“Heads-Up”: Republican Post State Of The Union Whining Today
Here’s a heads-up: After President Obama delivers his State of the Union address tomorrow, Republicans will wave their hands in front of their faces and whine that it was viciously, horribly, frighteningly “partisan.” And what will this partisanship consist of? Hold on to your hat here. He’s expected to argue for the same policies he has been arguing for and pursuing for the last four years. If the Republican members of Congress restrain themselves from shouting “You lie!” during the speech, it’ll only be because of their superior breeding and manners.
This, of course, is a follow-up to Obama’s inauguration speech, which was condemned by Republicans not because he said anything mean about them, but because he talked about some of the policies he prefers. That, you see, is “partisanship,” and when the other side does it, it’s beyond the pale. So in today’s Politico, under the headline “Obama’s State of the Union: Aggressive,” we read, without any particular evidence for the assertion, that the SOTU “will be less a presidential olive branch than a congressional cattle prod.” Surely this will be the first time a president ever used the speech to encourage Congress to pass legislation he supports. “That strategy has its dangers,” the article goes on. “If Americans perceive Obama as too partisan, he’ll lose a serious share of his personal popularity.” All that’s missing is a quote from Bill Galston explaining how the President is courting doom by not adopting Republican policy positions (I assume Galston was busy over the weekend).
You might say that because he originally ran for office promising to bring Republicans and Democrats together, Obama has a special responsibility to be accommodating to the other side. But let’s not forget that nearly every president comes into office promising to bring Republicans and Democrats together. Remember George W. “I’m a uniter, not a divider” Bush? Bill Clinton said it, too. But Obama seems to get an unusual amount of criticism from both his opponents and folks in the media for doing the same things that every president does, with every article an opportunity to remind readers that in 2008 he ran promising to bring people together.
Let me offer a prediction about tomorrow’s speech. There will be a good deal of now-familiar language about how he’s open to ideas from anywhere, and how if we all just be honest with each other we can come up with common-sense solutions to our problems. He’ll make a couple of good-natured jokes at his opponents’ expense (something Ronald Reagan particularly loved to do in his SOTUs). And he’ll go into numbing detail about his policy agenda. In other words, it’ll be a lot like every other SOTU in the last 20 or 30 years. And afterward, Republicans will cry that it was the most partisan State of the Union speech they’ve ever heard, and claim that they were all ready to work with him, but after being so terribly insulted, they just have no alternative but to oppose everything Obama wants to do, hold up his nominees, and proclaim him to be the enemy of American values.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 11, 2013
“A Lesson From The Inauguration”: When Everything Is Partisan, Just Do What’s Right
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when Republicans started complaining that President Obama’s second inaugural address was too “partisan” and lacked “outreach” across the aisle. But who was left out? What did they find “partisan”? The acknowledgement of climate science? The idea that women should receive equal pay for equal work? The nod to civil rights struggles of our past and present? The hope that no American will have to wait in hours-long lines to vote? The defense of the existence of a social safety net? The determination to offer support to the victims of a historic storm and to find real answers to the epidemic of mass shootings? In the not-too-distant past, none of these would have raised eyebrows except on the very, very far right. But I guess that’s the point: what was once the radical fringe is now in control of the Grand Old Party.
In many ways, Monday’s inauguration ceremony was a Tea Party Republican’s nightmare-come-true. The openly gay poet. The Spanish sprinkled into the benediction. The one-two-three punch of “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.” It was the embodiment of all that the far right has tried to wall itself off from as the country begins to include more and more of the real America in its democracy.
What would have pleased this faction, short of winning the presidential election? I imagine they would have preferred a paean to the America of their imaginations — where the founders were flawless and prescient about the right to bear assault weapons and the Constitution was delivered, amendments included, directly from God; where there are no gay people or only silent ones, where the world is not getting warmer; where there have been no struggles in the process of forging a more perfect union. This, of course, would have been its very own kind of political statement — and one that was just rejected by the majority of American voters.
If embracing America as it is rather than as a shimmery vision of what it never was constitutes partisanship, and if it turns off people who cling to that dishonest vision, let’s have more of it.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, January 24, 2013
“Redefining Compromise”: The Radicalization Of The GOP
Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a member of the House Republican leadership and the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, was recently asked about lawmakers’ capacity to compromise. As Robert Schlesinger noted, his response was illustrative.
“Compromising is one thing as long as you’re compromising and moving in the direction of your principles,” the right-wing lawmaker said. “If you’re compromising and moving away from the direction of your principles, I’m not sure it’s a compromise.”
And I’m not sure if Price has access to a dictionary. “Compromise” involves give and take, with concessions on both sides. To reach a resolution, compromise necessarily involves rivals accepting something less than their original goal.
I thought of Price’s recent comments again this morning after hearing the latest from Richard Mourdock, the Republicans’ U.S. Senate nominee in Indiana. He told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd this morning, among other things, “I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Mourdock also told CNN that bipartisanship means “Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government,” and he told Fox News, “I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
In this guy’s mind, the only acceptable “compromise” is the one in which he gets what he wants.
Remember, Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein, centrist political scientists with enormous establishment credibility, have explained that American governance is broken because the Republican Party is “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
As Mourdock helps demonstrate, the radicalization of the GOP isn’t over. The costs for the nation will likely continue to be severe.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 9, 2012
“A Rebuke To Mob Mentality”: Dick Lugar Sounds the Alarm against GOP Extremism
After conceding to Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock, Senator Dick Lugar released a statement assailing his party’s ideological rigidity.
There’s been a lot of talk about how veteran Senator Dick Lugar could have salvaged his campaign. The Indiana Republican was soundly defeated by nearly 20 points yesterday in primary race against a Tea Party-backed challenger. He lost amid criticisms that he’s too close to Obama and not dogmatic enough for the GOP. Many of those criticisms came from outside groups, including Grover Norquist’s Club for Growth and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which poured money into the effort to defeat the well-liked senator. In the end, Tea Party favorite Richard Mourdock won the primary—and in response, Dick Lugar sounded a call of alarm for Republicans about the fate of the party.
Lugar noted his own Republican bona fides, including that he’d voted with Reagan more than any other senator. Then he went after Mourdock, the Tea Party, and the general intractability that’s taken hold of his party:
If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good Senator. But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.
This is not conducive to problem solving and governance. And he will find that unless he modifies his approach, he will achieve little as a legislator. Worse, he will help delay solutions that are totally beyond the capacity of partisan majorities to achieve. The most consequential of these is stabilizing and reversing the Federal debt in an era when millions of baby boomers are retiring. There is little likelihood that either party will be able to impose their favored budget solutions on the other without some degree of compromise.
Lugar’s statement didn’t stop there. He outlined what he saw as the necessary mindset for politics—one that “acknowledges that the other party is also patriotic and may have some good ideas.” He noted that Reagan himself had worked with Democrats “and showed flexibility that would be ridiculed today.” Then he noted the how many subjects had become taboo amongst Republicans, like the idea that climate change may be more than a myth or that immigration is anything but a bad thing. While he gave a brief mention of Democratic partisanship as well, Lugar saved almost all his focus for his own party.
Lugar was probably one of the most respected members of the Senate in either party, and like his colleague Olympia Snowe, was a member of the shrinking group of Republican moderates. Michael Tomasky has argued, fairly I think, that when it really counted, Lugar fell in with his party’s extremism rather than fighting the tide. Paul Waldman had his own critique of the senator Tuesday, explaining that such moderates “gnash their teeth some and make lots of statements about how they really hope we can come up with a bipartisan solution to the problem at hand, but in the end they’ll be there for the GOP when it matters.”
Lugar’s hardly been a profile in courage these past few years and releasing an honest statement about the state of the party would likely have been significantly more impressive if he had done it when he was active and wielded influence, rather than after his party gave him the boot. But nonetheless, this may be one of the most forceful and direct criticisms of the GOP from someone in office. Lugar’s come to the obvious conclusion: For the Republican Party to succeed, it must divorce itself from some of its more extreme elements. Lugar’s note isn’t a victory letter to Democrats or even a call for bipartisanship. After all, for Democrats, this is largely a win—with Lugar in the running, they had no shot at the seat, whereas now they may be able to put the state in play. Instead, Lugar’s statement served as a rebuke to Republicans’ mob mentality.
“Like Edmund Burke,” Lugar’s statement read, “I believe leaders owe the people they represent their best judgment.”
Too bad the senator waited until he lost to give those he represented for over three decades his own best judgment.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, May 9, 2012
Indulging “Moderate Republicans”: Olympia Snowe Gives President An “F” For Not Paying Enough Attention To Her
Retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe has finished grading the president’s report card. President Obama gets an “F” in bipartisanship, where “bipartisanship” is defined as “constantly stroking the fragile egos of self-important Senate moderates.”
Snowe is not seeking reelection because the Republican Party wholly merged with the conservative movement and then began enforcing much stricter party discipline than it had in the past, and she would likely lose a primary election to a more right-wing candidate. But in her high-minded version of what happened, she is leaving because of “partisanship,” an evil spell cast on the formerly fraternal and cooperative United States Senate by comity-hating wizards.
This is how bad things have gotten: President Obama hasn’t called her in almost two years!
If there were ever a Republican for President Obama to work with, it was Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. She was one of just three Republicans in the entire Congress to vote for his economic stimulus plan in 2009 and even tried to work with him on health care, but in an interview with ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl, Snowe makes a remarkable revelation: She hasn’t spoken to President Obama in nearly two years.
Snowe said that if she had to grade the President on his willingness to work with Republicans, he would “be close to failing on that point.” In fact, Snowe, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, claims that her meetings with President Obama have been less frequent than with any other president.
That’s so weird, that President Obama stopped talking to her around two years ago. I wonder what happened? That wizard probably got him, and now he hates bipartisanship. That is the only explanation I can think of for why Olympia Snowe — a Republican the president could definitely try to work with! — hasn’t heard from Obama for around two years.
I mean, Snowe “even tried to work with him on health care.” Hey, that was around two years ago, actually! How hard did she try, again? If I recall correctly, she intentionally delayed the process for months before finally voting against a plan she’d previously voted for, never making a single substantive criticism of the policy of the bill in the fear that her criticism would then be addressed by Democrats and she’d be forced to come up with a new reason to oppose the bill, because it turns out she didn’t actually want to vote for healthcare reform, and she would not have supported any plan to expand coverage to all Americans, no matter how it worked.
So this is the problem. In the popular imagination, and in Barack Obama’s naive pre-2010 fantasies, “bipartisanship” means “working together to accomplish things.” In reality, in the Senate, it means “indulging moderates, forever.” For Olympia Snowe, the act of calling Olympia Snowe is more important than the act of … passing legislation to solve problems.
Snowe is now endorsing Scott Brown, saying Massachusetts residents should vote for him because he is another true believer in independent, party line-crossing bipartisanship. He even supports the Violence Against Women Act! (Why should Massachusetts residents vote for a Republican who is willing to cross party lines sometimes to vote for bills that every Democrat supports, instead of just voting for a Democrat whose support you won’t have to just sort of guess at until he comes out and says it? Because “bipartisanship,” that’s why.) (And the fact that Brown supported allowing employers to deny contraception coverage — a measure Snowe opposed — while his opponents shared Snowe’s position on the issue also doesn’t matter, because being a Republican who sometimes bucks the party line to do the right thing is more Honorable than being a Democrat whose party line is already the right thing.)
Would Olympia Snowe have voted for cap-and-trade if the president had called her more often? Or would she have done exactly what she did during the healthcare reform process, and strung Democrats along for months before voting against it for nakedly political reasons? (She was beginning to play the exact same game as she had before, saying she would maybe bring herself to support a “scaled-back” version of the legislation as long as other Republicans also promised to do so.)
Would Olympia Snowe have supported the “scaled-back,” less ambitious alternative to comprehensive immigration reform that was the DREAM Act, which would have allowed people who came to the U.S. as children and served in the military or went to college to seek citizenship legally? No, she would not have, because if the act had passed, “millions of illegal immigrants could attempt to become legal residents….”
So instead of cap-and-trade, we got nothing. Instead of the DREAM Act, we got nothing. If healthcare reform had failed, we’d have nothing. If Snowe’s stated goal was to maintain the status quo, because she doesn’t care about immigration and doesn’t believe in climate change, then she’d be totally doing a very good job. But she claims to care about climate change and want to do something about immigration, which leads me to believe that she’s horrible at being a senator. It is the incompetent political maneuvering of “moderates” like Snowe, and not “partisanship,” that leads directly to Senate inaction. If what she needed, in order to be swayed to the side of passing legislation to address problems, was for the president to make a much bigger public show of courting her, then she’s a bizarre and repulsive specimen. Being against everything because people aren’t paying you enough attention is so much worse than being against everything on principle.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 27, 2012
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