It's Not Mercury or Lead in the Water at the Brookings Institution: It's Brown Acid
Belle Sawhill:
Why Not Try A Third Party?: [W]hat is needed... is... to change the way Washington works. The only way to do that, in my view, is to begin now to build a movement for a third party that would take on our current dysfunctions more directly.... [T]he two parties are both very dug in to their existing positions... cannot easily move away from them without sounding like they have no firm principles at all. For example, most Republicans have pledged to never raise taxes. But without any new revenues we cannot possibly address our fiscal challenges much less make investments in education, infrastructure, the environment and the like. Democrats cannot be blamed for thinking that, without some flexibility on fiscal issues, very little else is possible. Democratic leaders such as Steny Hoyer have gone quite far toward extending an olive branch to the other side in the form of a willingness to put entitlement spending on the table, but there has been no reciprocation on the right...
Full stop. Rewind. Let's go to the videotape:
- The two existing parties are dug in...
- They cannot move...
- Republicans have pledged to never raise taxes...
- "Democratic leaders like [majority leader] Steny Hoyer have gone quite far toward extending an olive branch to the other side in the form of a willingness to put entitlement spending on the table, but there has been no reciprocation on the right..."
Sounds to me like one party is "very dug in to [its] existing positions and cannot move away from them..."
In which case the solution is not a third party, but instead a first party: the Democratic Party.
What Belle Sawhill ought to be saying is not so much that Washington is dysfunctional as that the Republican Party is dysfunctional.
