Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem

Coauthored by members of both liberal and conservative think-tanks:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...he-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story_3.html

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

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.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him 16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his goal.

Ironically, after becoming speaker, Gingrich wanted to enhance Congress’s reputation and was content to compromise with President Bill Clinton when it served his interests. But the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress. (Some of his progeny, elected in the early 1990s, moved to the Senate and polarized its culture in the same way.)

Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds its signers to never support a tax increase (that includes closing tax loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible. For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure to sign such pledges is simply too risky.

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.

The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.”

And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory.

This attitude filters down far deeper than the party leadership. Rank-and-file GOP voters endorse the strategy that the party’s elites have adopted, eschewing compromise to solve problems and insisting on principle, even if it leads to gridlock. Democratic voters, by contrast, along with self-identified independents, are more likely to favor deal-making over deadlock.

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.


The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraskacalled his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.”

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

 

Wish i could agree with you.. it sure would make things easier to fix... Democrats are just as bad.... just different

 

Read the article:

"Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures."

I had to cut out part of the article to make it fit on the forum, but it also mentions the compromise made on Bush's NCLB legislation (terrible, terrible legislation, to be honest), gave crucial votes to Bush's tax cuts, and went along with all of his steps after 9/11.

 

That is true, never really thought of that. Democrats have been a bit more bipartisan in their votes... Not so much for Republicans.

 

Dems have been compromising for a long time. And still getting blamed for not compromising.

 

The OP must have forgotten that whole Bush Presidency thing.

 

Ah yes, the one where even more help from Dems was given to the GOP programme.

 

Already addressed.

 

Yeah, they really compromised on the Healthcare takeover. I wish all compromising was locking out the opposition from any and all discussions.

 

Was the Democrat's "Tea Party terrorist" rhetoric addressed?

 

Democrats are bad, but I don't think they're as bad. Democrats at least want the country to continue. You can deal with them on that basis.

Republicans just want to watch the world burn.

 

So it's not only the Republicans who are the problem. Nice dishonest thread title, bro!

Democrats crammed Obamacare down the throats of all Americans, even though the majority of Americans didn't want it. They passed it without a single Republican vote. They had complete control over Congress for 2 straight years and didn't give a (*)(*)(*)(*) what the other side thought. Now that they have lost their iron grip, they are complaining about the "lack of compromise".

It's amazing partisan Democrats can manage to live with their own hypocrisy. Winning elections is all that matters to them.

 

Care to elaborate on your... ahem... brilliant (<--sarcasm) post?

 

Stupid post, of course, but I'll point out the error nonetheless. Democrats want the country to continue towards socialism, Republicans do not. I wish I could say you were close on that one.

 

It was the one where Democrats and liberals routinely derided Bush as a war-mongering lying fascist Nazi. The absurdity of the leftist attacks against Bush bordered on delusional and the media portrayal of him was a travesty.

Now you actually expect people to believe that Republicans are the evil extremists and liberals and Democrats are just the bumbling but good natured sidekick?

LAFF

I cut my political teeth during the Bush years and remember quite vividly how routinely despicable and vile things were said about the President by the left. They named a sewage treatment facility after him in San Fran, I believe, right before he was leaving office. It was acrimony, plain and simple and the left was guilty as sin. Now, like always, they try to deflect responsibility and finger point...

 

You mean, the title of the article coauthored by researchers from both liberal and conservative think tanks? That thread title?

 

I read it. Your explanation was inadequate. The "bipartisan" angle is bunk. The wars were characterized by exigent circumstances and are in no way representative of typical DNC behavior. The tax cuts were supported because this is a predominantly center-right nation and not all the Democratic politicians are nutty socialists. I believe they're referred to as "blue dog Democrats" and are generally in favor of moderate government. So, if you would like to claim that blue dog Dems aren't the problem, I would be inclined to agree, but the majority of the party is represented by extreme leftists like Pelosi and Obama, the types you're apologizing for. As for NCLB, that is just more big government social engingeering in education and leftists categorically love that stuff.

 

Democrats will lead Medicare to bankruptcy

By Greg Oerter

April 18, 2012

Joyce Harris wrote that seniors' interests were voted against by Reid Ribble when he supported the FY 2012 budget recently passed by the House.

Well, I'm a senior, and I pay attention, so I know the opposite is true.

Left in Democracts' hands, Medicare will be bankrupt by 2022. It was Democrats who stole $500 billion from Medicare when they passed ObamaCare.

President Barack Obama's FY 2012 budget got zero votes in the House. Democracts wouldn't even vote for it.

Harry Reid won't allow a budget vote in the Senate. The Senate has not passed a budget in 1,020 days.

This is a violation of the law. This was a country of law, once.

The Republicans' plan includes no changes for those 55 or oder. It is the best chance to save Medicare.

President Obama's plan is to just keep borrowing over a trillion dollars every year. This is the path to ruin for all of us. Remember our AAA credit rating?

The U.S. debt is now $15.6 trillion. The Medicare and Medicaid trustees estimate these programs have another $56.2 trillion in unfunded liabiilties.

This comes to $628,000 in debt for each and every household in the United States.

What happens when all of our taxes go to pay interest on the debt? What do we do when China won't lend us any more money?

That's where the Democrats will lead us. Is that in our best interest?

What do the Democrats do when they have spent all our money and borrowed as much as they can? Print more money.

Since Obama was elected, they have tripled the amount of dollars in circulation.

That's why bread, cereal, gas, etc. cost twice what they did when Obama took office. That's why your savings are worth 10 percent less every year.

Is this in our best interest?

Democrats will cry bloody murder over every spending reduction until the U.S.A. is bankrupt. Then all the government checks will stop. Is this in our best interest?



http://www.waupacanow.com/opinion/d...-to-bankruptcy-----jcpg-266672-147947145.html

 

Party over country for Republican's!

 

You can't actually believe that?

 

Wow, talk about inadequate...

 

Nice try, Dave. Better luck next time.

 

Was that what happened when a cabal of collectivist Democrats shoved through Obamacare despite a 60% disapproval rating?...party agenda over country?

 

Should I just start saying his entire argument is silly and leave it at that? He couldn't refute a single point; why should I bother?

 

How long are you guys going to use this absolutely stupid example? And you can't include those that disapproved of it because it didn't provide some sort of public option, lol.