What's the Matter with Senate Republicans?

Some Democrats in Congress are a stickler for bipartisanship. Rather than having the courage of their convictions, they seek the "political cover" that only bipartisanship can provide. Like I said yesterday, when a bill is truly bipartisan, no one can be blamed if the new policy fails. Politicians find that their careers are longer when they are know for nothing in particular. Faceless members of Congress tend to last longer than those who create a ruckus (and enemies). In the interest of keeping their jobs, most practice a "go-with-the-flow" mentality. Whether you're in the majority or minority, that means not rocking the boat by challenging the status quo.

It's no surprise then that when Democrats propose big policy overhauls--such as the Affordable Care Act, Financial Reform, or the START treaty--they seek Republicans support to help provide political cover just in case the Democrats find their new policy to be unpopular. When everyone is responsible, no one is.

Some Democrats, such as Robert Wexler, Nancy Pelosi, or Al Franken, believe that it doesn't matter what kind of backing their supported policy has--as long as it's enough to get it passed. If a new policy is good for the nation, it doesn't matter whether it has 109 Democrats and 109 Republicans supporting it or just 218 Democrats. At the end of the day, all that matters is that it's passed.

Chris Dodd, Max Baucus, and Barack Obama aren't like that. They pride themselves on getting bipartisan support for their proposals. We saw that last summer, when Max Baucus held long meetings with Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee regarding the Democrats' number one domestic priority:

Mr. Obama, in his news conference last week, praised the three Republicans in the Senate group — Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Ms. Snowe. Mr. Grassley, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, and Mr. Baucus share a history of deal-making, and group members said they share a sense of trust despite the partisan acrimony that pervades the Capitol.

Mr. Enzi, who sits on both the Finance Committee and the health committee, has a long record on health issues but found Democrats on the health panel unwilling to compromise.

And Ms. Snowe, one of two centrist Republicans, often teams with Democrats as she did on the economic stimulus plan this year.

After the group insisted it needed more time, the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, conceded that a floor vote would have to wait until after the summer recess. “If this is the only bill with bipartisan support,” Ms. Snowe said, “that will really resonate. It could be the linchpin for broad bipartisan agreement.”

In the end, only Senator Snowe voted the measure out of committee, but she quickly reversed herself and voted against every other iteration of the bill.

Baucus justified giving up his bipartisan dream because Grassley couldn't bring along extra Republicans to support the very watered-down measure. Even when he gave the Republican caucus half a loaf, they still batted it away. Grassley's word held no sway, and soon he abandoned the legislation he helped craft:

A few months ago, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa positioned himself to be the key GOP player in negotiations to advance President Obama’s top domestic priority — overhauling the nation’s health care system.

As ranking minority member on the Senate Finance Committee, Grassley has been a leading voice in the committee’s bipartisan “Gang of Six” that had been struggling to hammer out a bill before Congress recessed for August.

But Grassley’s evolution — from legislator once complimented by Obama for his willingness to work across the aisle to one of the president’s chief critics on health care — is a sign that the chances for passing a bipartisan health care bill have all but disintegrated. And as Grassley has pivoted from defending bipartisan work on a Senate bill to criticizing a competing House bill, he has increasingly sown confusion over just where he stands in negotiations to overhaul health care.

Senator Dodd has been following a similar pattern recently regarding financial reform. The House has already passed a moderately strong financial reform bill. Dodd has crafted a bill of his own and, ignoring the lessons learned during the health care fight, and did everything he could to get Republican support:

Dodd and Corker had spent weeks trying to hammer out an agreement on financial regulations, including new consumer protections for financial products.

"We have made significant progress and resolved many of the items, but a few outstanding issues remain," Dodd said in a statement.

President Barack Obama supports a standalone Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). But the proposal ran into stiff resistance in the Senate and fervent opposition from financial industry lobbyists and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In addition to consumer protections, Corker said another key sticking point remains regulation of financial derivatives.

Dodd said that he continues to pursue a bipartisan "consensus" package, but he believes pushing forward to committee debate is "the best course of action to achieve that end."

“I have been fortunate to have a strong partner in Sen. Corker, and my new proposal will reflect his input and the good work done by many of our colleagues as well," Dodd said. “Our talks will continue, and it is still our hope to come to agreement on a strong bill all of the Senate can be proud to support very soon."

Dodd worked over Senator Bob Corker, making concessions in the futile attempt to get his support. While Corker says he was close to supporting the bill, Dodd walked away from negotiations because Corker was unable to bring a single other Republicans on board. Corker could not promise Dodd that his weaker legislation would receive any Republican votes. Corker even attacked the Republican caucus for not supporting his efforts at crafting a bipartisan bill:

"We had an opportunity to pass out a bill out of our committee in a bipartisan way, and then stand on the Senate floor and hold hands and say that we would keep amendments that were unnecessary and improper from coming onto this bill," Corker said. "Instead of that, it's been decided that we are going to try to negotiate now ...

"I think it's going to be far more difficult now that this has passed out of committee ... I think we have made a very, very large mistake, and I regret that."

Banking committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) told HuffPost that "what [Corker] said was his Republican leadership abandoned him."

"They decided they wanted to say 'No' again," Dodd said. "So we went ahead ... If you don't even want to offer yours, I couldn't -- if anyone wanted to offer amendments, I would have been there. They made a decision not to. That was their call. Not mine. And listen, I understand why they wanted to do it."

This is beginning to be a familiar tale: Democrats want to compromise, but they are unable to find a single Republican to take that up on their offer. And if there is one Republican interested, they are never able to bring along a large portion of their caucus.

This pattern can even be found in foreign affairs:

Despite this treaty having extensive bi-partisan support among senior foreign policy officials – such as George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Richard Lugar (R-IN), Colin Powell –ratification is far from assured. There are real questions over whether the Senate GOP will seek to obstruct the ratification of the treaty. Treaties require a two-thirds majority, therefore eight or nine Republican votes are needed to ratify this treaty. If the Senate GOP wants to kill it they can. Therefore if ratification becomes a fight – it will not be a fight between Republicans and Obama, it will be a fight within the Republican caucus – between moderates and the far right.

In a sign of how extreme the GOP Senate leadership has become, Bloomberg reported, following word the treaty was done, that “Senate Republicans would object to linkages similar to the one in the 1991 treaty.” In other words, what was acceptable to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, would not be acceptable to Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ).

Even Dick Lugar, the most senior Republican in the Senate, can't bring support on board for a treaty that seems entirely reasonable.

I think this shows exactly how strong a hold the far-right has on the Republican party. Rather than evaluate legislation on its merits, it's being judged based on its sponsors. While bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake can be a damaging thing, blind partisanship can be just as bad, if not worse. Policy between the two parties are to be expected and can be a great thing, but reflexive revulsion to anything your political opponents propose, no matter how mainstream the idea, is ultimately damaging to the country. If anything that is proposed by the Democrats has 41 members of the Senate instantly opposed to it, it's very difficult to get anything done.

Of course, this strategy can seriously backfire on the clueless Republicans when the Democrats practically beg them to let them compromise:

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

This can be damaging for the Republicans for two reasons:

1) The law is the law. The Affordable Care Act, and soon financial services reform, will not be repealed. Republicans let the possibility of a weaker bill slip through their fingers.

2) If the new laws becomes popular, they will never be able to take credit. The voters will know exactly who to reward (or blame).

If the Democrats can learn their lesson that negotiating with this batch of Republicans is a futile exercise that will never yield meaningful results, they stand to reap great rewards. They should learn their lesson well...because it's obvious that the Republicans never will.

What's the Matter with Senate Republicans?

The Case for Partisanship

Today, when unveiling the Administration's new plan for opening hunderds of miles of coastline for oil drilling, President Obama justified the new policy by saying:

So the answer is not drilling everywhere all the time. But the answer is not, also, for us to ignore the fact that we are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security. Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again.

This is a common tactic for Obama, and one that he's used during his entire time on the national scene. He describes a position on the "left" (drilling "has no place"), a position on the "right" ("drilling is a cure all"), and emphasizes that his position falls somewhere in the middle. His approach, he says, is the pragmatic, centrist approach that rejects the extremes of both sides. By following a cross-ideological, if not bipartisan approach, Obama hopes to convince people that he's found the real solutions to our problems.

This tactic (some call it "Hippie-punching", where Obama attacks a strawman caracture of a traditionally liberal position) pops up in many of the President's policy addresses:

...it’s absolutely true this is a middle-of-the-road bill. This isn’t single-payer, which some people wanted. It’s also not what the Republicans were looking for, which was basically to deregulate the insurance industry, arguing that somehow this would cut down costs -- something that defies the experience of everybody who’s dealt with an insurance company out there.

Even back in 2004, during his epic DNC speech, Obama was echoing this theme:

Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you: They don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon.

The message here being that conservatives would like to waste your tax money on the Pentagon, while liberals would like to waste it on welfare. The correct approach--Obama's approach--is to do neither; He will instead make a conscious decision to always use tax dollars responsibly.

One positive aspect this rhetorical tactic has is that Obama, as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, paints the entire party in this flattering light. While individual policy proposals, such as single-payer, may be thrown overboard, the entire party is spoken of as pragmatists, not partisans. It's no wonder that the Democrats still have a large advantage in party ID and their ideological coalition spans the spectrum from progressive to center-right, from Russ Feingold to Ben Nelson:



Fortunately, the Democrats are now pursuing an active, if not progressive agenda in Congress and have many accomplishments to their name. From the Lilly Ledbetter Act to the Affordable Care Act, the Democrats in Washington have gotten plenty done over the past 14 months. Many of these achievements have been with centrist ideas that would have gained vast bipartisan support if the Republicans in Congress were intellectually honest and weren't paid to vote otherwise.

In a way, I'm glad that the Republicans in Congress have rejected the "pragmatic" approach of Obama and have voted as a block against nearly everything supported by the President. It's very healthy for our democratic republic to have clear and understandable differences between our political parties.

Take, for example, the issue of Civil Rights in the 1960 Presidential election. On the one hand, John F. Kennedy, a junior Senator with few legislative accomplishments, was running for President alongside Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader who passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which had the goals of protecting voting rights in the southern states. On the Republican ticket, there was Richard Nixon, who had previously met with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. at the White House and was the Vice President to Ike Eisenhower, who enthusiastically supported Brown v. Board and used federal troops in Little Rock to integrate public schools.

On a national level, there was little difference between the two parties when it came to civil rights matters. MLK himself refused to endorse either candidate, at least until the Kennedys, late in the campaign, became personally involved in trying to free him from jail. While there were large differences between the liberals and conservatives in the country over civil rights matters, there was no way to vote on a national level on that issue. Civil rights advocates around the country couldn't vote on their signature issue. Due to the fact that both parties contained liberal and conservative wings, it was impossible to distinguish between the two. Kennedy and Nixon, on this issue as well as many others, were almost identical, in both their records and their accomplishments.

The more the two parties have in common, the harder it is for low-information voters to make a decision in an election. Shortcuts, such as party ID or a candidate's personal background, help voters decide which candidate would best represent their interests. This increases their chances of choosing correctly. But if we don't want people using those shortcuts, then we must have clear divides between the two parties.

Partisanship also helps with accountability. If one party is in charge and can unabashedly push through their legislative agenda, then the voters know exactly who to reward or punish come the next election. When you have muddled legislation with a hundred parents from both parties, it's next to impossible for the voting public to decide who gets the credit and who gets the blame. While this may be a feature for members of Congress, it certainly does no favor for our democracy.

Today, Obama and the Democrats in Congress are passing legislation that they repeatedly claim takes ideas from both parties, from both sides of the ideological divide. If the Republicans were to actually support their own proposals, the Federal Government would be made up of one giant governing coalition where all legislators would be able to take credit when things go well and deflect blame when they fail. When there is no difference between the parties, people can't be expected to make intelligent choices at the ballot box, and therefore there can be no accountability.

I suppose we should thank the Republicans. By holding their breath and stomping their feet, they are the true guardians of democracy.

The Case for Partisanship