Republican National Convention (Photo credit: NewsHour)
A seemingly minor event last Wednesday went almost unnoticed except for an oblique reference to it in the New York Times. The Republican controlled House Ways and Means Committee began work on a bill to require that tax revenues be used to pay federal debt before anything else in the event that congress fails to raise the debt ceiling. It seems that the Republicans have learned nothing from past attempts to extort draconian austerity out of our surrogates in Washington, and they are contemplating trying it again. The last time the debt ceiling was the object of sufficient ardor that it changed our direction at all, the credit rating of the United States was down-graded. And though there was no consequence--American government bonds are still the most sought after investments for money that has to remain safe, and thus the interest we pay on our debt has not gone up one iota--the world saw our nation's bare backside hanging out and it wasn't a pretty picture. Naturally, since it was all engineered by Republicans, whose take-no-prisoners political philosophy seems not principled but vicious and callous in the light of day, they paid at the polls and hence, after the 2010 election that swelled their confidence to unrealistic heights came the election of 2012 in which the consensus is that they were routed. And now, in defiance of national polls on reducing the debt and the deficit, gun control, same sex marriage, immigration liberalization and the effectiveness of a congress in which they control one of the two houses, they are contemplating pushing their luck again. If it weren't so bad for the country, I would wish for them to do so...to their detriment again, I presume...but every time they try to control our direction, it looks for all the world, and I mean for all the world to see, like internecine conflict. That image does not serve to make us stronger, even though it never kills us. You may recall that this year's "sequester" came out of the debt ceiling bout we went through a couple of years ago. I wonder what new plague the Republicans will wreak on us this time if they don't get their way, and make no mistake about it, getting their way will be painful for us too if they are allowed to foist it on us. Republican politics is a no-win proposition for the rest of us but they are undeterred. Those inside the party do worry openly about whether the Republican Party even has a future, but given their actions, they seem intent on making sure it won't. Suits me.
There has been another garment factory disaster in Bangladesh, this time a building collapse killing at least 180 people, and once again the workers were making garments for Walmart and other well-known brands. Yet Republicans cling to the notion that business should be able to go its own way even if it means that the economical shopper gets his goods and the CEO gets his bonus only by virtue of shed blood elsewhere. Profit is king in Republican politics, and they can dress it up how ever they like, but it will continue to smell the same, and more and more, Americans recognize that. Recently some young men were killed in a corn silo out in our mid-west when they were "walking down the corn" that had become impacted within the silo. It is a common practice and it is regulated to the extent that the owners of the silo had the requisite harnesses and tethers to prevent the workers from effectively drowning in the corn if the impaction broke free, but they were hanging on a wall in a shed very near the silo while the boys were, as it turned out, risking their lives unprotected. There is more to the story than that, and in fact there are deaths in silos every year in the course of walking down grain of one kind or another. But the real question is why does it continue to happen when silo owners know how to prevent the deaths inexpensively and easily. Shouldn't someone be held responsible for those deaths? Are there sufficient regulations in that industry for that purpose? Would more regulation for that purpose impair the businesses of those in the industry, and even if it did, isn't it worth the lives of a dozen or so young people a year? My point, you see, is one that I have made very often in these letters and elsewhere. Republicans are oriented toward things--money and profit in particular--and Democrats are more oriented toward people. That is what the Republicans have to change, not the way they describe themselves.
Yes, we need more jobs in this country, but we don't need jobs that don't pay a living wage, and keeping the minimum wage low while refusing to legislate to make shareholder input on wildly excessive executive pay mandatory won't win the Republicans the votes they need to regain their credibility much less their virtue. Eventually, flag waving and rants about social issues including the second amendment and gay marriage won't be enough to garner the political support of the American family of unemployed parents and college graduates who can't pay their loans on what they make at the pizza parlor. At some point, the Republicans who think they are standing on lofty principles are going to have to come down here where we all live and recognize that for all too many Americans, the Darwinist principles on which Republicans rely are a luxury to people who can barely afford the food they eat and the roofs over their heads...and one more thing.
Politics is at least in substantial part about hanging responsibility around your opponents neck. I would never try to make anyone believe that Democrats don't engage in blame shifting too, but the Republican Party has an unnatural ability to lock its members into the same step when doing so. And that tendency toward lock-step marching doesn't make their message resonate. It actually makes it seem contrived and artificially dogmatic, thus robbing the party of credibility. I admit that I wish the Democratic Party had a little of the intra-ranks discipline that the Republicans display every day in Washington, and I've opined regularly that some of the Democratic Party's conservative apostates should be "encouraged" to defect to the other party. But I would never advocate conformity...especially mindless conformity like that required of Republicans. What both the Republicans and the Democrats need is something between the partisan rigidity required by Tom Delay, the disgraced Texas congressman who was known as "The Hammer," and Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, who should be known as "The Doormats." When issues are important because they are touchstones of the party's ethos, arm twisting is in order if for no other reason than to show the voters what the party stands for. But when issues are important for the sole purpose of making political hay, or just for partisan petit-politics intended to create victory rather than common weal, the members should be free to go their own way. The result would be political parties that knew collectively who they were, and thus could make their identities known to the public as well. Much of the problem in that regard is a consequence of decades of redistricting by prevailing parties for political gain...known as gerrymandering...that results in homogeneity of philosophy in voting districts. That is why the primary has become the election in many Republican districts, but Republican philosophy is at its edges far outside the mainstream, and that, in turn, is why governance is so fractious today, and why procedure decides more issues than voting. I've said it before and I'll say it again. The two major parties should be the liberal party and the conservative party so that everyone knows who the candidates are, and thus how to vote. We would all be better off. Even the Republicans.
Your friend,
Mike
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