Mike Lee: Republicans Will Shut Down Government To Block Obamacare (Huffington Post)
I usually don’t get too in-depth with the taxonomies of rhetoric with my students — unless you’re going to study rhetoric professionally, it’s really of little use — but I try to make a point of mentioning the problems with what are known as “arguments of definition.” That’s an argument where the parties involved cannot even agree just what is being argued about. I usually mention this in reference to debates about abortion; the problem of defining just where life begins, and who has the authority to make that decision, makes the abortion debate nearly impossible to engage in because arguing parties usually disagree on whether a fetus — the main point of the argument — is a living being. Usually this is the full extent of abortion discussion in one of my classes, but with the abortion clinic closings here in Toledo earlier this year, and with Toledo women likely needing to drive to Cleveland or Columbus to get an abortion after the measures passed into Ohio law a few weeks ago, it’s been hard to avoid the topic of abortion in class.
It feels like the whole debate about the processes by which our government runs is becoming akin to an argument of definition. Debates over the proper size and role of government have been going on since the first democracies, but the means by which our government operates have never, in my lifetime, been so contentious, and the rate at which this is changing has become nothing short of exponential in these past few years. It’s like the Republican and Democratic parties are engaged in a huge game that affects hundreds of millions of people, but they aren’t in agreement about the game’s most basic rules, and the Republicans continue to change those rules to try to ensure that only they can ever win. If one of the parties in our (fustercluck of a) two-party system is now seriously considering shutting the entire government down to get one piece of legislation repealed, then we may be about to go completely off the rails as a nation.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment where Republicans adopted the “win at any costs” mentality that has come to define them in recent years. The mid-nineties Republicans of the Republican Revolution, emboldened by taking Congress over in the 1994 midterms, actually shut the government down to try to squeeze concessions out of President Clinton, but that strategy is widely considered to have backfired. There were noticeable changes in Republican strategy after the 2000 elections and Karl Rove became the political wunderkind of his era, and Republicans’ subsequent victories in 2002 and 2004, and their post 09.11 absolutism (“You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”) echoes loudly to this day. The party seemed to lose its way after Democrats retook Congress in 2006, but by the time Barack Obama entered his first summer as President, there was a new Republican-conservative apparatus in place that, as the breakaway Tea Partiers were enfolded back into the big red tent, reeked of a monolithic desperation that effectively paralyzed the common sense and pragmatism that used to be readily evident in at least some parts of the party.
The most visible manifestations of this so far have been in the machinations of Congress. Use of the filibuster in the Senate had been on the rise for several years, but after President Obama took office, Republicans made it a de facto operating rule that you had to get sixty percent of the Senate to agree on a bill before it can get passed. The tool intended to protect against the “tyranny of the majority” has created a new tyranny of the minority that, itself alone, has tremendously crippled the legislative branch these past four and a half years. In the House of Representatives, where the majority has near-total power, Republicans have made sure that bills they don’t agree with don’t even get on the schedule to be debated after they took control back over following the 2010 midterms; given the countrywide gerrymandering of congressional districts that state Republicans engaged in at the same time, it’s all but certain that Republicans will maintain control of the House for at least the next decade.
In 2006, after Democrats’ big midterm wins gave them control of both houses of Congress, there was tittering in some circles about Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi using their newfound power to abruptly end the Iraq War by simply refusing to pass any defence bill that gave more money for President Bush to continue the war effort. It was never a serious consideration for any elected Democrats, though; as much as they may have opposed the war, they knew that defunding our military would be grossly irresponsible and not a politic way to show their opposition . It would also set a dangerous precedent for when Republicans took control of Congress back, because then they could gum up the whole of government in any way they wanted, then point a finger back in history and say, “The Democrats started it!”
As it turns out, the Republicans didn’t even need that excuse, because if Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and their ilk are to be believed, they are willing to shut down the whole of the United States government if they don’t get their way and have the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare, or whatever you prefer to call it) repealed. Games of chicken aren’t exactly uncommon in Congress, but they have never been played to this extent before, with so much at stake for ordinary Americans.
Although public support for the Affordable Care Act is still tepid at best, and still trailing behind opposition, the percentage of Americans who oppose Obamacare is still below 50%, so there is a huge chunk of undecided Americans — rightly so, since many of the laws’ provisions are not yet in effect — who are open to influence. In addition, there’s a long history in this country of social programmes like Obamacare gaining public support over the years. That history is not absolute, and there are certainly reasons to believe that Obamacare will lose popularity over time, but it’s certainly smart of Republicans to want to nip Obamacare in the bud now, before it gets a chance to get more support.
The thing is, Republicans have had two election cycles, including a presidential election, to campaign against Obamacare and everything else they think President Obama and Congressional Democrats have done, or want to do, to “destroy America.” (In other words, everything they’ve done.) They retook one house of Congress, but not the other, and not only did they lose seats in both houses in the last election, but Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, which featured the repeal of Obamacare as one of its key talking points, failed decisively. That was eight months ago, hardly ancient history by anyone’s definition.
Republicans lost this debate when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010. They’ve now had two opportunities to re-prosecute the debate, and they failed to win convincingly either time; if anything, the most recent battle was a clear loss for their side. There was a time when Republicans understood what an election defeat meant, and for a time after last November we saw some pragmatism on Republicans’ part when they let the marginal tax rate creep back up to their Clinton presidency levels. Between the increasing likelihood of Republican stubbornness killing immigration reform, and this stunning brinkmanship with the Affordable Care Act, it seems clear that Republicans simply do not care that they have lost these fights, and they are willing to do anything, regardless of how much jeopardy they put the nation in, to get their way.
I have my issues with parts of Obamacare, but regardless of how I feel about the issue, or even what issue is being debated, shutting down the entire government — leaving so many government employees without pay, shutting our nation’s most vulnerable citizens out of the social services they need to meet their basic needs (and have paid for with their own tax dollars) — over one issue, regardless of its popularity, is so ludicrous that it defies description. Every time I think that the Republican Party — not the amorphous blob of American conservatism, but the actual, elected, in-political-power, these-people-can-do-some-serious-things Republican Party — has demonstrated that it lacks the basic maturity and pragmatism and common sense to function as a part of government, they somehow manage to do something even crazier and more bat-guano insane than before.
Perhaps this is just another ear-piercing shriek from the ultra-far-right wing of the Republican Party that will fail to materialize when the time comes for actual action, but given how they’ve been acting in recent weeks, I wouldn’t count on it. If this threat of a government shutdown comes to reality, then we have a dangerous new precedent for the depths Congressional Republicans will stoop to in order to get their way, regardless of popular opinion, regardless of their numbers in the House and Senate, regardless of the most basic and uncontroversial ideas of how an elected body in a democracy should use their power.
If Democrats hold their ground and the shutdown happens, then tens of millions of Americans will suffer, a suffering that will only increase as the shutdown lingers. If Democrats give in, then this shocking tactic is validated and Republicans essentially have carte blanche to rule over the whole of the government because they can always use the threat of government shutdown to get exactly what they want. There are no winners in either situation, and there will be unspeakable harm done to this country and its people unless Republicans hit the brakes now and stop this senseless game of chicken.
In the meantime, all I’m getting on the news tonight is that some royal family on another continent had a new offspring today. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about this.