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Federal shutdown

Allowing Tea Party fanatics to rule through extortion undermines democracy

Posted 10/2/13

The showdown over the Affordable Care Act, which led to this week’s government shutdown, illustrates just how toxic the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has become to the body politic. …

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Federal shutdown

Allowing Tea Party fanatics to rule through extortion undermines democracy

Posted

The showdown over the Affordable Care Act, which led to this week’s government shutdown, illustrates just how toxic the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has become to the body politic.

Drawn-out fights over spending bills are nothing new for Congress. What is new is the willingness of Tea Party ideologues in Congress to use terroristic-like threats to achieve policy objectives they can’t win through the legislative process or the ballot box. The Affordable Care Act is the law. That’s a fact, albeit one that most Republicans have a hard time accepting.

But Republicans campaigned in 2012 on the repeal of Obamacare— and they lost the White House, the Senate, and they would have lost the House of Representatives if it were not for the extreme gerrymandering that Republicans engineered in a handful of key states in 2010. In fact, more Americans voted for Democrats for the House in 2012 than Republicans. The bottom line is: the GOP has no mandate whatsoever on this issue.

Rather than accepting the will of the voters, or working through the established legislative process, fanatics within the GOP are openly threatening to damage the interests of the United States if the Senate and President Obama don’t accede to the dismantling of Obamacare. Today, it’s the partial federal government shutdown. But in another couple weeks, the debt limit will become yet another opportunity for Republican extremists to undermine America’s interests.

This isn’t a question of two sides disagreeing. This is a matter of one faction resorting to tactics that virtually hijack our constitutional processes in a manner that is unprecedented in American history. Through their actions, these extremists demonstrate both their ignorance of our system of government and their utter disdain for the voters.

House Speaker John Boehner deserves much of the blame. While he probably would best be described as a moderate among the current cast of House Republicans, he has clearly lost the will to control the Tea Party ideologues who make up a sizeable portion of his caucus.

Boehner could end the shutdown today by bringing a clean continuing funding resolution to the House floor. A majority of House members, including Democrats and even some Republicans would support it. But Boehner fears that doing so could cost him his speakership. In other words, he’s putting his own personal rank and privilege above the interests of the country. It’s a disgrace.

Sadly, many Republicans don’t even understand that their party has lost its way. They’ve convinced themselves that their mission to eliminate Obamacare is embraced by a majority of Americans— a notion reinforced by conservative media outlets from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News, on which Republicans are increasingly reliant for their “information.” Many simply no longer listen to mainstream news sources, because they don’t reinforce their ideological views. That’s an extraordinarily dangerous practice for any group, and it’s left the Republican Party increasingly isolated from the rest of the country.

While a significant number of Americans are unhappy with Obamacare, in many cases that unhappiness comes from Democrats who favored a single-payer approach. Others are simply confused about how Obamacare will work. Their anxieties have been exploited by right-wing groups, funded in part by the Koch brothers, who continue to wage a campaign of misinformation about the law.

Regardless of what Americans think of the law, clear majorities in recent polls oppose defunding it and want the law improved, not dismantled.

And there’s a perfectly reasonable way to achieve that. Introduce legislation to incorporate changes, garner enough votes to get it passed and send it to the president to sign. That’s how the legislative process is supposed to work. You don’t hold the country’s budget and economy hostage while you extort demands on something that’s been the law of the land for four years.

Obama and Democrats in the Senate can’t blink in this confrontation. If they do, it will set the pattern for how this country operates for years to come. If a Republican faction can use such tactics to get Democrats to dismantle or unnecessarily delay the key centerpiece of the Obama administration, this country will be ruled by radical minorities for years to come. Republicans should expect that Democrats will use similar tactics, forcing a future conservative president to accept any of a long list of far-left policy planks or face shutdowns or debt defaults. That’s not a democratic system of governance. It’s little more than thuggery.

Politics in Washington today aren’t just partisan—they’re downright toxic, and our entire system of governance is badly infected. Ridding Washington of this infection may be painful, but it’s the only way that our system of government can survive. America is too great a country to be run by fanatics and extortionists.