In 2007, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and had deep political differences with then-President George W. Bush. Yet they passed a clean debt limit increase, with about as many Democrats as Republicans voting “aye.” But imagine, for a moment, that Democrats had held the House two years earlier, in the fall of 2005, less than a year after Bush’s re-election. And imagine further that in exchange for not breaching the debt limit and bringing economic catastrophe down on the citizens of the United States, they had demanded that the Republican Senate pass, and the Republican president sign into law, all of the following: single-payer health-care, a federal living wage law (indexed to inflation, of course), the elimination of all oil subsidies, a roll-back of Bush’s tax cuts on high earners, strict limits on campaign financing, new regulations of greenhouse gas emissions and an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. This imagined list of 2005 demands is no further from the majority’s agenda than what House Republicans offered Democrats and the White House last week. Yet it’s hard to imagine that Politico would have dismissed this 2005 list as merely “demands for reform,” or that Time would have suggested that such maneuvers were routine — the narrative would have been that Dems had gone completely bonkers. The difference is that, with a demographic tide going against them, Republicans have gradually jettisoned the norms that make democratic governance possible. First they filibustered virtually everything. Then they started creating these annual budget showdowns to fight for cuts in taxes and spending. Now they’re using the budget battle to advance the entire legislative agenda of the hard right.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 08:10:10 +0000
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