct.

Again and again over the past eight years the Bush administration has put ideology over competence and experience, from the members of the Coalition Provisional Authority to the director of FEMA to the selection of District Attorneys.

In his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, John McCain is illustrating this same kind of governing. The problem is not particularly with Sarah Palin herself, who may be a wonderful person. The problem is with what her choice tells us about John McCain. All the pundits on television who are heralding this choice as an indication that John McCain is a maverick have blank slates for minds.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.