When Olympia Snowe recently announced her retirement from the Senate, she cited partisan gridlock as the reason for her departure. She neutrally accused both sides of the aisle of creating the impasse. It is my observation that most people who consider themselves in the political center like Snowe seem to err on the side of Republicans. When Republicans deserve blame for something, both Republicans and Democrats get called out for it. It is what I hear when Snowe assigns blame for Senate gridlock on “both sides.” Anyone who fairly catalogs the craftiness that has grinded congressional activity to a halt will be tracking elephant prints.
In her vague indictment, Snowe wrote “In fact, the Senate’s requirement of a supermajority to pass significant legislation encourages its members to work in a bipartisan fashion.” It’s not that this statement is false. It is true, but she omits some facts that get to the root of the problem. No one ever talked about a “supermajority” before Obama’s tenure as president. It became important because a supermajority of 60 senators is what it takes to block a filibuster, the parliamentary tool used by the minority party to block votes on measures they oppose. The filibuster has a sordid history in the Senate, but nothing in its narrative matches the dramatic spike in its use by Senate Republicans since Obama took office.
The so-called liberal media (everything that isn't News Corporation-owned) has addressed how contrary today’s senate Republicans are in invoking the filibuster at a record pace. The complaint of the necessity for a supermajority to get any legislation passed, therefore, is not one that can in any way be pinned on Democrats. Over the past three years, Republicans have used the filibuster to reform government... into the one of the biggest American embarrassments ever.
Snowe currently serves in the Senate under a minority leader who famously announced that his single most important job was to defeat Barack Obama. The party in the minority is not constitutionally obliged to bend to the party in power, but it was never the American tradition for the minority party to shut down America until they could win back power. McConnell is doing his best to furlough America, doing as much as he can to make sure there is no progress on the American agenda in order to keep a political opponent from getting any credit. Real mature.
The coalition of the Olympia Snowes and lazy centrists look at McConnell’s actions and 1) attribute them to “the typical tricks played by BOTH sides” and, 2) blame ALL of Congress for his petty peevishness. The difference is that Snowe knows better. She has been there and she knows that there has been no Democratic coalition in the Senate that has behaved so childishly. I believe that her motivation for trying to spread the blame equally among the two parties might be to make the rest of her tenure go smoothly. If she honestly fingered McConnell and the resentful Obama-hating Republicans as the sole culprits of gridlock, she would assuredly be targeted by her party for retribution. I have a feeling that once she has retired she will be more free to discuss how Republican lack of respect for American traditions of governance made an unprecedented bad turn in 2009.
I laugh at polls for the fact that they often show how American public opinion conflicts with itself. In spite of a Republican party that has offered little more to the policy discussion than “cut taxes and regulation,” Americans give Republicans an edge in trust in handling a variety of issues YET a majority of Americans don’t believe Republicans in Congress share the same priorities as average Americans. It boggles the mind.
Witness the contradiction in these two different polls. The first, a CBS poll that shows an overwhelming number of Americans supporting the Democratic position of raising taxes on the wealthy.
Yet this second AP-Gfk poll puts Democrats and Republicans even as far as which party people trust in handling taxes though the majority of Americans, we now know, oppose the Republican tax position.
The encouragement I feel is therefore tempered when I see this Pew poll below:
There it is. It seems Americans put more trust in the party they trust the least. Republicans are seen as less cooperative, more extreme, less capable, and less honest, yet are forgiven so readily to the point where they currently tie or surpass Democrats in confidence to deliver.
America is like the bar where everyone puts up with the one troubled sumbitch patron that never leaves. It keeps everyone on edge. No one can really have a good time. They laugh at his unfunny jokes to stay on his good side. Whenever he's asked to leave, it's always tentative. Everyone watches when he tears the place up, and when the cops come to haul him away, everyone cusses out the cops.
I still think Obama has an edge in the election but as the first president to need a supermajority to get anything done, his effectiveness in a second term will be limited. He will continue to be hobbled by the sumbitch no one is willing to ban from the bar. As I've said before, America truly gets the government it deserves.
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