Twenty years ago, as I was tooling up to a grad school career in political science, I watched the shift happening in the GOP. I watched the 1988 Presidential campaign, and the 1992 Presidential campaign, and how H. Ross Perot could pull 19% of the vote despite the fact that most of his supporters probably considered Bush their second choice and knowing full well Perot couldn’t land a single electoral vote. I watched Newt Gingrich laying the groundwork for a takeover of the Congressional GOP. I watched long-term incumbent Congressmen and Senators retire in the South, to be replaced by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.
And I declared then and there that we were headed for a second American Civil War. And here we are.
We have states attempting nullification. We have an entire party in Congress holding not only the federal budget but the full faith and credit of the United States hostage…unless the Democrats and the President willingly give up on the single biggest policy priority of his administration. The bill passed in both houses, with a supermajority in the Senate necessitated by the unprecedented abuse of the filibuster. It passed Constitutional muster with the Supreme Court. The President who signed the law was re-elected handily. The Senate stayed in the hands of the party that passed it. And more votes were cast for Democrats than Republicans in the House, but the House stayed Republican by dint of gerrymandered districts.
And yet, the House demands that Obamacare cease to exist. That’s the negotiating position: give us what we could not get by legislative or electoral means, or we will force a default. And then, a bunch of shuck-and-jive about how a default wouldn’t be that bad, and it’s all the President’s fault because he can just pay the interest on the debt and we ought to get rid of 32% of the government anyway, la-di-da. Which is the consequence of enabling stupidity.
Medicare. Social Security. Defense. Pick one. Once you’ve paid the interest on the debt, one of those is going to get hit badly if you re-order priorities, because those three plus the interest amount to three-quarters of the Federal budget. And because 32 is greater than 25, that means that you’re talking about getting rid of every single thing the federal government does, plus gouging one of those three.
This is what we get. This is the inevitable result of the golden mean, the constant search for false equivalence, the pious Villager nonsense of “both sides do it, a plague on both your houses.” This is the price of acting as if people constantly braying about taking back the country as they demand to carry guns in Starbucks and threaten citizen juries to arrest all Congressmen are anything but fucking nutjobs who should be in a home, not treated as equal participants in political debate. This is what happens when an entire political party crafts its message and its purpose around “live in fear,” and then is too terrified of its own sociopaths to act against them.
It’s time for the President to embrace the power of no. No negotiations. No bargains. No face-saving gestures. The GOP owns this until they back down. The United States is not a hostage for Confederates to bargain with for what they couldn’t win by fair means or force of arms. It stops now.
Uncle Sam’s got the hydrogen bomb.