Taking the “Bi” Out of Bipartisan: Why Republicans Have to Lie
When the New York Times, which held on dearly to the idea that legislators from the two political parties could have a kumbaya moment if they’d only try, admits that bipartisanship is not a viable option, then you know it must be true.
This truth has been increasingly obvious to most of the country for more than a decade, ever since Senator Mitch McConnell vowed to make Barack Obama a one term President.
Not a single Republican voted for the 2009 law crafted to pull the country out of the economic abyss of the Bush Depression. In 2017 all but three Republicans voted to take away the Affordable Care Act, an action that would have left nearly thirty million Americans without any health insurance options.
The primary legislative accomplishments of the Trump years were the passage of an unnecessary tax break for the wealthy, and the confirmation of marginally qualified and almost all white judges.
Now, hiding behind complaints that the American Rescue Plan is either too expensive, loaded with pork, or simply not needed, not one Republican in either house of Congress could be bothered to cast a yes vote.
Pork, in case you haven’t been keeping up with Republi-speak, is the new code word for anything that doesn’t enrich the donor class.
Despite much ballyhooed concessions made along the road to getting passage, the Biden administration’s bill is arguably the most significant act passed by Congress in this century. At its core the pandemic rescue features the opposite of the justification used by advocates of trickle down legislation since the days of Saint Reagan.
The act builds from the bottom, with direct and indirect aid to people who’ve been damaged the most by the economic “progress” of the past half century.
From the New York Times:
Researchers at Columbia University project the overall package will lift more than 13 million people from poverty this year, including nearly six million children, and estimate that a permanent program of children’s payments would decrease child poverty nearly in half.
“Not since Social Security have we made that kind of commitment to cut poverty,” said Christopher Wimer, a co-director of the university’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy.
Another indication of the bill’s significance comes via the Wall Street Journal’s condemnation:
The $1.9 trillion in spending the Democrats passed is a way station on their high-speed train to a cradle-to-grave welfare-entitlement state.
https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1368692747205509121?s=20
There are two more significant pieces of legislation (voting rights and law enforcement reform) coming down the pike, and Democrats in the Senate are going to have to find a workaround for the filibuster.
The good news here is that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a longtime defender of the filibuster, has signaled that he might nevertheless be open to filibuster reforms that could make it easier for Democrats to advance their legislative agenda.
Back in January, Senator Mitch McConnell refused to turn over control of the Senate’s committees to the Democrats before he received a public pledge from Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema that they would never vote to eliminate the filibuster.
From Daily Kos:
Of course, McConnell had no right to insist on anything—this was political blackmail, pure and simple. It was simply McConnell, on behalf of his Republican donor base, baldly setting up and threatening the careers of two Democratic senators if they refused to do his bidding.
There is no constituency—in West Virginia, Arizona, or anywhere else—that opposes the repeal of the filibuster. Many, if not most American voters could not explain what the filibuster is if asked, let alone how it affects them. To whatever extent any Democrat opposes its elimination at this point, their reasons must lie elsewhere, and those reasons are far removed from what people who actually live in their states believe or need.
The “bipartisanship” excuses trotted out to keep the filibuster immediately pale in the face of the implications of its retention, and when the reality of what preserving this archaic construct actually means is brought home to the people whose lives are being held hostage by it.
The concept of a compromise between differing points of view is premised on the idea that there are legitimate differences between the parties involved. And “NO” is not an option.
Given that Republicans couldn’t even come up with a platform beyond “whatever Dear Leader wants” in 2020, or craft an alternative proposal for Obamacare, or agree on a plan to deal with the nation’s infrastructure (something everybody supposedly wants), it’s safe to say their future lies with telling lies.
Here’s Thom Hartman:
Reaganomics has gutted the American working class, given oligarchs a chance to take over much if not most of our political system from the state to the federal level, and made America a cautionary tale for the rest of the developed world.
So, Republicans and their billionaire-owned media aren’t even bothering to sell “conservative ideas” anymore. They’re just trying to crank up the outrage, appealing to people’s emotions, and hoping to get them so worked up that they’ll forget how badly Republicans and their billionaire buddies have picked their pockets.
Their back is against the wall. The old “conservative ideas” hustle to rip off the working class is no longer working with a large section of their base.
They have learned, however, that the old “big lie” strategy that Hitler pioneered in the 1930s can work. Instead of promoting “ideas,” just promote something that was visibly invented out of whole cloth.
So if you’re at all curious about where the anti-mask, reopen at any cost, and cancel culture narratives are coming from, look no further than the GQP.
https://twitter.com/StephenARhodes/status/1368598106053500931?s=20
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