May 21, 2012
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Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein recently wrote a column for the
Washington Post
with a provocative headline: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are
the problem.” Their thesis was that they had never, in 40 years of
observing Congress, seen the institution behave in such a dysfunctional
manner. They wrote that while they had long found reasons to be
critical of both Democrats and Republicans, things have changed and our
current crisis is solely the fault of a Republican Party that "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 article went on to present extensive evidence to back their case.
Nothing has signified these extreme tendencies more clearly than last
summer's debt ceiling fiasco, where the Republicans acted so
irresponsibly that
Standard & Poor's felt
compelled to downgrade America's hitherto gold-plated credit rating. In
their press release, the ratings agency implicitly accused the
Republicans of "brinksmanship" and said they had caused American
governance and policymaking to become "less stable, less effective, and
less predictable that we previously believed." They were particularly
alarmed that the statutory debt ceiling had become a bargaining chip
over fiscal policy.
Looking back at that debacle,
Steve Benen
recently wrote, "It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major
party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War."
When I first read that, it struck me as a preposterous statement.
What about the Jim Crow laws, or the Palmer raids, or the Japanese
internment camps, or McCarthyism, or the Vietnam and Iraq wars? But
when I started to think about it, I realized that many of the big
mistakes our country has made since the Civil War were not really the
result of one political party's actions. The Jim Crow laws are, of
course, associated with the Democratic Party. But only the Southern
half of the Democratic Party. Wartime measures, like the Palmer Raids
during World War I, the internment camps of World War II, COINTELPRO
during Vietnam, or illegal surveillance and detainee abuse during the
current War on Terror, have been instigated less by political parties
than by particular administrations, or they have had significant
bipartisan support. The same can be said for our country's decisions to
fight in Vietnam and Iraq. In these cases, the blame is both too
narrow in one sense, and too broad in another, to lay all the blame on a
single party. Even McCarthyism can't be laid squarely on the GOP,
since much of the Republican establishment, including the Eisenhower
administration, wasn't too pleased with it. The debt ceiling fiasco was
different. Here's how Benen described it:
It was a move without parallel. The entirety of a party
threatened to deliberately hurt the country unless their rivals paid a
hefty ransom -- in this case, debt reduction. It didn't matter that
Republicans were largely responsible for the debt in the first place,
and it didn't matter that Republicans routinely raised the debt ceiling dozens of times over the last several decades.
This wasn't just another partisan dispute; it was a scandal for the
ages. This one radical scheme helped lead to the first-ever downgrade of
U.S. debt; it riled financial markets and generated widespread
uncertainty about the stability of the American system; and it severely
undermined American credibility on the global stage. Indeed, in many parts of the world, observers didn't just lose respect for us, they were actually laughing at us.
It's the kind of thing that should have scarred the Republican Party
for a generation. Not only did that never happen, the Republican
hostage-takers are already vowing to create this identical crisis all over again, on purpose.
Benen is right. It's not easy to identify other examples where an
American political party acted with such reckless disregard for the good
of the country. But when I really think about it, the Debt Ceiling
Fiasco isn't a stand-alone thing. It's part of a continuum. You can't
just cherry-pick the Debt Ceiling Fiasco and forget about the
politicization of the Department of Justice, or putting an
Arabian horse trader in charge of New Orleans' safety, or blowing off any planning and just declaring, "
Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out."
What's the worst thing the GOP has done in the 17 years since they
first took control of Congress? The Gingrich shutdowns of the federal
government? Impeaching President Clinton? Using their majority on the
Supreme Court to steal the 2000 election? Standing around like mute apes
while the housing bubble inflated?
It's not that the Debt Ceiling Fiasco was the worst or stupidest
thing that any political party has imposed on America in 150 years. It's
that the Republican Party is the worst party we've had in 150 years.
You might argue that they don't have much competition. "So, they're
worse than the Democrats, big deal." But parties don't remain the same
over time. In one sense, they change every two years following each
federal election cycle. It's best to think of
iterations of our political parties.
For the GOP, there's the abolitionist Lincoln iteration, the
Reconstruction iteration, the McKinley/Taft iteration, the Teddy
Roosevelt Era, the Roaring '20s iteration, the FDR oppositional phase,
the Eisenhower era, the Nixon/Ford iteration, the Reagan Revolution, the
Gingrich Revolution, the Bush era, and finally the post-Bush era. And
there's no need to box things into tight little categories. It makes
sense to talk about the post-Bush Republican Party, but we can also talk
about the post-Nixon party or consider the contemporary GOP on a
timeline beginning with its 1994 takeover of Congress.
I think it's fair to say that the GOP that exists today, as expressed
by both its behavior in Congress and its recent display in the
presidential primaries, is worse than it has ever been. The Republicans
of the 113th Congress are worse than the Republicans of the 112th, who
were worse than the 111th, and so on.
There's a scene in the movie
Office Space in which the main
character is talking to a psychologist. He complains that every day
seems worse than the last. The psychologist says, "That means that
every day is the worst day of your life." The protagonist agrees, which
leads the psychologist to observe impassively, "That's messed up."
That's a great metaphor for the modern Republican Party. The Debt
Ceiling Fiasco, which is now set to be repeated, was merely a temporary
nadir on an otherwise constant 45º downward slope.
A blogger who goes by the
nom de guerre driftglass recently wrote about
New York Times columnist
David Brooks' tendency to "waddle into the threshing blades." I like
that imagery. That's what the Republicans have been doing to the
country for a while now. Under Gingrich, they shut down the government
and impeached the president after hounding him for six years with
specious investigations. Then they disgraced the Supreme Court and
stole the election away from its rightful winners. Then they dropped
the ball on al-Qaeda. Next we wound up in Iraq with no plan.
From there it was on to Terri Schiavo and a drowned New Orleans and a
failed attempt to privatize Social Security and a wrecked Department of
Justice, and the Abramoff scandal. There was Guantanamo and black
prisons and torture and murder and disaster in Afghanistan. When the
stock market collapsed in September 2008, it might have seemed like the
final culmination of a disastrous path embarked upon…when, exactly?
1964? 1980? 1994?
But the nightmare wasn't over. In many ways, it was only starting.
Yet to come were the Birthers and the Tea Party and the Tenthers and
climate deniers. The party would begin a new Great Purge, sending Arlen
Specter scurrying to the Democrats and defeating long-serving
politicians like Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana,
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (who survived on a write-in campaign),
Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, and a couple dozen "Establishment" picks.
Those that have survived are now cowering in fear, completely unwilling
to compromise with the Democrats or the president on anything, lest
they become the next victim. They can't address climate change because,
despite the fact that John McCain and Sarah Palin campaigned on a
cap-and-trade carbon plan, the party's officeholders are now afraid to
admit that climate change is even occurring.
And who could have predicted that the party would go after women's access to contraception?
And what of the new crop of Republican governors. Grifters like
Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Rick Scott in Florida surely represent a
new breed (and a new low) of radical state executives. Governors in
Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona and elsewhere are competing with
each other to craft the most radical and unprecedented legislation. We
have not seen a party this dangerous in any of our lifetimes. Not in
this country, anyway. The last time things got this bad was about 150
years ago. The last time things got this bad, we needed a Civil War to
resolve it.
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