A couple of days ago I wrote about the Republican insistence on austerity programs and tax cuts as the only cures for our ailing economy, when very recent history (as well as more long-term history) tells us that they will not actually address the problem at hand. We have an economy that needs to be jump-started and their solution is choking it off. It doesn't make any sense.
Yesterday in the Washington Post, two distinguished writers and thinkers, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, wrote about our dysfunctional political system (largely as evidenced by the behavior of the Republicans in Congress since President Obama took office, but looking back historically to the rise of Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist--the two people who can most particularly be blamed for said financial crisis and many other ills besetting this country).
Their argument essentially begins with this claim:
"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.
"When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges."
Whatever one's political leanings, it's hard to argue with the facts. And the facts show us that many "controversial" major policy programs were at one time supported by Republicans: the health insurance mandate, the DREAM Act, comprehensive immigration reform, cap-and-trade... the list goes on.
But in a relatively brief time, the party has moved away from commonsense ideas and embraced a radical vision of an America in which everyone is out only for themselves, in which the rich should control virtually all the wealth and power while the poor are left to fend for themselves on whatever scraps are left. It's a vision Ayn Rand might have loved, but nobody with an ounce of intelligence could.
Unfortunately, not only has the Republican Party taken this radical step, but they've also embraced tactics that allow them to get their way, to the extent that "their way" means blocking almost anything proposed by Democrats (whether or not Republicans, 4 or 8 or 10 years ago, were advocating exactly the same thing). They have turned the filibuster from an occasional tactic to SOP. They have used it not only to block policies but to block appointments, hindering the administration's ability to fill the positions necessary to staff government offices created through the legislative process. They managed to get the credit rating of the United States downgraded for the first time in history and almost caused a cataclysmic default. At the state level, they're attacking voting rights, women's health, privatizing every government service they can, and pushing ever-more-lenient gun laws that result in ever more Americans being killed and injured.
When it comes to the recession, they've successfully limited the stimulus program and blocked any further ones, as well as blocking every jobs initiative the Democrats raised (while occasionally advancing their own, consisting of more of the tax cuts and deregulation that got us into this mess in the first place. What's that Einsteinian definition of insanity again? You know--doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results).
Except they know what the results of those policies would be. Not jobs, but a shrinking middle class, more poverty, more hunger. The Paul Ryan budget every Republican in the House voted for tosses the rich ever more tax cuts and pays for them by slashing social programs for the poor, doubling student loan rates, etc. They would create more poverty while at the same time making it harder, more dangerous, more deadly, to be poor.
They know, because we've tried their way. There have been exactly two Democratic presidents in the last 31 years. Since Reagan we've been experimenting with supply-side economics, and the end result was the worst recession since the Great Depression (which came about after a similar period, the so-called Gilded Age, when the gap between rich and poor became a chasm and the middle class was essentially nonexistent).
They know, but they don't care. The party has taken such an extreme tilt that they are no longer interested in governing for the benefit of Americans. They are only interested in their radical vision. I'm not talking about individual Republican voters here, I'm talking about elected officials at nearly every level, and the "big thinkers" at places like the Heritage Foundation and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News that push extremism onto the rest.
Today 1 in 6 Americans will go hungry. Tonight kids (1 in 5 American children) whose parents are unemployed will go to sleep with empty stomachs, and if they're lucky--if local Republicans haven't cut the school budgets too much--they'll get breakfast and lunch at school. We could be doing so much better, if Republicans had spent the last three years working constructively with Democrats to solve problems instead of pursuing their agenda of obstruction.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told us his priority, so none of this should come as a surprise. These were his words: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President."
To achieve that end and to advance their agenda, they'll do anything.
That's why I hope Americans turn against this radicalized Republican Party in 2012. We need politicians who'll work together, who'll focus on the common good, who'll put rabid partisanship aside in favor of compromise and progress and decent human consideration. We need a two-party system, but both of those parties have to be sane.
Right now, we don't have that. We have a presumptive Republican presidential candidate whose economic policies are largely "cut taxes and regulations." The same voodoo, in other words, that put us here, that doesn't work. A candidate who has turned against his own reasonable positions on guns and climate and gays and embraced the Ryan deficit-ballooning, poverty-increasing budget.
Doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Blocking programs that would create jobs, thereby keeping our fellow Americans unemployed, in poverty, hungry.
We can't reward that behavior.
We just can't.
