From PoliticsUSA: “When an individual or group reaches a state of mind in which they become obsessed with, or inordinately attached to, an idea or a stated goal they are considered by psychologists to be fixated. Anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of being close to a person fixated on an idea can attest that nothing will deter the person’s obsession, even if there is a danger to themselves or others. There is a fairly substantial number of conservatives who are obsessed with bringing the federal government to its knees because there is an African American sitting in the Oval Office, and they are fixated on shutting down the government if their efforts are thwarted by the President or Senate Democrats.
“The truth is that since teabaggers became de facto leaders of the Republican Party, they have contemplated various schemes to shut down Washington. After U.S. Senator Ted Cruz took control of the Republican House and masterminded the government shutdown last October, many Republicans complained bitterly about and railed against other Republicans who voted to re-open the government and they have been obsessed with shutting it down again. In fact, their fixation with a shutdown is so overwhelming they have promised that if they gain control of both houses of Congress, their approach to ‘ruling America’ will be predicated on the perpetual threat of closing the government to force President Obama to assist their ‘bring the government to its knees’ obsession.”
With Republicans in the U.S. Senate now trying to undermine a comprehensive immigration bill--despite widespread public support--and their fellow right-wingers in the House at a loss for something to do during the 19 days left in their legislative calendar for 2013, Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog can’t help but ask congressional Republicans,
what is it, exactly, you intend to run on in 2014? I don’t
mean that in some kind of obnoxious, snarky way; I genuinely want to know.
I’m trying to imagine the message a year from now: “We shut down the government, we used the debt ceiling as a weapon, we killed immigration reform, we ignored efforts to reduce gun violence, we never even considered the possibility of a jobs bill, we tackled some culture-war bills that no one beyond our base cares about, we voted to take away Americans’ health care benefits 46 times, and we demanded unpopular cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for nothing. Two more years!”
After the Republican shutdowns in the mid-’90s, GOP lawmakers were desperate to pass some big-ticket legislation so they’d have some accomplishments to run on. If immigration is suddenly no longer an option for Republicans, how do they intend to spend the next year? Going after contraception?
Ideally, elected officials would think first about what’s right for the country, then what produces the best political results. But even if we skip past the first step and overlook why immigration reform is sensible on substantive grounds, are GOP lawmakers convinced that another do-nothing Congress is in their own best interests?
It’s not a good time to be a member of that short-sighted, radical Republican contingent known as the Tea Party. From The Hill:
Support for the Tea Party has reached its lowest point ever, as a growing number of Republicans now hold a negative view of the movement, according to a Pew survey released on Wednesday.
Forty-nine percent of the public have a negative view of the Tea Party, up from 37 percent in June and nearly double from where it stood in the early days of the movement, the poll found.
Only 30 percent said they have a favorable view of the Tea Party, down from 37 percent in June.
While the Tea Party has long been viewed unfavorably by Democrats and independents, the latest Pew survey found that Republicans have turned sharply against the group. Only 27 percent of centrist and liberal Republicans view the movement favorably, a 19-point drop from 46 percent in June.
In addition, non-Tea Party Republicans are increasingly likely to say that the Tea Party is not even associated with the GOP. While 41 percent of Tea Partyers say they identify as Republicans, only 27 percent of non-Tea Party Republicans say the movement is a part of the GOP.
Meanwhile, in an interview with National Journal, Representative Charles Boustany (R-Louisiana) questioned the “institutional loyalty” of Tea Party congresspeople:
“Their allegiance is not to the members in the conference,” Boustany said. “Their allegiance is not to the leadership team and to conservative values. Their allegiance is to these outside Washington DC interest groups that raise money and go after conservative Republicans.”
So let’s review: Bomb-throwing Republicans on Capitol Hill have put the U.S. through a harrowing last two weeks, coarsened the political dialogue, and threatened the economic stability and world standing of our nation, all because of their tizzy-fit at the fact that millions of Americans they don’t want to see receive health-care coverage can now afford it. And where are we at the end of the right wing’s irresponsible tantrum? With no concessions having been made by either party--exactly what President Obama insisted upon from the beginning. The GOP has proved itself incapable of governing.
* * *
“As the 16-day-old government shutdown draws to a close,” reports The National Memo, “its true costs are coming into clearer focus.
According to Standard & Poor’s, the shutdown has taken roughly $24 billion out of the U.S. economy, and cut 0.6 percent off of yearly fourth quarter GDP growth.
“The bottom line is the government shutdown has hurt the U.S. economy,” S&P said in a statement. “In September, we expected 3 percent annualized growth in the fourth quarter because we thought politicians would have learned from 2011 and taken steps to avoid things like a government shutdown and the possibility of a sovereign default. Since our forecast didn’t hold, we now have to lower our fourth-quarter growth estimate to closer to 2 percent.”
The ratings agency also stressed that a short-term solution won’t solve the nation’s economic woes.
This actually comes The American Conservative magazine:
“Yes. I cannot believe I’m saying this, but I hope the House flips to the Democrats in 2014, so we can be rid of these nuts. Let Ted Cruz sit in the Senate stewing in his precious bodily fluids, and let Washington get back to the business of governing.”
In a column for Business Insider titled “House Republicans Show Themselves to Be Dangerously Incompetent, Again,” Josh Barro reflected today on the legislative train wreck that has resulted from GOP efforts to hold the U.S. government hostage as part of its campaign to undermine President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and thereby leave millions of Americans once more at the mercy of greedy health-insurance providers. He writes:
There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power.
A party that is this bad at tactics can’t be expected to be any good at policy-making.
In an article appropriately titled “The Reign of Morons Is Here,” published in the weekly electronic supplement to Esquire magazine, Charles P. Pierce reflects on the current state of the U.S. Congress, driven to anarchy and the brink of economic irresponsibility by the phony patriots and short-sighted, anti-intellectual, right-wing extremists who’ve taken control of the Republican Party:
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress--or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress--a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn’t seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do--to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouth-breathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
An old friend, who has been active in politics for more than
thirty years, told me yesterday that he was giving up. “I can’t stomach what’s
going on in Washington any more,” he said. “The hell with all of them. I have
better things to do with my life.” My friend is falling exactly into the trap
that the extreme right wants all of us to fall into--such disgust and cynicism
that we all give up on politics. Then they’re free to take over everything.
Make no mistake: Ted Cruz and his Tea Party
followers, and the Koch brothers and their other financial patrons, are
relishing this [government] shutdown. They’re delighted that 95% of the
Environmental Protection Agency is down, so polluters can do whatever they
want; that 80% of the Labor Department is down, so unscrupulous employers can
trample on their employees; that much of the Securities and Exchange Commission
is down, so corporations can have a field day. And they’d like nothing more than
a default on the nation’s debt in two weeks, because the resulting financial
chaos will cause even more of us to become angry and cynical. That’s the point:
They feed off of anger and cynicism.
Our response should be the opposite: We will not
give in to bullies or intimidation, and nor will we give in to cynicism about
what our government needs to be and who it needs to serve. We will remain
engaged and active, and push every member of Congress as well as the President
to remain steadfast.
Democrats and President Obama have gone out of their way to reach a spending compromise to avert what could be another setback for a slowly but surely improving national economy. Yet that’s not good enough for the GOP’s deluded political extremists. They want to load up the spending legislation with “riders” that would, for instance, defund Planned Parenthood, which operates hundreds of community health centers across the nation. They insist that “90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are for abortion”--even though that’s not close to being accurate, and the organization is already forbidden by law to use public funds for abortions.
When voters, frustrated with the sluggish pace of economic recovery, tipped the U.S. House of Representatives to Republican control in last year’s elections, I doubt they expected the result would be budgetary gridlock brought on by issues, such as abortion rights, that have nothing to do with the federal budget. It’s a sad state of affairs.
My political views have definitely evolved over the years. When I was a young man in the 1980s, I thought that, despite my antipathy toward the policies put forth by Republicans, at least they had to have the best interests of America at heart. They just saw a different way of moving the country forward.
But I can no longer endorse that opinion.
Given the recent unwillingness of right-wingers on Capitol Hill to negotiate in good faith on a federal budget; their zealousness to shut down the government as part of a continuing culture war (just as they did in 1995); efforts by GOP governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere to destroy public and private unions (the backbone of workers’ rights); Republicans’ drive to “essentially end Medicare” and do away with Medicaid, roll back President Obama’s important expansion of health-care coverage, and make us even more dependent than we’ve been on bottom-line-driven insurance companies; their wish to hand out more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and hand the bill for those to the already strapped middle class; their push to eliminate regulations that hold corporations accountable for the health and safety of their employees and anyone else; and House Speaker John Boehner’s 11th-hour insistence that any federal budget win the approval of a majority of his caucus (a pretty ludicrous proposition, when you consider the ideological extremism of so many of its members), I must now accept that Republicans don’t really care about advancing the cause of all Americans.
As right-wing U.S. Representative Mike Pence (R-Indiana) accidentally acknowledged last night during an appearance on Fox “News,” in the battle over the budget “we’re trying to score a victory for the Republican people.” Some in the Beltway media will undoubtedly pass that off as a slip of the tongue, but there’s more truth in Pence’s statement than anything else.
Now, I don’t think that all Republicans share the radical viewpoints espoused by their national leaders. There are certainly decent members of the party, and each of us knows some.
But when it comes to the GOP leadership in Congress, and in at least some of the 50 states, I’ve come to believe that they don’t honestly care about anybody except themselves. No matter what they might say in front of microphones. They don’t care about union enrollees. They don’t care about members of the middle class. They definitely don’t care about the poor or the unemployed. They don’t care about people who believe that women ought to have birth-control choices, or those of us who think that arming more and more Americans (even college students!) can only lead to increased violence. They don’t care about people who don’t attend a Christian church. They don’t care about anyone who’s black or Latino or Asian, or anything but white (except if those same people are willing to swear fealty to GOP causes, and pay big into the party’s coffers). They don’t care about folks who think government plays a vital role in keeping citizens healthy and preventing corporations from taking advantage of their employees. They don’t care about people who endorse public funding of the arts. And they damn well don’t care about anyone who calls him- or herself a Democrat or a progressive. We are, to their minds, the enemy. Not simply people with different ideas of how the nation and the world should operate. We’re the enemy.
“The worldview to which much of the GOP subscribes,” writes MyDD’s Charles Lemos, “is one that we as a nation thought we had long put behind us, but they want to repeal the twentieth century and they don’t mind destroying the country in the process.” The evidence of that seems to abound right now. Today’s Republican Party, led by religious and social extremists, appears anxious to turn the nation over to Big Business, deny clear evidence of global warming, escalate the wealth gap among Americans, and ignore anybody who isn’t pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.
What’s more, as Rachel Maddow laid out last night on her MSNBC show, Republicans have developed a long-term game plan--assisted by now-unregulated corporate funding--to do away with any political opposition whatsoever. To make the United States, in effect, a one-party system. With right-wingers in charge--and to hell with the rest of us. As she explains it, it doesn’t matter that over-reaching GOP governors or other legislators might fall before the wrath of angry voters in the interim; what matters is that laws and practices are slowly but surely bent in favor of the Republican Party and its worst ideologues for decades to come.
This is a frightening and undemocratic proposition, and I hope it’s nothing more than a great conspiracy theory. But after observing the games being played of late by the GOP, I am more convinced than ever that today’s Republican Party stands up only for “the Republican people.” It’s a sad turn for a political party that Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt once hoped would do its best to improve the lot of all Americans.
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are fixated on shutting down the government if their efforts are thwarted by the President or Senate Democrats.
