Have been composing in my head a posting about how the GOP seems to have completely forgotten that the United States of America is supposed to be covered through negotiation & compromise, not capitulation & domination. When I saw that Daily Kos had beat me to the punch, assumed they'd been triggered by Reince Priebus' recent comments. Nope - their spur was a recent Bloomsberg interview with poli sci mavens Thomas Mann & Norman Ornstein revisiting their prescient 2012 book, It's Worse Than It Looks, a book whose message was largely neutered by a media that brushed aside the meat of its message in order to continue pursuing a false "false equivalency" meme.
Hey, give these two guys a pat on the back for not giving up, even though their message kept being ignored or diluted by a media that refused to listen. They've been trying since 2008 (!) - yup, pre-President Obama - & their book, The Broken Branch, in which they laid out the strategic disintegration of the legislative branch & offered a blueprint for change.
The change appears to come during & after the 1994 election - in other words, after Newt Gingrinch's Contract With America changed what had been a carefully calibrated congress into an institution with one side of the aisle rigidly set against anything smacking of negotiation & compromise. Bargaining was given the heave ho & politically purity became the bywords of the Republican party.
Conservatives, in control of both the House & Senate for the first time in 40 years, gave the boot to the concept of regular order, cold shouldered the idea of deliberation, and flipped congress from a being a committee-based, decentralized institution into one now set along party lines.
Back in 1994, far-right conservatives like Newt conservatives considered compromise a dirty word. In 2015, the whole conservative movement holds it as anathema. Leaders like Ted Cruz would see government shut down as a viable way to get the conservative message heard, even when the legislation that created the crisis is inevitably going to crash & burn once it gets to the president's desk. Better to create turmoil than to appear to acquiesce.
And still the media makes it out that both sides are equally to blame. No. The Democrats haven't anything like The Contract With America, they don't strut around demanding purity pledges or talk about "Democrats in Name Only." That's the GOP & only the GOP.
In 2008, Mann & Ornstein did their best to warn us about what would come if the situation went unchecked. They tried again in 2012, with the same sorry cries of "a pox on both your houses" from the media. No one in the mainstream media was willing to risk saying, "The GOP is out of control."
Too late now. Political leaders have forgotten HOW our country was governed for over 200 years. People had different political affiliation, but once they were elected to office the expectation was that they would serve the NATION's interests, not their party's. Those days are gone.
Reince Priebus is quoted as claiming the GOP is "cooked" if it doesn't win the White House in 2016, because "if you don't hold the White House, it's very difficult to govern in this country - especially in Washington, D.C."
Let this radical centrist translate - the present-day GOP knows how to dominate, not how to govern. If they hold the House AND the Senate AND the presidency, THEN they know how to govern. Don't take my word for it - read what Reince has to say.
Who taught these people - in government & in the upper echelons of the GOP leadership - high school Civics? They sure don't understand how the American system of governing was set up to work, haven't a clue how it worked for generation after generation. Today, to them, it's not even about party. It's of the ideology, for the ideology, by the ideology.
