Ummm... Peter Beinart... The Democrats Would Have Filibustered Bush's Tax Cuts: They Were Pushed Through Via Reconciliation--That's Why They Expire Next Year
A commenter writes, apropos of Peter Beinart's claim that "It's no surprise that Democrats couldn't successfully filibuster George W. Bush's tax cuts":
Those bills went through reconciliation. Which helps undermine some of the false symmetry of the article. How does one write a long form article about gridlock without talking to a single person who can correct this error?
Time for another weblogger ethics panel!!!!
Peter Beinart: American Discontent: The Problem with Washington Politics: Why Washington Is Tied Up in Knots: Time Magazine: How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and received dozens of new canes from appreciative fans. In 1905, Idaho miners bombed the house of a former governor who had tried to break their union. In 1965, an anti–Vietnam War activist stationed himself outside the office of the Secretary of Defense and, holding his year-old daughter in his arms, set himself on fire. (She lived; he did not.) By that measure, a Rush Limbaugh rant isn't particularly divisive.... What really defines our political era, as Ronald Brownstein notes in his book The Second Civil War, is not the polarization of Americans but the polarization of American government. In the country at large, the disputes are real but manageable. But in Washington, crossing party lines to resolve them has become excruciatingly rare. The result, unsurprisingly, is that Americans don't like Washington very much....
From health care to energy to the deficit, addressing the U.S.'s big challenges requires vigorous government action. When government doesn't take that action, it loses people's faith. And without public faith, government action is harder still. Call it Washington's vicious circle. Breaking this circle of public mistrust and government failure requires progress on solving big problems, which requires more cooperation between the parties. But before we can begin to break that circle, we need to understand how it developed in the first place....
[I]n the 1960s and '70s... liberal Northern Democrats rallied behind civil rights, abortion rights, environmentalism and a more dovish foreign policy... the Republican Party shifted rightward.... Whereas many members of Congress had once been cross-pressured — forced to balance the demands of a more liberal party and a more conservative region, or vice versa — now party, region and ideology were increasingly aligned....
In the 1980s, discrediting government was not the strategy of the congressional GOP, for two reasons. First, the sorting out hadn't fully sorted itself out yet.... Second, because Republicans occupied the White House, making government look foolish and corrupt risked making the party look foolish and corrupt too.... All that changed when Bill Clinton took office. With the GOP no longer controlling the White House, a new breed of aggressive Republicans — men like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott — hit on a strategy for discrediting Clinton: discredit government.... In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster.... For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration.... In Clinton's first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned that the vicious circle works.... With these acts of legislative sabotage, Republicans tapped into a deep truth about the American people: they hate political squabbling, and they take out their anger on whoever is in charge....
All this, it turns out, was a mere warm-up for the Obama years....
In recent years, Republicans have played this style of politics better than Democrats.... It's no surprise that Democrats couldn't successfully filibuster George W. Bush's tax cuts and Republicans couldn't successfully filibuster Obama's stimulus spending. When you're handing out goodies, it's much harder for opponents to gum up the process....
Is there a way out? In theory, if the Democrats won so overwhelmingly that they controlled nearly 70 seats in the Senate, as they did when Franklin Roosevelt secured passage of Social Security and when Lyndon Johnson got Medicare through, they could simply steamroll the GOP. But... the reality remains that today, and for the foreseeable future, neither party can do big, controversial things without help from the other.
So, what might encourage the two parties to cooperate?
First, more New Hampshires.... New Hampshire, by contrast, is an open primary, which encourages candidates to appeal to voters outside their party.... Second, more Crossfires. In today's highly segmented, partisan news environment, it's hard to create big new media institutions dedicated to objective news reporting. But it might be possible to create new talk shows and blogs in which liberals and conservatives interrogate one another's views — programs like the early (and more substantive) incarnation of CNN's Crossfire.... Third, more Ross Perots.... Imagine if another powerful third-party voice were to emerge today, demanding that both parties take real steps to solve problems like global warming and health care — as opposed to the Tea Partyers, who insist that government just get out of the way...
Crossfires and Ross Perots won't save us. Open primaries might. But the surest road to a better America would be to punish the Republican Party for gridlock: destroy it utterly, so that no politician for a thousand years will think that betraying his oath to serve the country to create pointless gridlock is the road to electoral success.
"Centrists" like Beinart who want a healthy politics need to punish the bad actors, and punish them severely--not enable them.
