The obstructionist-GOP narrative... can we test/prove it?

Great Debates
21

A government shutdown could result from one side being obstructionist, or from either or both sides being particularly stubborn.

The difference to me is between this type of of dialog:

D: We want a 40% tax rate
R: We want a 20% tax rate
D: We can maybe go down to 35%
R: We can maybe go up to 25%
(both sides then refuse to budge)
(eventual government shutdown)

Vs this:

D: We want a 40% tax rate
R: We want a 20% tax rate
D: We can maybe go down to 35%
R: We want a 20% tax rate, plus we insist that one city in every state be named after Ronald Reagan
(both sides refuse to budge further)
(eventual government shutdown)

Part of what makes this a tricky issue, one worthy of starting a thread, is that as others have pointed out, few if any individual occurrences are proof of obstructionism. After all, it’s the role of the opposition party to be stubborn and stake out positions that are at odds with what the majority party proposes. The question is what happens next… whether compromise is desired and worked for.
Simplifying greatly for a moment, if you imagine that all positions are just numbers, then a functioning government is one where if one side starts out at 9, and the other starts out at 6, the end up actually passing the law at around 7.5, maybe weighted towards whichever party controls more of the branches of government. Obstructionism then would be either absolutely refusing to budge, or claiming that you want 4, even though up until last year your party wanted 6, but now if you request 6, then the other party might agree on 6, and you’d rather just have a disagreement, which you can then blame on the other guys. But of course it’s very hard to convert complex real positions to numbers like that, particularly in any objectively provable sense.

22

Sure. Gingrich in '95 and '96, too.

23

Exactly so. If you cast your mind back to Ronald Reagan and negotiations with the Soviet Union, the word “negotiability” was a bad word in the White House. It was anathema for anyone to propose terms that the Soviets might be able to accept. The only terms that anyone was allowed to put forward were terms that the Soviets never could possibly accept.

That isn’t negotiating in good faith.

And that’s what today’s Republicans are doing, because they have created a moral definition in which compromise is a bad thing. This is a hell of a shame. Our country only exists because of compromises. Refusing to negotiate – putting “poison pills” in budget bills – is bad governance.

24

A bit of clarity about what so-called government shutdowns have been in the past. Sneak peek: The “Democrats did it too a couple of generations ago, so there!” claims above refer only to specific agencies.

25

This is true, especially when you look at the fact that a couple of the earlier shutdowns arose because of a dispute over government funding of abortion. When the issue is funding abortion, it’s not exactly the same complaint to observe that one side is unwilling to discuss a compromise that allows a lesser level of funding. Their opposition is, after all, not to how much we allocate to abortion.

26

Since I"m just dropping in, let me say to Max: it’s complicated. The GOP has engaged in an unprecedented level of obstruction. However, it has not been a total blockade against bills or appointments and it is not because they are obstructing to make the President a failure.

What actually seems to be going on is that the two sides rubbed each other the wrong way from the start, so there’s not much amenable discussion going on between the President and Republican leaders. There’s also not much useful discussion going on between Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, who also apparently can’t stand each other either. So the only way bills can pass is when both sides are already mostly in agreement. Which is not a terrible way to run the government. Laws should have broad support before going into law.

On the staffing front, the Republicans have been inconsistent, stopping some appointees out of sheer bloody-mindedness, others because they don’t hate the appointees but hate the agency(Consumer Financial Protection Bureau being a prime example), stopping still others because they believe they are too liberal(and some actually did go down when brought to a vote, meaning Democrats also voted against them), and then being surprisingly cooperative with others(Sotomayer and Kagan were confirmed without much blood on the floor).

Ah, and then there’s the debt ceiling. While it may seem unprecedented, and I think almost all Dopers would agree it was unwise, it was a political winner for Republicans, at least in theory. Voters agreed that the debt ceiling shouldn’t be raised without taking steps to fix the need for debt ceiling increases. Democrats back home were also promising that they agreed that steps should be taken before raising the debt ceiling. Many liberals act like Obama made a huge concession by agreeing to sit down with Boehner, but I say Obama doesn’t make concessions unless the politics of an issue are working against him. And they were on the debt ceiling, so he had to negotiate. The second time around was a different story. The Republicans had shut down the government again, the public was holding them mostly responsible, and so Democrats and the President could take a firmer stance, and Republicans backed down.

So basically, rather than the usual situation, where there are enough agreeable people on both sides to cobble together coaltions, right now whether legislation gets passed and what kind depends on raw political power. I think that will be temporary, because I think regardless of who wins in 2016 we’ll have a President who is better at diplomacy, and hopefully soon Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid will be retired or out of power.

Oh, and I would be remiss in not mentioning that we have a big bloc of Republicans who won’t vote for anything unless it’s everything they want. That makes it necessary for Republicans in the HOuse to build coalitions involving some members of the other party, a task which they have been less than skillful at. John Boehner doesn’t seem to lead a majority so much as a plurality. There are essentially three parties in Congress, the Democrats, Republicans, and the Tea Party. I do think the Tea Party will continue to mature, so again, I see things getting a lot better after 2016, regardless of who is in charge of what.

27

In the Republican leadership’s case, Obama ‘rubbed them the wrong way’ by the simple act of being elected. As evidenced by the meeting they had at the very beginning of his administration to oppose everything they could.

I don’t see why this is so. The US has a long and inglorious history of having majorities support bad (and often truly evil) political policies.

How? It was a big loser in practice. And many Dopers correctly predicted this. Why would be it be any better “in theory” (what ever that means)?

What is the evidence that the Tea Party ‘continues to mature’? I still see the same accusations that Obama supports Jihadists, for example. It looks to me like they’re just getting a bit weaker, and not posing the same primary threat as before.

28

I always just assumed it was true that this meeting happened, but that sure doesn’t look like what it’s portrayed as. To “challenge” is not to obstruct. Plus a couple of the attendees have actively worked with Democrats on various issues to try to get compromises done: most notably Tom Coburn and Bob Corker.

I’d also note that in terms of “challenging”, what the Republicans have done is far milder than what Democrats have done in some of the states that Republicans won elections in, such as in Wisconsin and North Carolina.

29

As evidenced by a meeting where they said they’d “challenge” Obama on everything? Did you get that talking point from your own mind, or from David Axelrod? I’d also note that Obama managed to insult them at their very first meeting together, and piled on a lot more over the next few years. That poisons the waters. Reid’s been far worse. I actually have to wonder if he has all his marbles.

Either we believe in our system or we don’t. The founders created a system where it’s hard to pass laws supported by one party, and just as hard to implement them in many cases.

The polling agreed with the Republican stance that there should be fiscal adjustments rather than an unconditional debt ceiling rise. Thus it was a good idea, in theory. In practice, it actually wasn’t bad either because they got the sequester.

In terms of pure numbers in Congress, they are pretty much as strong as they always were, and may get a little stronger in 2014. But they also seem to recognize the death of their movement staring them in the face, so the smarter ones have moderated a little. That’s why they haven’t shut down the government or brought us to the brink of default again. It’s true that they are politically weaker, but that only matters if they actually care how ugly the polling is and how ugly their future is. But if they wanted to, they could keep on doing what they did. They have the numbers to do it still, unless Democrats and K street Republicans are united in opposing them.

30

Yes. Their plan to beat Obama wasn’t to convince the country that their ideas were better – it was to try and hamstring him and oppose every possible achievement that he could take credit for.

Talking sternly and seriously is not ‘insulting them’. They’re big boys. They should be able to take some stern and serious opposition.

You didn’t say it was ‘hard’, you implied that it was wrong to pass laws without broad support. Obviously it’s hard, but it’s not ‘wrong’, if the legislation is good and helps the country.

That wasn’t the Republican stance. That may be what they want you to think, but it wasn’t their actual position.

There are multiple contradictory sentences in this paragraph. First they’re “as strong as they always were, and may get a little stronger”, then they’re “politically weaker”. Totally incoherent.

31

When the Democrats in the Wisconsin state house fled the state in an effort to stop Walker and the GOP majority from passing laws, that was also obstructionist, right?

It seems to me the general reaction from the SDMB crowd at the time was laudatory.

So perhaps another question to ask is: is obstructionism per se unreasonable?

Or only when it runs counter to your preferred political outcome?

32

Does it make any difference if one could reply: “The obstructionism in Case A was acceptable for this, this and this reason. The obstructionism in Case B is unacceptable for this, this and this reason.” ?
I’m just curious if labels matter more than context.

33

That’s an interesting question, and probably worthy of debate, but seems like a distraction in the context of this particular thread.

34

Leaving aside the fact that you are coming up with smaller state-sized issue-oriented examples on the Democratic side to counter the much larger issue of the Republicans country-wide institutionalized examples, you’ve seemed to have left out a couple of teeny details out of your description.

  1. Did they do this for Walker’s entire term?
  2. Did they do this to stop passage of all, or even most, laws the GOP majority was trying to pass, or was there a specific objective?
    Let’s have the whole truth.
35

I don’t think Trinopus can. Because if he claims that Democrats were being obstructionist to Democrats, the word “obstructionist” loses its meaning.

36

Why would it? There can certainly be bitter rivalries within a party, acted upon.

37

“Bitter rivalry” does not equal “obstructionist”.

38

I think in this context “obstructs” means the minority party in a given House of Congress obstructing the majority party. It could be to reflect poorly on the president. Or not.

39

No, I disagree. It’s important to define terms.

To remind you of Trinopus’ argument:

So I asked if the standard would survive, or change, when we look at examples of Democrats “actually shut[ting] down the government?”

I asked about the Wisconsin Democrats fleeing the state to deny a quorum to the majority GOP. This is also relevant because, while it’s not a total shutdown of all government, it’s certainly a shutdown of the legislature. And as Czarcasm tries to point out, there’s a difference between stopping every law, and just stopping some laws. The House and Senate have passed many bills during the last session – clearly it’s hyperbole to say they’ve literally stopped every law. They’ve only stopped the ones they didn’t agree with.

What I’m trying to expose here is the notion that at the heart of things, the Democrats’ obstruction is considered justified, because they are opposing bad laws; the Republicans oppose good laws, so their obstructing hurts the nation.

So it’s perfectly relevant to highlight that disconnect, because otherwise the standard applied during one discussion of “obstruction” will be very different than the standard applied during another.

And who wants that? On a liberal-leaning board, why, that would give an enormous advantage to one side!

40

No, but bitter rivalries can manifest in obstructionism. The point being that this doesn’t have to be a binary Republican/Democrat conservative/liberal divide.