Thank you for saying it, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. The Republicans are the problem.
These respected centrists (Ornstein is with the American Enterprise Institute; Mann with the Brookings Institution) have written a terrific piece in the Washington Post that's based on their forthcoming book.
It's clear, truthful, undeniable. One major political party in the United States has gone wacko, and it isn't the Democratic Party.
Below are some of my favorite parts of the essay.
The mention of habitual Republican use of the filibuster, something new in Senate politics, is right-on. Why does the media say "The Democratic proposal failed to pass by a vote of 53-47 in the Senate"? The bill got a freaking majority! It succeeded in passing, except for the idiotic 60-vote filibuster rule.
As Ornstein and Mann note, reporters should say just that. A majority of Senators voted for the bill, but it didn't become law because of Republican obstructionism. Here's more on that subject.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
...The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
...Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies.The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations.
...The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska called his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.”
And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.
...We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.
Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Filibuster overuse is hardly unique to Senate Republicans. Its use has been growing in a cyclical nature since the 1960’s (see Wikipedia cloture vote graph since 1947).
The filibuster gets more and more abused every time Senate majority changes hands. Case in point, just 7 years ago Republicans invented the ‘nuclear option.’ It wasn’t actually used but like a nuclear weapon it was the deterrent that convinced Democrats to step back from their own filibuster abuse.
The next time Senate majority changes hands it will again be the Democrats’ turn to abuse the filibuster and the Republicans’ turn to cry about it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate
Sincerely,
Big Oil
Posted by: DJ | April 29, 2012 at 04:14 PM
Quoting Ornstein and Mann: "In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies."
--What should they do? Belly up and go along with policies and initiatives they feel are detrimental to the country?
On a slightly different note, here is an example of how this presidential campaign will be waged by both sides in the coming months...
Candidate for President, Mitt Romney, is riding by the zoo in Washington, DC, when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage.
Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.
Romney runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a hard punch.
Recoiling from the pain the lion lets go of the girl, and Romney brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.
A mainstream media reporter has watched the whole event. The reporter, addressing Romney, says, 'Sir, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page.
The following morning the front page headline reads:
ROMNEY ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH
To overcome media bias, Romney will have to resort to the same tactics. It's going to be the dirtiest presidential election in memory, probably ever, by far.
Posted by: tucson | April 29, 2012 at 04:37 PM
I am predicting an easy win for Barack Obama. Republicans are demonstrably pathetic in their zeal to hang on to the past.
The only spoiler to that scenario will be if the widespread hatred for Obama spurs enough voters to vote for Romney as a countermeasure.
Who votes, anyway?
Posted by: Willie R | April 30, 2012 at 09:32 AM
Take a close look at the filibuster data and you'll see that while its use did rise somewhat during the W administration, it went from an upward trend to a geometric function since 2009. And @tucson, don't even try to suggest that they GOP is behaving somehow responsibly and true to their values. They stated almost immediately coming out of the gate that they would oppose Obama any way they could. I believe in a loyal opposition, but what they are doing isn't even remotely patriotic. But even factoring out the filibuster, the extent of the GOP's culpability includes the executive branch whenever they control it. They just govern poorly.
Just look at 2001-09. Tax cuts doubled-down in the face of two wars. Huge giveaways to drug companies with Medicare Part D. Unfunded mandates like No Child Left Behind. Turning a surplus into the largest (at the time) annual deficit (while obscuring the costs of the wars). Doubling the national debt. Torture. Wiretapping. Turning a blind eye, and even encouraging war profiteering, particularly for their big political donors. Absent regulatory oversight that gave us Enron and the housing bubble. The worst post-war economic recovery in terms of jobs and income. And the big one, the worst recession since the Depression.
Oh, but if you're in the 1%, you just love the GOP, don't you?
Posted by: JackL | April 30, 2012 at 05:32 PM
JackL wrote: "And @tucson, don't even try to suggest that they GOP is behaving somehow responsibly and true to their values."
--Politicians by definition have no values. I'm a cynic, but this is largely true, imo. It is practically mandatory to lie, cheat, deceive, obfuscate, sell out and distort in order to get elected. Vote for who you perceive to be the least dishonest. Obviously, in your case, that will not be a republican.
Posted by: tucson | May 01, 2012 at 03:57 PM