Ahead of the 2006 midterms, Congressional Democrats outlined a fairly broad and thorough agenda and vowed to advance them through the House within the first 100 working hours of their majority in the event that they won. When they did win, then-Speaker
Nancy Pelosi definitely let Bush be The Story for the next two years. But she also moved a bunch of items that lacked GOP support through the House to establish a Democratic agenda (including familiar items like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, and two different State Children’s Health Insurance Plan expansions, both of which President Bush decided to veto). And moreover she managed to pass some actual laws, including two stimulus bills (can you imagine if Obama requested a stimulus bill now?) and marshaled overwhelming Democratic support (twice) for the bill that ultimately authorized TARP when then-minority leader John Boehner couldn’t muster half his conference to support the bailout President Bush demanded.
This year’s Republicans aren’t capable of anything like this. Winning in 2014 might not require them to be. But it might also leave them without much to tell the public if it watches Democrats actually doing things and begins to wonder what the GOP has to offer other than a single-minded hatred of Obamacare.
It’s hard not to feel extremely dispirited by the prospect of the next eight months. The country’s business is hostage to political gamesmanship and jockeying. Doing nothing about almost anything right now – for brazenly partisan purposes – is the GOP’s game-plan. It’s pure oppositionism – and we’ll likely see the entire pre-election period as one in which the Republicans do one thing only: sabotage and undermine and slander and oppose the ACA. So a law that has greatly expanded the number of insured Americans will be relentlessly described as a law that threatens the insurance of millions. This is not going to be a campaign for an alternative to the ACA – because the actual alternative looks a lot like what we’ve got, and a comparison of alternatives – an exploration of costs and benefits of various approaches – is not something the GOP wants.
The same with immigration reform. The kabuki theater of the past month has been a contest in cynicism, crafted entirely around the desire to bury this issue until after the mid-terms. The purported reason for not acting is a preposterous and self-evident falsehood – that Obama cannot be trusted to enforce the border. As Fareed recently noted,
the Obama administration has enforced immigration laws ferociously. It deported more than 400,000 people in 2012, 2½ times the number in 2002. In 2002, for every two people removed from the country, 13 became legal residents. In 2012, for every two removed, just five became residents. For these reasons, as well as the recession, the number of illegal immigrants has not increased in several years. (On the more general point, Dan Amira of New York magazine has compiled data that show that Obama has issued fewer executive orders than any president in 100 years.)
So these are transparent dodges of pressing national issues almost entirely for internal party politics and the mid-terms.
No, I’m not shocked. But I’m also not so cynical as to ignore the nihilism at the heart of today’s GOP. They are the reason we have gridlock; they are the reason we cannot reach some obvious fiscal compromise that could raise some taxes and trim some entitlements; they are the reason we cannot even have a debate about how to tackle climate change; they are the reason we cannot enact even minor gun control measures backed by huge majorities; they are the reason we cannot offer some relief to countless undocumented immigrants while reforming immigration to allow for more skilled workers. I won’t even begin on foreign policy, where, again, they are all opposition and no coherent policy (or divided by Rand Paul non-interventionism and Cheney-style neoconservatism).
Obama is getting the blame for all this; which, of course, is the strategy. But he doesn’t deserve it; which, of course, is the truth.
The Dish 