Is the Republican Party schizophrenic? Are its members and supporters bipolar? The fight over sequestration, the party’s efforts to remake itself and the recent embrace of Obamacare by several Republican governors seem to answer both questions in the affirmative.
In the 2011 debt ceiling deal, Republicans and Democrats agreed to place a sword of Damocles over their heads. At the time, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders hailed the sequester as a “Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.” Now that the across-the-board budget cuts loom large on March 1, Republicans claim that it is all the President‘s fault. In addition, Republicans, who for months decried the cuts as ominous, now argue that maybe the cuts aren’t so bad after all. Yes, the sequester could lead to 700,000 people losing their jobs and major cuts to state aid, but that is a small price to pay for shrinking the size of the federal government, they now argue.
“The sequester is something of a political phenomenon,” Ed Rogers, a Republican political consultant who worked in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote in The Washington Post in declaring that the sequester may not be a disaster. “When it goes into effect, it will be one of the most significant things to occur in Washington in the last four years and oddly, none of the Congressional leadership nor the president is for it. Again, something big is about to happen that no one in power supports. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. Perhaps we should write more laws that declare if the president and Congress don’t act then spending cuts will ensue. We have never been particularly successful in slowing spending any other way.”
Boehner, who once embraced the sequester as a hammer that could be used to force spending cuts, now argues that the bipartisan agreement is actually “Obama’s sequester.” Instead of negotiating a deal to eliminate the sequester or even to delay it, Boehner and other Republicans have spent the last few weeks blaming the President.
“It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester’s going to go into effect,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said recently. “I have seen no evidence that the House plans to act on this matter before the end of the month.”
Faced with the sudden Republican shift on the sequester – remember Republicans and Democrats said the sequester should never, ever, ever happen – the party’s sycophants have been forced to engage in mental gymnastics in an effort to shift the blame to the President.
In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks argued that neither the Republican Party nor President Obama has a plan to avoid the sequester. That such a statement is patently false – the President and Senate Democrats have come up with a plan that calls for new revenue and budget cuts – does not matter to Brooks.
To Brooks, the sequester allows Democrats and Republicans to “dance the moves they enjoy the most:” the Permanent Campaign Shimmy for Democrats and the Suicide Stage Dive for Republicans.
“The conservative press is filling up with essays with titles like ‘Learning to Love Sequestration,’” Brooks wrote. “Of course, Republican legislators are screwing up their courage to embrace it. Of course, after the cuts hit and the furor rises, they are going to come crawling back with concessions as they do after every Suicide Stage Dive.”
Ron Fournier, of the National Journal, was even more schizophrenic is his recent column. Fournier, unlike Brooks, acknowledges that Obama has “reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans.” But Fournier says that while seeking compromise makes the President right, it does not negate his failure to reach a deal with a party that refuses to compromise.
“Is this fiscal standoff (the fifth since Republicans took control of the House in 2011) just about scoring political points, or is it about governing? If it’s all about politics, bully for Obama,” he wrote. “A majority of voters will likely side with the President over Republicans in a budget dispute because of his popularity and the GOP’s pathetic approval ratings.
“If it’s about governing, the story changes: In any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure. Sure, blame Congress – castigate all 535 lawmakers, or the roughly half you hate. But there is only one President. Even if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history.”
Such thinking is why so many are urging the Republicans to remake themselves, not just repackage their ideas.
In making his argument, Fournier quoted an op-ed in the Green Bay Post-Gazette by Rep. Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican. Ribble argued that Republicans must accept that new revenues must be considered if we are to deal with the nation’s debt. “Neither party is without fault,” Ribble wrote. “Republicans must confront their own conventional wisdom that says ‘The only way to shrink government is to starve it of resources.’”
Ribble is not the only Republican advocating that Republicans rethink their party and its ideas. In an article for Commentary magazine, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner argue that GOP leaders must recognize that that they cannot lash out at middle-class Americans as an undeserving 47 percent as Mitt Romney did. Instead, they must come up with ideas that help the bulk of Americans.
One way would be to seek policies that help “individuals attain the skills and values – the social capital – that allow them to succeed in a free economy,” the two wrote. “The Republican goal is equal opportunity, not equal results. But equality of opportunity is not a natural state; it is a social achievement, for which government shares a responsibility. The proper reaction to egalitarianism is not indifference. It is the promotion of a fluid society in which aspiration is honored and rewarded.“
They later added: “Instead of signaling that America is a closed society, which it is not and never has been, Republicans would do better to stress the assimilating power of American ideas – the power whereby strangers become neighbors and fellow citizens. In this connection, they would also do better, for themselves and for the country, to call for increasing the number of visas issued to seasonal and permanent farm workers; to champion a greater stress on merit and skill in admitting legal immigrants; and, for the 12 million or so undocumented workers in the United States, to provide an attainable if duly arduous path to legal status and eventually citizenship.”
Mostly, they argue that Republicans must begin to see themselves as champions of the collective, which may have been what drove some Republican governors to accept Obamacare after spending several years fighting it.
“This country is the greatest in the world, and it’s the greatest largely because of how we value the weakest among us,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in announcing that his state will expand Medicaid under Obamacare. “It shouldn’t depend on your Zip Code or on your tax bracket. No mother or father should despair over whether they have access to high-quality health care for their sick child.”
“I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians that needed access to health care,” he said.
Apparently Scott wasn’t the only Republican governor to grow a conscience. Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, urged his fellow lawmakers there to “examine your conscience” before opposing his plan to embrace the Medicaid expansion.
“I can’t look at the disabled, I can’t look at the poor, I can’t look at the mentally ill, I can’t look at the addicted and think we ought to ignore them,” Kasich said. “For those that live in the shadows of life, those who are the least among us, I will not accept the fact that the most vulnerable in our state should be ignored. We can help them.”
Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan and Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona also joined the chorus of Republicans singing the praises of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion
Yet even as they do, the party of Lincoln and its apologists continue to suffer from a personality disorder, unable to determine which way is up.
In the 2011 debt ceiling deal, Republicans and Democrats agreed to place a sword of Damocles over their heads. At the time, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders hailed the sequester as a “Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.” Now that the across-the-board budget cuts loom large on March 1, Republicans claim that it is all the President‘s fault. In addition, Republicans, who for months decried the cuts as ominous, now argue that maybe the cuts aren’t so bad after all. Yes, the sequester could lead to 700,000 people losing their jobs and major cuts to state aid, but that is a small price to pay for shrinking the size of the federal government, they now argue.
“The sequester is something of a political phenomenon,” Ed Rogers, a Republican political consultant who worked in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote in The Washington Post in declaring that the sequester may not be a disaster. “When it goes into effect, it will be one of the most significant things to occur in Washington in the last four years and oddly, none of the Congressional leadership nor the president is for it. Again, something big is about to happen that no one in power supports. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. Perhaps we should write more laws that declare if the president and Congress don’t act then spending cuts will ensue. We have never been particularly successful in slowing spending any other way.”
Boehner, who once embraced the sequester as a hammer that could be used to force spending cuts, now argues that the bipartisan agreement is actually “Obama’s sequester.” Instead of negotiating a deal to eliminate the sequester or even to delay it, Boehner and other Republicans have spent the last few weeks blaming the President.
“It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester’s going to go into effect,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said recently. “I have seen no evidence that the House plans to act on this matter before the end of the month.”
Faced with the sudden Republican shift on the sequester – remember Republicans and Democrats said the sequester should never, ever, ever happen – the party’s sycophants have been forced to engage in mental gymnastics in an effort to shift the blame to the President.
In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks argued that neither the Republican Party nor President Obama has a plan to avoid the sequester. That such a statement is patently false – the President and Senate Democrats have come up with a plan that calls for new revenue and budget cuts – does not matter to Brooks.
To Brooks, the sequester allows Democrats and Republicans to “dance the moves they enjoy the most:” the Permanent Campaign Shimmy for Democrats and the Suicide Stage Dive for Republicans.
“The conservative press is filling up with essays with titles like ‘Learning to Love Sequestration,’” Brooks wrote. “Of course, Republican legislators are screwing up their courage to embrace it. Of course, after the cuts hit and the furor rises, they are going to come crawling back with concessions as they do after every Suicide Stage Dive.”
Ron Fournier, of the National Journal, was even more schizophrenic is his recent column. Fournier, unlike Brooks, acknowledges that Obama has “reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans.” But Fournier says that while seeking compromise makes the President right, it does not negate his failure to reach a deal with a party that refuses to compromise.
“Is this fiscal standoff (the fifth since Republicans took control of the House in 2011) just about scoring political points, or is it about governing? If it’s all about politics, bully for Obama,” he wrote. “A majority of voters will likely side with the President over Republicans in a budget dispute because of his popularity and the GOP’s pathetic approval ratings.
“If it’s about governing, the story changes: In any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure. Sure, blame Congress – castigate all 535 lawmakers, or the roughly half you hate. But there is only one President. Even if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history.”
Such thinking is why so many are urging the Republicans to remake themselves, not just repackage their ideas.
In making his argument, Fournier quoted an op-ed in the Green Bay Post-Gazette by Rep. Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican. Ribble argued that Republicans must accept that new revenues must be considered if we are to deal with the nation’s debt. “Neither party is without fault,” Ribble wrote. “Republicans must confront their own conventional wisdom that says ‘The only way to shrink government is to starve it of resources.’”
Ribble is not the only Republican advocating that Republicans rethink their party and its ideas. In an article for Commentary magazine, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner argue that GOP leaders must recognize that that they cannot lash out at middle-class Americans as an undeserving 47 percent as Mitt Romney did. Instead, they must come up with ideas that help the bulk of Americans.
One way would be to seek policies that help “individuals attain the skills and values – the social capital – that allow them to succeed in a free economy,” the two wrote. “The Republican goal is equal opportunity, not equal results. But equality of opportunity is not a natural state; it is a social achievement, for which government shares a responsibility. The proper reaction to egalitarianism is not indifference. It is the promotion of a fluid society in which aspiration is honored and rewarded.“
They later added: “Instead of signaling that America is a closed society, which it is not and never has been, Republicans would do better to stress the assimilating power of American ideas – the power whereby strangers become neighbors and fellow citizens. In this connection, they would also do better, for themselves and for the country, to call for increasing the number of visas issued to seasonal and permanent farm workers; to champion a greater stress on merit and skill in admitting legal immigrants; and, for the 12 million or so undocumented workers in the United States, to provide an attainable if duly arduous path to legal status and eventually citizenship.”
Mostly, they argue that Republicans must begin to see themselves as champions of the collective, which may have been what drove some Republican governors to accept Obamacare after spending several years fighting it.
“This country is the greatest in the world, and it’s the greatest largely because of how we value the weakest among us,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in announcing that his state will expand Medicaid under Obamacare. “It shouldn’t depend on your Zip Code or on your tax bracket. No mother or father should despair over whether they have access to high-quality health care for their sick child.”
“I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians that needed access to health care,” he said.
Apparently Scott wasn’t the only Republican governor to grow a conscience. Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, urged his fellow lawmakers there to “examine your conscience” before opposing his plan to embrace the Medicaid expansion.
“I can’t look at the disabled, I can’t look at the poor, I can’t look at the mentally ill, I can’t look at the addicted and think we ought to ignore them,” Kasich said. “For those that live in the shadows of life, those who are the least among us, I will not accept the fact that the most vulnerable in our state should be ignored. We can help them.”
Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan and Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona also joined the chorus of Republicans singing the praises of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion
Yet even as they do, the party of Lincoln and its apologists continue to suffer from a personality disorder, unable to determine which way is up.
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