Letter 2 America for March 22, 2013

Dear America,

The failure of the assault rifle ban to get so much as a vote in The Senate is an unfortunate reminder that not all conservatives are Republicans.  In fact, not all liberals are Democrats either, but liberal Republicans seem far fewer in number than their conservative counterparts in the Democratic Party to the extent that "liberal Republican" is practically an oxymoron.  The only two I can think of are Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, the latter of whom is retired, and even they voted the party line when called upon by party leaders to do so, whereas the conservatives among Democrats, at least those in the House of Representatives, even have a name: Blue Dog Democrats.  I assume that name to be a derivative of the old expression, "yellow dog Democrat."  A yellow dog Democrat is one who would vote for an "ol' yeller dog" on the democratic ticket before he would vote for a Republican.  It is an expression of partisanship, but in this day and political age, it would be more appropriate to use the yellow dog sobriquet for most Republicans.  Party loyalty is at an all time high among Republicans, and the conservative nature of the party seems ever more quintessential.  As to Democrats, they should probably call the party regulars Yellow Cat Democrats because it seems harder to get consensus out of them than it would be to herd a couple of hundred yellow cats through the halls of congress.  You may remember the debate over what is now called Obamacare.

There was a contingent among the Democrats, who controlled the House of Representatives at that time, that seemed more Republican than Democratic in their attitudes and strategies on the issue of health care.  Originally, a single payer system was the goal of the Democrats, but the Republicans were dead set against any health care reform, much less anything universal and government run.  Still, with a univocal party, the Democrats could have passed such a plan, but Democrats like Bart Stupak and his twelve disciples in The House...I refer to them as Stupak and the stupettes...who were practically boastful about being Blue Dogs, and Ben Nelson in The Senate--he was a Democratic Senator at that time but no longer holds office--managed to transmogrify the Democratic majority into impunity for the filibustering, obstructionist, conservative, disloyal mostly Republican opposition that actually controlled congress.  It prevented almost everything progressive from happening from 2006, the first of the two most recent elections after which the Democrats had the ostensible majority in both houses, right up to the present day.  Now the Republicans control The House, and they have an unruly  minority within to contend with as well.  But the difference is that the bumptious little contingent in the Republican Party is not less, but more Republican...that is more conservative...than the party as a whole.  Thus, the Republican leadership can gather a majority on a vote by going farther to the right either substantively or strategically, which is their latent desire anyway.  The Democratic Blue Dogs, to the contrary, are less Democratic...less progressive...than the party as a whole, and to appease them, their party has to dilute every progressive effort to get them to go along, and now, even if the Blue Dogs do cooperate the Democrats are a minority in The House, so they have almost nothing to say about anything any more.  

That is why I invented the term Republican conservative complex, or Rcc...at least I think I invented it.  In any event, that designation hasn't made its way into conventional political taxonomy yet, but I'll continue to use it until something else that reflects the reality comes along; the Democratic Party hasn't controlled anything over the past five years, no matter what the election tallies reflect, because of the Rcc.  It would be more apt to say that the liberals in this country, despite being in the majority on many issues, like tax policy and the desire for universal health care for instance, have not prevailed in any of those areas, health care in particular.  As recently as the middle of the Bush administration and maybe even up until today, more than 60% of Americans favored universal health care.  But despite the advent of Obamacare, all we have to show for our health care reform sentiments is insurance reform, which may be a step in the right direction, but more than anything else it is a boon for the insurance industry.  We are nowhere near achieving universal health care, which all of the other major industrialized nations have had for decades, yielding better, cheaper results by far.  Thanks to what we got in Obamacare, insurers will profit from universal private coverage, and only federal regulation under the Affordable Care Act will prevent their rapacity from making us all their prey.  And even so, many will still be uninsured, and who knows what insurance will cost the rest of us in the end.  For all our political weight, we have achieved virtually nothing...because of the Rcc.  It should have a name, if for no other reason than to make it easier to identify its members.  It isn't the Republican Party that is our problem, America.  It is the Republican conservative complex, and some of its members are Democrats.

Your friend,

Mike