Representative Debbie Wasserman Shultz said "we won't hold the American people hostage" on "Countdown" this evening (December 17, 2010) when discussing her vote in favor of the Obama "compromise" bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years (and many other things). That tells you all you need to know about how the Republicans continue to roll the Democrats. They put them between a rock and a hard place. They find a "rock", something Democrats feel compelled to do, in this case extend unemployment benefits for 13 months. This forces Democrats to go to the "hard place", in this case extending the Bush tax cuts.
The Republicans have now done this repeatedly. There are only two things necessary for this strategy to work: (1) the Republicans stick together, and (2) the Republicans find a "rock". This strategy appears to be dangerous for Republicans but it isn't really. It might have been the first couple of times the Republicans tried it. I am sure it was hard talking the Republicans into sticking together in the early days. But now there is a long proven track record to show that the strategy works really well. So the case for sticking together is now easy to make within the Republican caucus. So the danger of Republicans not sticking together is now very low.
The only risk left is that Republicans will not be able to find a "rock". Here too the risk is pretty illusory. Frequently the Democrats will give the game away as Rep. Shultz (and many other Democrats) did in this case. Democrats believe in a functioning government. Democrats believe in not holding the American people hostage. Democrats believe a lot of things. All the Republicans have to do is find a way to frame the debate in a manner that appears to put one of these Democratic beliefs in jeopardy. And it doesn't have to be real. Remember "government death panels". They didn't exist and weren't in the bill and insurance company death panels actually exist but their fictitious existence was enough of a threat to make Democrats jump through real hoops.
Now it is a necessary component of making the strategy work that the Republicans be willing to act in an irresponsible manner. And it must have been hard for some Republicans to take this step in the past. But everyone knows that the Democrats will do the responsible thing and pull the country back from the brink of disaster. How do we know? Because they have done it time after time before. The most obvious example from the recent past is TARP. TARP was a Bush initiative. Most people have forgotten that already. In spite of the fact that TARP was necessary to pull the entire economy back from the brink of disaster, and in spite of the fact that TARP was a Republican program, most of the people who voted against TARP were Republicans. TARP would not have passed without the heavy Democratic support it received.
Going a little further back in time, it was necessary to raise the debt limit in the Bush era. Now remember, if the Bush administration had acted in a fiscally responsible manner and not blown up the budget and moved the government from a surplus regime to a deficit regime, it would not have been necessary to raise the debt limit. But, as usual, most of the NO votes for raising the debt limit during the period when the Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislature and the White House came from Republicans. The bills would have failed and the government would have been shut down without the Democrats bailing out irresponsible Republicans.
I can think of no examples where Republicans took a hard vote in order to be responsible and bail out Democrats but there are many votes beyond the ones I have pointed out where Democrats took hard votes to bail out Republican irresponsibility. And the voting record of Republicans since Obama took office is a long litany of irresponsibility.
It would be nice if the "liberal" mainstream media consistently covered Republican irresponsibility. This week Jon Stewart has devotes several segments on "The Daily Show" to the "9/11 first responder" bill that would extend enhanced medical coverage to these people. He noted that ABC, NBC, and CBS have not covered this issue at all. Fox, the "all 9/11 all the time" network, has only mentioned it in passing, and then failed to report that it was being held up by Republicans. If the mainstream media had just missed the ball on this one story it would be understandable. But the mainstream media has missed the ball on the dozens of other similar situations where the Republicans have filibustered important legislation that is normally bipartisan. A current example is the Start II treaty. This has broad support among the Republican foreign policy establishment. Yet it is being held up solely by Republicans. In the Bush era any opponent to any military appropriation, no matter how larded up with pork, was branded by Republicans as a traitor or someone who "didn't support the troops" or all kinds of other bad things. Yet the Republicans in the Senate have twice unanimously voted to block the bill from even being allowed to come up for a vote and there has been nary a peep out of the mainstream media.
I could go on. But my point is that expecting Republicans to become reasonable and responsible any time soon is irresponsible. So what should be done? This has been going on for a long time. It can be traced back at least to Newt Gingrich in the early '90s. In that time a number of strategies have been tried. Mostly they have depended on Republicans coming around and being reasonable. Only one strategy has worked at all. It is the one I mentioned on a previous post. Clinton let the government be shut down twice in an argument with the GOP about the budget. Unfortunately, this is the only example where direct confrontation has been tried.
It is important to keep in mind that the climate is against Democrats. As I outlined above, the mainstream media has been captured by the Republicans. Republican talking points and spin dominate that slant taken by the mainstream media in their political coverage. As an example we are now talking about the deficit. Why? Because the Republicans want to talk about it. Most economists tell us that we should be increasing Federal spending to try to pull us out of our current deep recession. They also say that spending on public works is the most efficient way to pump up the economy and that tax cuts are the poorest. But we have just finished an election season dominated by talk of closing the deficit and cutting taxes. The Republicans just rode "closing the deficit and cutting taxes" to a big victory.
But cutting taxes makes it just that much harder to close the deficit. And Republican after Republican has claimed over and over that cutting taxes does not increase the deficit. Yet where is the "Republicans are full of shit" (or some more polite version of the same idea) coverage from the mainstream media? Now it is possible to cut taxes and close the deficit if you are willing to make draconian cuts to spending. With the expiration of Federal subsidies to States in the "it didn't work" (according to Republicans) stimulus bill, states are now being forced to make draconian cuts to their budgets and it's not pretty. So Republicans could salvage their credibility by proposing draconian cuts to the Federal budget. But, given the unpopularity of such cuts, there will be no serious effort by Republicans to make any large budget cuts. They can't even rein in in earmarks by their own people and all earmarks taken together amount to pocket change.
Democrats have reverted to their usual "spineless" posture. If the Republicans are in charge, as they were for six years during Bush, and if the Republicans manage to act feckless enough on their own, which they apparently did after the 2004 election, this can work for Democrats. But as their sole strategy it is bound to fail. Republicans have been the dominant party for most of the last 30 years. They are now on the rebound. Drastic action is required.
Again, as I indicated in a previous post, confrontation is required. If the other side does not take your threats seriously then the threats are ineffective. Republicans do not take threats from Obama or congressional Democrats seriously. Why should they? Democrats never deliver on the threat. The mainstream media also don't take these threats seriously. This is because the beltway punditocracy doesn't take these threats seriously. Several pundits have been caught out when Democrats caved on some issue. Many pundits have seen their stars rise when they predicted that Democrats would eventually cave when most people thought Democrats would stand fast. So at this point there is no reason for a beltway pundit to take a Democratic threat seriously. On the other hand everyone takes Republican threats seriously. Why? Because Republicans deliver on threats, even if delivering requires them to take an unpopular or irresponsible action.
There is only one way to rebalance the equation and that is for Democrats to make good on a threat. They have to walk away on a deal if the deal is not good enough even if this results in bad things happening. That's the only way. Now, this means doing something irresponsible. So it is important to pick the place to take a stand carefully. My opinion is that the Bush tax cuts was the best place.
Consider the alternatives. Should they take a stand on increasing the debt limit by opposing it? That has the effect of shutting the entire government down. How about the Defense budget? That has the effect of shutting the military down while we are in the middle of prosecuting two wars. What about the bill to fund the entire government? That's worse than the Defense bill. Compared to these the down side to the Bush tax cuts is small change. And look at the bill we actually got. Besides the major items like the Bush tax cuts and the extension of unemployment we got the whack to the estate tax, a very bad thing. And then we got a bunch of "corn husker kickback" type sweeteners for one special interest or another. It was a bad bill that will do a lot of harm. The best you can say about it is that "on balance it does more good than bad". In other words it the good is only a little greater than the bad.
Now it has taken only days for the consequences of the Democratic cave on this bill to surface. After months of negotiations and carefully worked out compromises the "omnibus" bill to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year has been blocked by Republicans. Why not? There is no downside risk for them. In the current "post Obama compromise" environment it will be easy for the Republicans to ring more concessions out of Democrats. In the "spineless Democrats" environment we operate in this is how things work. And it is going to continue to be how things work until Democrats grow a spine and fight back. And given their long record for spinelessness the Democrats are going to have to stand up a number of times before Republican behavior changes. And these confrontations will keep getting more painful the longer Democrats wait. And all of us will also have to live with the pain of bad Republican policies while all this is playing out.
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