Because it’s never been like this before, not even when Clinton was POTUS. Because the Congressional Pubs have repeatedly made clear their determination to deny the Obama Admin any successes no matter what – I recall one Pub even baldly told a Dem leader, “You see, we can’t afford to let you succeed.” That attitude goes way, way beyond any disagreement on specific policies.
And, because Thomas E. Mann (of the nonpartisan Brookings Institution) and Norman J. Ornstein (of the conservative American Enterprise Institute), in their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, are in complete agreement that the gridlock in Congress is entirely the fault of obstructionist Pubs.
If I run for congress on the platform that I will do my best to ensure congress can not act on anything and I get elected, am I governing by fulfilling that promise? (this would be my platform if I ran for office)
Governing from a congressional standpoint is meaningless - it means doing whatever the fuck they want. The only way they could not “govern” is if they are out of office.
. . . Why?!
Right. But (at least as I read it) D’Anconia’s comment was in response to a claim that governing did not include mere obstruction:
So I took Airbeck to be saying, in effect, that what Congress was doing – or not doing – was not “governing.” And D’A was replying that Congress had no obligation to govern as Airbeck was using the term.
Perhaps if Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John Kerry had obstructed Bush on the Iraq War, it wouldn’t have happened. Sometimes all you can do is obstruct. I vote elected officials to represent me not go along with the opposing party. Yeah, I know Sanders and Obama didn’t vote for it. But they could have done more. A lot more.
I tentatively agree with the last sentence above – but point out that the GOP controls both House and Senate, and the country is still running, with a budget passed and a debt ceiling raised. Therefore, it is not the case that the GOP literally refused to do any important aspect of keeping the country running.
Correct?
No, no – you refuse to accept that anyone can hold a contrary principled position to the one you espouse, that’s all. I don’t agree with the approach, but I don’t agree that it’s impossible to articulate a rationale for the decision to fight on the debt ceiling. You argue that it caused “actual harm” in the form of lowered credit ratings; I argue that this could have been balanced by the harms accepting the budget expenditures did.
This is not science: you cannot baldly assert that your harms mass 14kg and mine mass only 2kg, so that clearly your harms are greater. This is a subjective weighing; you can argue for the reasons to accept your view but not claim your view is objectively correct.
Our credit rating and its decline due to Republican intransigence is an objective fact, and if you don’t think that has harmed the country then we are talking past each other. If we can’t agree that something as concrete as a lowered credit rating is a harm and that it happened simply due to the republican congress refusing to pay the bills they already approved then we are not going to meet on any middle ground here I’m afraid. An argument where the two sides cannot even agree on the basic facts is doomed to be pointless.
Also, if the expenditures were ultimately accepted after the harm caused by the credit rating downgrade, then the Republican harm and the actual harm both happened, so how is that not worse than if they had just approved paying the bills that they accrued in the first place. Its not science but it is still bound by logic, correct?
You missed the point of Bricker’s post. He did not say that lowered credit rating is not a harm, he said that the harm as a result of lowered credit rating could have been balanced (or offset) by greater harms in accepting the budget expenditures. There is no objective measure here in weighing the magnitude of these harms. Maybe signaling that this was an option being entertained would garner some future activity that comparatively yielded net positive results.
Where is that reported? Mitch McConnell’a famous “one-term president” comment wasn’t until the 2012 mid-terms.
Speaking of missing something, you clearly didn’t read my entire post.
Please check my second paragraph, read carefully, and maybe don’t accuse me of missing the point when you’ve missed half of my post.
Point taken, except keep in mind that Obama was not in Congress when that vote was taken (2002). He was still a state legislator in IL.
Yep - I read it initially, quoted it in my previous post. I stand by my comment. You think one harm is worse than another. People disagree. You must be devastated.
The degree to which it is appropriate for Congress to prevent real or imagined harm from the Presidency, at the expense of acting to pass compromise legislation, as a general question on the form of our government, is a subjective question and hard to judge.
But whether Congress over the last several years has been acting appropriately in prioritizing blocking any substantive action, instead of seeking compromise, can hardly be considered so hard to judge.
The approval rating of Congress has gone from low (like high 30s, low 40s) ten years ago, to roughly mid-20s in the late Bush years, to consistently in the 10-16 point range since 2010. That’s just the facts – Americans increasingly think Congress is totally worthless, and it hasn’t always been this way.
Republicans themselves are dissatisfied with Congress as an institution for producing insufficient legislation. The Senate Republicans are holding a policy retreat today in Baltimore, and several press articles indicate that one of the top agenda items is whether to reform the Senate’s rules to make it easier to pass budget bills on time.
The general concept that Congress is doing something productive by doing nothing — or whatever spin or nuance one cares to apply to that general idea — is an idea that only seems to have currency in this thread and among certain right wing Tea Party types.
Even by objective measures, the argument over whether Congress is “not governing” or simply “governing unwisely” is clarified. One could fairly claim that, for example, rejecting record numbers of appointees to the judiciary and executive positions would be an example of governing, but perhaps governing unwisely depending on your point of view. But that isn’t happening. As others have detailed, more and more judicial appointments are simply in limbo, not receiving votes at all, despite the fact that there is no longer a filibuster possible on such appointments. That is simply ducking decisions, not making unwise ones.
Similarly, dozens of nominations for important positions are simply being ignored. The nominee to head the Treasury Department’s office to track down and stop terrorist financial activity has languished for nine months without a vote. The nominee to be ambassador to Mexico, with whom the U.S. has very serious issues to deal with in terms of narcotics and immigration, has been frozen for nearly the same. The nomination for the head at the US Agency for International Development sat for eight months, throughout the beginnings of the Syrian refugee crisis, until being approved.
Literally the only bright spot – and it really ain’t so bright – is that bipartisan cooperation on writing the individual budget bills isn’t all that bad. But those committees are probably the only relic of the “smoke filled rooms” era where politicians find it mutually beneficial to cooperate. So while deals can be cut on proposals to fund individual agencies, the process of getting those recommendations approved is also a record of inaction and lack of decisions. To explain, budget talks to relieve sequestration started in September. But there was no reason they could not have started in April, when the first budget proposals were debated. But no, the will of Congress was inaction and delay.
All that wasted time can hardly be considered an important check on executive policies – it was just wasted time. No action at all. A failure to compromise and govern, until the very last possible minute.
If your teenager drags his or her feet on doing chores in this manner, they get chided for being lazy and shiftless. Now some folks here are trying to cast criticism of congressional inaction as mere difference of opinion on what Congress should be doing – if not outright noble?
Puh-leeze. Maybe Cliven Bundy and his ilk would buy that, but not me.
Dead wrong, and betraying a basic lack of comprehension of what I wrote. My post actually argued that two harms is worse than one. The Republican harm of the funds being spent and the debt ceiling being raised HAPPENED ANYWAY, after the credit rating was reduced. Once again 2 harms > 1 harm, especially when one of the harms was unnecessary and the other one was always going to happen anyway. Can you not see that? Do you really think not paying our bills was a reasonable option?
Maybe save the condescending tone for a situation where its warranted. Otherwise you just end up embarrassing yourself.
Sure – but again you simply hand-wave away any possible interpretation that you don’t like. I agree that the credit rating was a harm. But calling attention to the issue of the debt ceiling and resisting its increase in a very public way brought renewed public attention to the problems of continuing to spend at a massive deficit. Why isn’t that public airing of the issue accounted as a benefit, one that counterbalances the harm?
Oh I understand what you wrote. I find it amusing you continue to miss the point. It’s not simply a 2 is greater than 1. You are attempting to put objective measures on subjective things. What if a person values the result of sending the message that they are willing to let it all burn to get their way greater than anything else? Maybe the calculus is that in future sessions debt ceiling threats will be taken more seriously in order to extract future concessions? It’s not math, it’s politics.
I’m not handwaving anything, because the debt ceiling was raised anyway, and the funding was approved anyway. As it always was going to be. Do you think there was a chance that it wasn’t going to ultimately happen that way? That we’d actually default forever and let the economy crash as we become the worlds deadbeats? Threatening just short of letting the credit rating decline would be what you’re referring to, and that while I don’t agree with the tactic, I would agree isn’t dereliction of duty. Actually letting it decline though, out of spite? Causing real harm in addition to doing exactly what they were crying about doing simply out of petulance? I don’t know if you are a parent, but would you allow your child to act that way?
There’s apparently a couple of books that details a meeting between GOP leaders in 2008 about how they were going to obstruct Obama. One comes from Robert Draper, the other from Mike Grunwald.
These were the participants:
Frank Luntz - GOP Minister of Propaganda
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA),
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX),
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX),
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI)
Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA),
Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R),
Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ-R),
Sen. Tom Coburn (OK-R),
Sen. John Ensign (NV-R) and
Sen. Bob Corker (TN-R).
Non-lawmakers present Newt Gingrich
Sessions detailed a model of the Taliban and how their tactics could be used to thwart Democrats:
Here, McCarthy was quoted as saying:
And indeedthat’s what they did:
Of course now in 2016, we know they stuck to the plan. The idea of opposing Obama was relentless. Whereas under Bush, all of those members who could vote voted for:
And these same people suddenly clamped up and couldn’t spend one single dime more on saving the economy under Obama (though joke’s on them, Obama was able to grow the economy anyways).
The GOP as it stands now has no credibility. They willingly and gleefully harm America only to remain elected. They don’t give a shit about America, don’t give a shit about Americans, and would sell their own mothers to get one Democrat out of office. They are the ones who did not compromise. It is 1000% their fault that compromises are not made. Obama bears absolutely no blame on failing to work with the GOP. The only thing I fault Obama for is not recognizing the evil festering within Congress early enough to deal with it.
And even still, we got the ACA done miraculously in that period where the Dems controlled all the branches of government. Imagine what we could have done without the GOP. Hell, we could have replaced fossil fuels, created flying cars, put every child through school, and been to Europa and back 3 times already. The GOP has been obstructing all progress in America for the last 8 years. All fault is on them.
Please stop accusing me of missing the point, this is great debates. Take it to the pit if you want to have a pissing contest. If you want to have a debate then lets keep it on that level please.
Which is worse:
Option A: causing the nations Credit rating to decline, and then raising the debt ceiling and paying our bills so we don’t default.
Option B: raising the debt ceiling and paying our bills so we don’t default.
You are arguing that these are exactly the same and its only a matter of perception. I’m saying that actually letting the country’s credit rating is a real objective harm that did not need to happen and which ultimately resulted in nothing exept economic harm to America. You may be ok with your politicians threatening (and actually taking steps) to let the country burn. I am not ok with that. Burning down the country is not one of the congressional duties outlined in the constitution.