Oh how the flighty have fallen. Those once-rowdy House Republicans, backed by seething mobs of real Americans eager to battle the nation's socialist titans, have settled, it seems, on the safety of institutional inertia and group invisibility.
Today's their third cloistered day at a Maryland resort, where they're engaged in that most problematic of all intellectual exercises: mindless circumspection. What should they do, what should they do, whatever should they do in 2014? The answers are emerging. Duck, and nothing.
The most pressing issue is immigration reform. Damn, on this, they'd sure like to do something. And they would do something, they say, if it weren't for the difficulties imposed on their authoritarian personalities by a bicameral legislature and separate chief executive. "Members took turns expressing their distrust of President Obama and Senate Democrats as negotiating partners," reports the NY Times. This mentality in part reflects conservatives' belief that negotiations should be held only with those who agree with them entirely; mostly, though, it's an excuse to do nothing.
Want proof? Five paragraphs later in the Times story, there's this: On the matter of the debt ceiling, "House Republicans urged the president and the Senate"--the intolerable, distrusted ones--"to move first."
On Obamacare, House Republicans have been sworn to our salvation for five years now. Well, you can make that six, for once again they've decided to pass on proposing any alternative, since that, they fear, would only "open a line of Democratic attack that would deflect from what they see as the failings of the president’s health care law." Yet that passage's predicate deflects from Republicans' underlying concern: they simply lack an attackable alternative. Constructive legislation ain't their department. Fuck it.
And then there's tax reform, something else they demagogically hail but ponderously evade. "House leaders [are] worried about the political cost of taking on popular tax breaks." You do recall, I presume, when the stouthearted class of 2010 laughed in the face of political costs.
You know what? I liked them better when they were unhinged anarchists--and dying to prove it, double entendre intended.
This brings me back to your post on unifying the GOP. Unify around what? If they attempt to unify around any of their standard issues they're more or less screwed. I cannot wait to see what they are going to demand and not get in order to surrender when they raise the debt ceiling.
Posted by: Peter G | January 31, 2014 at 09:32 AM
"Unify around what?"
Opposition to "our greatest geopolitical foe"?
Posted by: Charlieford | January 31, 2014 at 10:22 AM
Who's that this week? I forget.
Posted by: Peter G | January 31, 2014 at 11:36 AM
Yes, unfortunately their consultants appear to have realized that their agenda (most succintly captured by Paul Ryan's "budgets") is about as popular as athlete's foot. So they've moved on. Now they have no articulated agenda - they just discuss "principles" that bear some relation to an important issue, with absolutely zero intention to turn those "principles" into legislation that would address the issue or could pass the House.
It's remarkable. One of this country's major parties is now inhabited in large part by ignorant, angry, regressive white men who come across as having IQs around room temperature when forced to discuss the issues of the day. And the party's "elite" are reduced to promoting fatuous marketing slogans in lieu of actual ideas or policy. And this party still controls one house of Congress and seems to have a floor of 45% of the vote in national elections. And the journalists in charge of reporting on such things act as if nothing about this is the least bit strange. I'm glad I live in California, where politics has, for now, entered a state of relative normalcy.
Posted by: Turgidson | January 31, 2014 at 01:00 PM