Steve Benen has a piece on Republican obstructionism from Day 1 and the filibuster:
… there’s no real question as to whether Republicans will “go into full obstruction mode”; they already have. Literally on Joe Biden’s first full day in the White House, GOP senators said they would, en masse, reject his economic relief package and his immigration reform proposal, and there’s no reason to believe the party will adopt a more constructive posture in the coming months. …
… there are core truths that are inescapable:
The Senate does not and cannot function as an effective legislative body under its current rules.
Without a functioning Senate, federal policymaking has turned sclerotic in recent decades, and the problem will persist indefinitely without reforms.
In another post, he blames it on Senator McConnell (R-KY):
The circumstances are frustrating for those eager to see effective governing, but they shouldn’t surprise anyone. GOP leaders wrote a playbook the last time Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, and they’re obviously running the same plays again.
As we recently discussed, observers need only look at Mitch McConnell’s actions in early 2009 to get a sense of how the Kentucky Republican approaches his governing responsibilities when Democrats control the levers of federal power.
As I noted in my book, after President Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Republicans were under some pressure to be responsible and constructive, with many pleading with GOP officials to resist the urge to slap away the Democratic president’s outstretched hand. McConnell executed a different kind of plan, refusing to even consider bipartisan governing, even when Obama agreed with his opponents.
As the Kentuckian saw it, the public believes bipartisan bills are popular, so he rejected every element of the Democratic White House’s agenda so voters would not see Obama succeeding. “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell told The Atlantic in 2011, referring to legislation backed by the White House.
Here’s the executive version: The Democrats are playing the governance game – they try to implement good governance wherever possible, correct or mistaken, to confront the national problems that come upon us. In the end, they hope to be judged on how well they governed.
The Republicans play the Win power game – whatever it takes, they will keep the ideas of the Democrats from being passed into law, even if they agree with them. If it has Democrats’ fingerprints on it, it is anathema and must be stopped[1].
No matter what the cost is to the Nation.
We’ve since seen that Senator McConnell, and the balance of the Republican Party, really has no idea what to do with that power. The incompetence of the AHCA and the 2017 Tax Reform bills were so awful they were laughable.
But make no mistake, the incompatability of these strategies, the inferiority in terms of the good of the nation of the Republican strategy, is, definitionally, damaging to the nation. It matters not to the Republicans, who have long contended that conservative ideas are superior; this contention has proven hollow in their refusal to endorse any idea with Democratic endorsement, even when they brought it up, when they don’t control the Senate, as well as the vast incompetence they’ve shown in executing their own business.
And when it comes to economic aid to small business that President Biden endorses and the House passes and sends to the Senate? They’ll refuse to vote for that, too. Even though all disinterested economists endorse it. Even though our local bars and restaurants are going under. They’ll refuse to pass it, using filibusters if necessary.
Remember this from above?
Without a functioning Senate, federal policymaking has turned sclerotic in recent decades, and the problem will persist indefinitely without reforms.
And that frantic urge to power, that step towards Turchin’s internecine war of the elites, is what existentially threatens this nation. It’s one thing to work against a piece of legislature based on ideological principle; it’s quite another, and morally illicit, to work against a piece of legislature based on your pathological need for power. McConnell, and his ideological predecessor Newt “Quitter” Gingrich, may call it the long game, but I call it abdication of responsibility.
The electorate should be judging based on quality of governance, rather than making one side look bad while substantially damaging the nation.
1 This extends even to the naming of members of SCOTUS; see Judge Merrick Garland’s treatment.
