Dear America,
The 114th congress has been in session for about two months now, and whereas the first months of most new congresses are dedicated to major legislative achievements that are intended to demonstrate the commitment and competency of the party in power, this congress has accomplished nothing but humiliation for the newly empowered Republican Party. The very first step the Boehner-led House of Representatives took, outside of the perfunctory bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act that Boehner orchestrates once every month or two, was to pass a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Obama had previously and continually promised to veto if it was passed by The Senate and sent to his desk, which it was, and which he did just two days ago. The next step toward political irrelevancy that the Republican leadership took was to pass in The House a new appropriations bill that would fund the Homeland Security Department only if it did not implement President Obama's executive orders relative to immigration reform. The House bill went to The Senate where the Democrats did to it what the Republicans did to Democratic initiatives throughout the 113th and 112th congresses; they filibustered it to death. In light of Democratic intractability on the subject...and after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it up for debate three times, meeting with the same filibuster each time...The Senate sent a "clean bill" to The House, even though appropriations have to start in The House under the constitution. Boehner, after his failure to get his majority party The House to pass even a three week appropriation, got a short term, one week appropriation through so that funding wouldn't run out last Friday while he attempted to reason with the recalcitrant right wing of his caucus, and somehow he managed with another clean bill, this one running until September 2015 passing just this past Wednesday. Coincidentally, McConnell had his own, almost simultaneous failure in The Senate as a bill to override President Obama's veto of the Keystone XL congressional approval bill failed along party lines. What a surprise. All these votes, supposed moral successes of the conservative movement, turned out in reality to be nothing but Pyrrhic victories if not unmitigated failures, and it is somewhat surprising that they even tried given the political realities...and two decades of history of the same.
Starting with Newt Gingrich in the mid-nineties having to capitulate after closing down the government for three weeks with conditional appropriations that President Clinton vetoed, and running through a similar attempt in 2013 that failed despite Senator Ted Cruz's melodramatic actual filibuster and Rand Paul's previous and similarly futile gesture related to the use of drones by the government, the only consequence of these martyrdoms has been execration by the majority of the population. And as to the veto of the XL pipeline, despite the attempt to make its approval a major issue, the fact is that it means very little even with the bellowing of the Republicans about job creation. Thus, the failure of their bills to override The President's determination to wait for the official evaluation of the project by the State Department--the normal course of events--has never risen to the status of political miscalculation that the Republicans hoped it would, and now, the humiliation of eminently predictable failure along party lines makes the Republican leadership look like bumbling, bombasts at best. As it turns out, the right wing of the right wing within the party has engineered its own failure by insisting on the failure of the party as a whole. But the question all this raises is, will the failure of the Republican right wing be a good thing or a bad one for the nation in the end, and the answer depends on whether both parties understand that this is an opportunity for moderation to prevail again...on both sides of the aisle.
In Parliamentary states, like Great Britain and Israel, governance is effected through formation of coalitions among the several parties in existence at any given time. For example, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud Party needs its alliance with other parties of conservative and liberal ilk in order to control the Knesset, Israel's legislature, and thus hold the Prime Minister's office. The same process controls legislatures and the effective chief executive's offices in many European countries, which ends up creating a realization of mutual dependency in the parties, which in turn results in compromise. We now have a multi-party system in our legislature too; we no longer have just a two party system. The Democrats have the "Blue Dogs," many of whom are gone now as conservative Republicans replaced them in 2012 and 2014, but as a concept, there is a recalcitrant conservative wing of the Democratic Party just as there is one--the Tea Party--in the Republican Party. That leaves only one prospect for legislative progress, and that is a coalition of moderates from both parties, and the Homeland Security funding bill is proof that it is possible. It passed with 257 votes, 75 of them being Republican and the 182 vote balance coming from the Democratic Party. That is the coalition that can succeed in this Republican Congress. It is the same in The Senate where the Republicans are in the majority but the bill passed 68 to 31 with more than twenty Republicans voting against the conservative, Tea Party wing's position.
In The Senate, the mechanism for passage was to separate the appropriation from the overriding of The President's executive order, in other words, to repudiate the extortionate tactic of tying funding of something crucial to the Republican position on something else. It may well be that, at least in The Senate, the days of that kind of anti-democratic practice may be a thing of the past, which is paramount among predicates for legislative progress. If congress as a whole will desist in this practice of packaging disparate intentions into single "omnibus" bills, the moral equivalent of derivatives in the financial markets, we might begin to see some productive efforts in our legislature. One can hope, can't one.
Your friend,
Mike
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