“Why Should You Vote?”: Visualize Romney World And Move America Forward
My wife, Jan Schakowsky, and I are friends with a wonderful woman named Bea. Bea is now 95 years old. Bea was born in 1917.
She was born in a country where women couldn’t vote. In some areas of the country, just fifty years before, slavery had been legal. Collective bargaining was not recognized under the law. Poverty was rampant — especially among the country’s oldest citizens.
Bea was born in a country where there was an unimaginable gulf between a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs, and the masses of ordinary people. It was a country where only a tiny fraction of the population ever went to college — or even graduated from high school — a country were hardly anyone was considered “middle class.” It was a country where there were few regulations to protect health and safety on the job, no national child labor laws, no federal minimum wage, and very little to prevent corporations from recklessly destroying the environment.
Bea was born in a country where people of color were considered second-class citizens and discrimination against them was enshrined into law — a country where gays and homosexuals could be prosecuted for their sexual orientation.
Bea was born in the United States of America.
Over her lifetime, Bea has been involved in many of the great social movements of our time — movements that helped transform our country into the envy of the world.
She was active building the labor unions that build the middle class. won a living wage, weekends and a 40-hour work week, pensions for retirement, and the passage of Social Security and Medicare that ensured a retirement free of poverty.
She marched with the civil rights movement that gave people of color an equal status in American society.
Bea became a public school teacher and helped educate an ever-expanding number of ordinary Americans — watching more and more of them go on to college to fulfill their dreams.
She was part of the women’s movement that demanded equal status and equal pay for women — as well as the right for women to control their own decisions about contraception and abortion.
This year, Bea — at 95 years old — is working on a phone bank to turn out voters for Barack Obama. She says that if Mitt Romney and the Republican Right win the election on Tuesday, they have made clear that they absolutely intend to destroy all of the things for which she has struggled her entire life. She’s right.
Mitt Romney has demonstrated over the years that he has only one real core value: his own success.
Throughout his career, Mitt has demonstrated that he will do whatever is necessary to benefit himself — and his investors. At Bain Capital he didn’t flinch when it came to destroying other people’s jobs and lives if it would make him and his investors money.
Now his “investors” are the oligarchs of the Republican Right — people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson — who, between them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Many are the same people who funded the Tea Party movement. Others are the Wall Street hedge fund barons whose recklessness collapsed the economy and came very close to recreating a Great Depression.
These people — and their Tea Party allies in Congress — have shown the country that they have no intention of compromise. They are intent upon rolling back all of the things Bea has fought for — on sending us back to the Gilded Age. They truly believe that America would be a better place without labor unions. They want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers of ever-shrinking value that pay private insurance companies.
They want to be free to despoil the environment, do away with public education, eliminate jobs, cut wages, and continue to appropriate every dime of economic growth that is generated by our increasingly productive labor force.
As President Obama said in the second presidential debate, they want send us back to the foreign policy of the 1980’s, a social policy of the 1950’s and an economic policy of the 1920’s. They believe in a society where the law of the jungle reigns supreme — where you look out for yourself above all else — where, if you believe you are your brother and sisters’ keeper, that we shouldn’t leave anyone behind, that we should have each other’s back — you’re simply a chump.
If Mitt Romney becomes president, Republicans keep control of the House and win the few seats necessary to control the Senate, there will be nothing to restrain them from making their vision of society a reality in America — from taking America backward to a time most of us cannot imagine.
What are some of the things a President Romney has promised to do?
- Eliminate Medicare and convert it into a voucher for private insurance — ending the most popular and successful health care program in American history and raising out of pocket costs for seniors by6,500 a year.
- Privatize and cut Social Security – handing over the Social Security Trust fund to Wall Street and eliminating guaranteed benefits.
- Appoint — most likely two — Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, outlawing abortion rights — and most likely make the Court a firm ally of unrestrained corporate and Wall Street power for generations.
- Repeal Wall Street Reform. Return us to the pre-crash law that would allow Wall Street to once again run wild, gamble with more and more exotic financial instruments, make a fortune for itself — and once again wreck the economy.
- Repeal ObamaCare. That by itself would end the promise that no one will ever again be bankrupt by a sudden illness. It will return us to a very recent time when someone who has a pre-existing condition can be denied insurance coverage – and that insurance companies can call the shots when it comes to your health care.
- Pass the Ryan Budget. That would mean slashing critical federal expenditures that benefit the middle class and those who aspire to the middle class, like cutting Medicaid that pays for health care for the poor, children and those in need of nursing homes or home care — and slashing funds for education and college grants.
- Increase military spending by two trillion dollars above the amount requested by the military leadership. That might benefit big defense contractors, but it would make it practically impossible to reduce the giant federal deficit.
- Give the wealthy an additional 5 trillion dollar tax cut and pay for it by increasing the effective tax rate paid by the middle class.
- Stop funding for Planned Parenthood and any other family planning programs that we fund around the world that use their own funds to pay for abortions.
- Try to pass the “Personhood” Amendment that would effectively outlaw all abortions and many forms of hormonal contraception.
- Allow many of the same Neo-Con foreign policy advisers who got us into the Iraq War to once again take control of American foreign policy.
- Veto the Dream Act that would allow young people who were brought to America as children to apply for citizenship.
- Eliminate the Presidential Directive that prevents the deportation of Dream Act-eligible young people.
- Empower people like Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who wrote the Arizona “papers please” law and now serves as Romney’s chief adviser on immigration.
- Slash environmental regulations and investment in clean energy development.
The list goes on and on.
But worse than the individual initiatives that Romney and Ryan have made clear they would undertake, is the attitude they would bring to decision-making.
Romney’s true views were laid bare in the now famous “47 percent video” where he explained how he could not convince 47% of Americans to take responsibility for their lives — people like retirees who worked all of their lives for their Social Security and Medicare — people like veterans who risked their lives for the country — people like the disabled — in fact, pretty much anyone who doesn’t agree with his “we’re all in this alone” view of American society.
If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are elected on Tuesday, they will turn back the clock on progress in America. If they are allowed to do so by a Republican House and Senate, they would return us to a time we could scarcely imagine.
For those who believe in a society where we’re all in this together, Tuesday’s election is the mother of all battles.
But if we all vote, we will win — it’s that simple. If you care about the future society we leave to our children; if you believe that we can once again have an expanding, robust middle class; if you believe that the American Dream is not dead and that our children should be able to look forward to more opportunity than was available to their moms and dads — there is no excuse not to vote.
We simply cannot allow the millions of right wing special interest money to buy America’s democracy.
Where you can, vote early. Regardless, get to the polls. If you need to stand in line, stay there until you vote. Everyone who is in line will have a chance to vote, even if the lines are long.
However it turns out, Tuesday will mark a decisive, historic turning point in American history. Together, if we all vote, we have the power to continue America’s progressive tradition. We have the power to move America forward, not back. We have the power to assure that at this decisive moment we once again bend the arc of history toward justice.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, November 4, 2012
“A Major Step Backwards”: How Mitt Romney Would Treat Women
In this year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is just women.
Give us a little credit. We men aren’t mercenaries caring only for Y chromosomes. We have wives and daughters, mothers and sisters, and we have a pretty intimate stake in contraception as well.
This isn’t like a tampon commercial on television, leaving men awkwardly examining their fingernails. When it comes to women’s health, men as well as women need to pay attention. Just as civil rights wasn’t just a “black issue,” women’s rights and reproductive health shouldn’t be reduced to a “women’s issue.”
To me, actually, talk about a “war on women” in the United States seems a bit hyperbolic: in Congo or Darfur or Afghanistan, I’ve seen brutal wars on women, involving policies of rape or denial of girls’ education. But whatever we call it, something real is going on here at home that would mark a major setback for American women — and the men who love them.
On these issues, Mitt Romney is no moderate. On the contrary, he is considerably more extreme than President George W. Bush was. He insists, for example, on cutting off money for cancer screenings conducted by Planned Parenthood.
The most toxic issue is abortion, and what matters most for that is Supreme Court appointments. The oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a 79-year-old liberal, and if she were replaced by a younger Antonin Scalia, the balance might shift on many issues, including abortion.
One result might be the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which for nearly four decades has guaranteed abortion rights. If it is overturned, abortion will be left to the states — and in Mississippi or Kansas, women might end up being arrested for obtaining abortions.
Frankly, I respect politicians like Paul Ryan who are consistently anti-abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. I disagree with them, but their position is unpopular and will cost them votes, so it’s probably heartfelt as well as courageous. I have less respect for Romney, whose positions seem based only on political calculations.
Romney’s campaign Web site takes a hard line. It says that life begins at conception, and it gives no hint of exceptions in which he would permit abortion. The Republican Party platform likewise offers no exceptions. Romney says now that his policy is to oppose abortion with three exceptions: rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.
If you can figure out Romney’s position on abortion with confidence, tell him: at times it seems he can’t remember it. In August, he abruptly added an exception for the health of the mother as well as her life, and then he backed away again.
Romney has also endorsed a “personhood” initiative treating a fertilized egg as a legal person. That could lead to murder charges for an abortion, even to save the life of a mother.
In effect, Romney seems to have jumped on board a Republican bandwagon to tighten access to abortion across the board. States passed a record number of restrictions on abortion in the last two years. In four states, even a woman who is seeking an abortion after a rape may be legally required to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound.
If politicians want to reduce the number of abortions, they should promote family planning and comprehensive sex education. After all, about half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on reproductive health.
Yet Romney seems determined to curb access to contraceptives. His campaign Web site says he would “eliminate Title X family planning funding,” a program created in large part by two Republicans, George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon.
Romney has boasted that he would cut off all money for Planned Parenthood — even though federal assistance for the organization has nothing to do with abortions. It pays for such things as screenings to reduce breast cancer and cervical cancer.
Romney’s suspicion of contraception goes way back. As governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed a bill that would have given women who were raped access to emergency contraception.
Romney also wants to reinstate the “global gag rule,” which barred family planning money from going to aid organizations that even provided information about abortion. He would cut off money for the United Nations Population Fund, whose work I’ve seen in many countries — supporting contraception, repairing obstetric fistulas, and fighting to save the lives of women dying in childbirth.
So when you hear people scoff that there’s no real difference between Obama and Romney, don’t believe them.
And it’s not just women who should be offended at the prospect of a major step backward. It’s all of us.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 3, 2012
“The Choice Is Clear”: President Barack Obama For Re-election
The economy is slowly recovering from the 2008 meltdown, and the country could suffer another recession if the wrong policies take hold. The United States is embroiled in unstable regions that could easily explode into full-blown disaster. An ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women’s access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans’ rights are cheapened by the right wing’s determination to deny marriage benefits to a selected group of us. Astonishingly, even the very right to vote is being challenged.
That is the context for the Nov. 6 election, and as stark as it is, the choice is just as clear.
President Obama has shown a firm commitment to using government to help foster growth. He has formed sensible budget policies that are not dedicated to protecting the powerful, and has worked to save the social safety net to protect the powerless. Mr. Obama has impressive achievements despite the implacable wall of refusal erected by Congressional Republicans so intent on stopping him that they risked pushing the nation into depression, held its credit rating hostage, and hobbled economic recovery.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney’s true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney’s choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.
We have criticized individual policy choices that Mr. Obama has made over the last four years, and have been impatient with his unwillingness to throw himself into the political fight. But he has shaken off the hesitancy that cost him the first debate, and he approaches the election clearly ready for the partisan battles that would follow his victory.
We are confident he would challenge the Republicans in the “fiscal cliff” battle even if it meant calling their bluff, letting the Bush tax cuts expire and forcing them to confront the budget sequester they created. Electing Mr. Romney would eliminate any hope of deficit reduction that included increased revenues.
In the poisonous atmosphere of this campaign, it may be easy to overlook Mr. Obama’s many important achievements, including carrying out the economic stimulus, saving the auto industry, improving fuel efficiency standards, and making two very fine Supreme Court appointments.
Health Care
Mr. Obama has achieved the most sweeping health care reforms since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The reform law takes a big step toward universal health coverage, a final piece in the social contract.
It was astonishing that Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress were able to get a bill past the Republican opposition. But the Republicans’ propagandistic distortions of the new law helped them wrest back control of the House, and they are determined now to repeal the law.
That would eliminate the many benefits the reform has already brought: allowing children under 26 to stay on their parents’ policies; lower drug costs for people on Medicare who are heavy users of prescription drugs; free immunizations, mammograms and contraceptives; a ban on lifetime limits on insurance payments. Insurance companies cannot deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Starting in 2014, insurers must accept all applicants. Once fully in effect, the new law would start to control health care costs.
Mr. Romney has no plan for covering the uninsured beyond his callous assumption that they will use emergency rooms. He wants to use voucher programs to shift more Medicare costs to beneficiaries and block grants to shift more Medicaid costs to the states.
The Economy
Mr. Obama prevented another Great Depression. The economy was cratering when he took office in January 2009. By that June it was growing, and it has been ever since (although at a rate that disappoints everyone), thanks in large part to interventions Mr. Obama championed, like the $840 billion stimulus bill. Republicans say it failed, but it created and preserved 2.5 million jobs and prevented unemployment from reaching 12 percent. Poverty would have been much worse without the billions spent on Medicaid, food stamps and jobless benefits.
Last year, Mr. Obama introduced a jobs plan that included spending on school renovations, repair projects for roads and bridges, aid to states, and more. It was stymied by Republicans. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s claims, Mr. Obama has done good things for small businesses — like pushing through more tax write-offs for new equipment and temporary tax cuts for hiring the unemployed.
The Dodd-Frank financial regulation was an important milestone. It is still a work in progress, but it established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, initiated reform of the derivatives market, and imposed higher capital requirements for banks. Mr. Romney wants to repeal it.
If re-elected, Mr. Obama would be in position to shape the “grand bargain” that could finally combine stimulus like the jobs bill with long-term deficit reduction that includes letting the high-end Bush-era tax cuts expire. Stimulus should come first, and deficit reduction as the economy strengthens. Mr. Obama has not been as aggressive as we would have liked in addressing the housing crisis, but he has increased efforts in refinancing and loan modifications.
Mr. Romney’s economic plan, as much as we know about it, is regressive, relying on big tax cuts and deregulation. That kind of plan was not the answer after the financial crisis, and it will not create broad prosperity.
Foreign Affairs
Mr. Obama and his administration have been resolute in attacking Al Qaeda’s leadership, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. He has ended the war in Iraq. Mr. Romney, however, has said he would have insisted on leaving thousands of American soldiers there. He has surrounded himself with Bush administration neocons who helped to engineer the Iraq war, and adopted their militaristic talk in a way that makes a Romney administration’s foreign policies a frightening prospect.
Mr. Obama negotiated a much tougher regime of multilateral economic sanctions on Iran. Mr. Romney likes to say the president was ineffective on Iran, but at the final debate he agreed with Mr. Obama’s policies. Mr. Obama deserves credit for his handling of the Arab Spring. The killing goes on in Syria, but the administration is working to identify and support moderate insurgent forces there. At the last debate, Mr. Romney talked about funneling arms through Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are funneling arms to jihadist groups.
Mr. Obama gathered international backing for airstrikes during the Libyan uprising, and kept American military forces in a background role. It was smart policy.
In the broadest terms, he introduced a measure of military restraint after the Bush years and helped repair America’s badly damaged reputation in many countries from the low levels to which it had sunk by 2008.
The Supreme Court
The future of the nation’s highest court hangs in the balance in this election — and along with it, reproductive freedom for American women and voting rights for all, to name just two issues. Whoever is president after the election will make at least one appointment to the court, and many more to federal appeals courts and district courts.
Mr. Obama, who appointed the impressive Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, understands how severely damaging conservative activism has been in areas like campaign spending. He would appoint justices and judges who understand that landmarks of equality like the Voting Rights Act must be defended against the steady attack from the right.
Mr. Romney’s campaign Web site says he will “nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito,” among the most conservative justices in the past 75 years. There is no doubt that he would appoint justices who would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Civil Rights
The extraordinary fact of Mr. Obama’s 2008 election did not usher in a new post-racial era. In fact, the steady undercurrent of racism in national politics is truly disturbing. Mr. Obama, however, has reversed Bush administration policies that chipped away at minorities’ voting rights and has fought laws, like the ones in Arizona, that seek to turn undocumented immigrants into a class of criminals.
The military’s odious “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule was finally legislated out of existence, under the Obama administration’s leadership. There are still big hurdles to equality to be brought down, including the Defense of Marriage Act, the outrageous federal law that undermines the rights of gay men and lesbians, even in states that recognize those rights.
Though it took Mr. Obama some time to do it, he overcame his hesitation about same-sex marriage and declared his support. That support has helped spur marriage-equality movements around the country. His Justice Department has also stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act against constitutional challenges.
Mr. Romney opposes same-sex marriage and supports the federal act, which not only denies federal benefits and recognition to same-sex couples but allows states to ignore marriages made in other states. His campaign declared that Mr. Romney would not object if states also banned adoption by same-sex couples and restricted their rights to hospital visitation and other privileges.
Mr. Romney has been careful to avoid the efforts of some Republicans to criminalize abortion even in the case of women who had been raped, including by family members. He says he is not opposed to contraception, but he has promised to deny federal money to Planned Parenthood, on which millions of women depend for family planning.
For these and many other reasons, we enthusiastically endorse President Barack Obama for a second term, and express the hope that his victory will be accompanied by a new Congress willing to work for policies that Americans need.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, October 27, 2012
“You’re Welcome Ladies”: What Mitt Romney Will Actually Do On Abortion
During Tuesday’s debate, Mitt Romney did a sneaky little pivot on the issue of contraception coverage that surely went over the head of most of the people watching. What Romney supports is a Republican bill, the Blunt amendment, that would allow any employer to refuse to include coverage for contraception in employees’ health insurance. For many women, that would mean they would be shut out of getting contraception through the plans that, we should note, they paid for themselves (insurance coverage isn’t a favor your employer does for you, it’s part of your compensation that you get in return for your labor, which means you paid for it). But when it came up in the debate, Romney said this:
“I don’t believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not. And I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care of not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives. And—and the—and the president’s statement of my policy is completely and totally wrong.”
See what he did there? Instead of answering the actual question of whether your boss should be able to take your coverage for contraception away, he answered a question nobody ever asked, which is whether the government should ban contraception, or whether your boss should be able to literally come to your doctor’s office during your appointment and grab the prescription for birth control pills out of your hand. In other words, Romney thinks your boss should be able to cancel your coverage for contraception, but he generously acknowledges that your boss shouldn’t actually tell you whether you can use contraception or not. You’re welcome, ladies.
Romney is doing something similar on abortion. On the one hand, he has said multiple times that he wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned and wants to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood; on the other he’s been claiming that he really has no abortion agenda at all; nothing to see here, everything will stay as it is (here’s an ad pitched at women, making the case for Mitt the Moderate on both issues). As Michelle Goldberg tells us, social conservatives haven’t said a peep about Romney’s new abortion moderation. Why? Because they know it’s just for show, and they know what really matters.
I’m sure there are more than a few voters who listen to Romney and say, “Well, he doesn’t seem like one of those radical pro-lifers, so I guess I’m OK with him.” But this is a helpful reminder that what’s in the president’s heart is of only minimal importance. The question “Is Mitt Romney really pro-life?” is all but meaningless, not only because it’s Mitt Romney we’re talking about, and when it comes to policy he has no “real” beliefs that exist outside of the pressures and incentives he has at a given moment. More importantly, when we elect a president we effectively elect an entire party, and the party Mitt Romney represents is the GOP circa 2012, a party more conservative than it has ever been before. There are 3,000 appointed positions in the federal government. Who’s going to fill these positions? Why, Republicans, of course. Who’s going to be running the Department of Health and Human Services? People who are committed to undermining the Affordable Care Act, because that’s what Republicans who work on health care policy believe. Who’s going to be running the Department of Labor? Representatives of business who are committed to destroying unions and reducing protections for workers, because that’s what Republicans who work on labor issues believe. Who’s going to be running the EPA? People who are committed to undermining environmental protections and making it easier for industry to pollute, because that’s what Republicans who work on environmental issues believe.
And if Stephen Breyer or Ruth Bader Ginsburg decides to retire in two years, would President Romney say, “Just find me the best candidate; I don’t really care if they may vote to uphold Roe v. Wade“? Hell no. He’ll do exactly what everyone on both sides expects, which is to locate the next Samuel Alito, someone who went to the best schools of course and has an admirable elite pedigree, but who also was nurtured within the conservative movement, someone who will make the right wing weep with joy. During his confirmation hearings this prospective justice will say solemnly that he shouldn’t comment on issues that might come before the Court, so he really can’t comment specifically on Roe, but rest assured that he’ll faithfully apply the Constitution and just call those balls and strikes, as John Roberts so memorably put it in his own hearings. Democrats will complain, most will vote against the nominee, but he’ll be confirmed. And within weeks, a dozen lawsuits will be filed with the intention of forcing the Court to revisit Roe. Those cases will fly up the judicial ladder with all deliberate speed, and the four conservatives on the Court and their new colleague will finally get the opportunity they’ve been waiting for. And that will be that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 18, 2012
“A Stark Choice”: Bipartisanship In A Romney Administration
I’ve probably yelled enough about the mendacity of Mitt Romney’s claims last week that he’d “sit down with Democrats” the day after the election and start charting a bipartisan path for the country. But Paul Ryan was up to it again last night, arguing that he couldn’t tell us how he’d pay for an across-the-board tax cut because that would be up to bipartisan negotiations in Congress (as though they could repeal the laws of mathematics!).
Most readers here are probably familiar with the relentless demonization of bipartisanship as “surrender” throughout the Republican primaries, and the specific pledges Romney made to remain faithful to policies guaranteed never to attract a single Democrat (from a repeal-and-reverse approach to health care, to the cut-cap-balance meta-pledge, to the many promises never to accept a tax increase). The most important pledge Romney made, in my opinion, is to sign Paul Ryan’s budget resolution as is if Republicans manage to whip it through Congress using reconciliation procedures, which would mean revolutionary changes in the structure and purpose of the federal government, adopted swiftly on a party-line vote.
But what happens if Romney wins and Republicans fall short of getting control of the Senate? Would this scenario enable him to break his promises and perhaps unleash that secretly moderate Mitt who’s been lying through his teeth the last five years or so?
I don’t think so. Even if Romney is so inclined (and I see no particular reason to believe he is), he’d be dealing with a highly mutinous House GOP and the bulk of a Senate GOP Caucus that would insist the new president use his leverage not to cut deals but to break skulls. Depending on the margin of Democratic control of the Senate, and the identity of the Democratic Caucus, there would almost definitely be an effort to buy a vote or two to put them in operational control of Congress, and with items like the repeal of Obamacare and the enactment of the Ryan budget on the table, they’d pay a pretty high price for treason. If that didn’t work, the combination of Republican control of the House, the presidential veto, and GOP filibuster power in the Senate would be used to squelch any Democratic legislation on even the most quotidian matter. With the entire bipartisan commentariat and the business community screaming for action to avert a “fiscal cliff,” Republicans would probably get their way on that set of threshold issues simply by way of superior leverage. And even without congressional support, a new administration could probably paralyze implementation of Obamacare via executive action and inaction.
Perhaps that’s as much as they could accomplish, but beyond that, you’d find a powerful sentiment among Republicans to withhold bipartisan action pending the midterm elections of 2014, when a more favorable electorate (in terms of turnout patterns) and another positive landscape for GOP Senate gains would make the final conquest of Congress a solid betting proposition. And on one big priority of the conservative movement–the final reshaping of the Supreme Court and the reversal of Roe v. Wade–the odds would be very good for a Romney appointment that would survive the Senate on traditional grounds of deference to the president.
More generally, from Romney’s perspective, the certainty of a wholesale uprising by his party’s “base” and its dominant congressional faction in the event of genuine “bipartisanship” would be a much bigger strategic problem than finding ways around a narrow Democratic margin in the Senate. Besides, if Romney does win, it will almost certainly be due to a tilting of the electorate that also makes a Republican Senate more likely than it appears to be today.
In any event, as I’ve said often, Obama and his entire campaign owe it to the country as much as to themselves to demand as many public concessions as possible, in advance, if Mitt and Paul intend to continue right down to Election Day professing their love for bipartisan negotiations. I doubt any real concession will be made, and perhaps it will finally dawn on the media if not the public that there’s really no way around a stark choice between two very different parties and agendas.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 12, 2012
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