Elections 2010: Throw All the Bums Out!

“Throw all the bums out. They are only concerned with protecting their own jobs and their party’s power, not with what’s best for the nation!” is a fair paraphrase of the sentiment many feel about congress as a whole. It embodies a certain amount of truth, and in other years I could well side with those who feel that way. Not this year.

In a Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner, President Obama recounted how in the opening days of his presidency—with the country in danger of falling into another great depression—which no responsible person advocates—he and his team shaped a recovery package “put together on the theory that we shouldn't exclude any ideas on the basis of ideological predispositions.”

With this in hand President Obama arranged to meet with the Republican caucus to “present our ideas, and to solicit ideas from them before we presented the final package.”

Surprisingly, “on the way over [to the meeting], the [Republican] caucus essentially released a statement that said, ‘We're going to all vote “No” as a caucus.’ And this was before we'd even had the conversation. At that point, we realized that we weren't going to get the kind of cooperation we'd anticipated.”

That is putting it mildly. Once Obama took office the Republicans dug in for two years of unprecedented partisan warfare—and that is not hyperbole. This warfare can most easily be measured by the abuse of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate.

The filibuster is a procedural move in the Senate which prevents voting on a piece of legislation unless a “super-majority” of 60 Senators vote for cloture (this is not voting for the bill but merely voting to allow the Senate to vote for the bill).

In the 109^th congress, when the Democrats were last the minority in the Senate, they used the filibuster 68 times, in the 110^th Congress, the minority Republicans used the filibuster 139 times—more than twice as often—and they have used it 118 times as of the last published tally in the ongoing 111^th congress.

This Republican obstructionism has greatly slowed the pace of legislative activity and completely derailed some of President Obama’s legislative agenda (e.g. the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” which would have easily passed a majority vote.).

This is not to say that there is no partisanship on the Democratic side, but in the last two years the Republicans have been the greater offenders. Notably the President and the Democratic leadership, particularly in the Senate, have been criticized by commentators on the left for continuing to try to reach out to the Republicans.

Consider the battle over Health Care Reform, we lost the “Public Option” in order to gain the minimum Republican support necessary to move the bill through the Senate. At an earlier stage, after the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee adopted 160 Republican amendments to the bill, it passed the committee on a strictly party-line vote. Not a single Republican voted for it.

David Frum, a commentator and conservative political activist possessing all the human warmth of a Gila monster, provides an analysis which details the Republican’s decision to refuse bipartisan involvement in the development of the Health Care Reform bill (Waterloo) in which he states:

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994. . .

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

This pointless and erroneous vilification of the president and unwillingness to work with the Democrats in any meaningful fashion has been the hallmark of the Republican strategy since Obama has been elected.  

And yes, if you are a mind to you can find instances of Democratic tactics designed to push legislation through over the top of Republican objections, but in this congress the Republican’s laid down the gauntlet and the Democrats have had little choice. They could push bills through or not pass any meaningful legislation.

The question now is “are we going to reward the Republicans for creating an atmosphere where bipartisanship was not merely rare but impossible by allowing them to gain seats in the House and the Senate?” I say no. If you are in a “throw the bums out” mood, hold the Republicans accountable (they like to talk about accountability) and throw them out.

You can’t encourage bipartisanship by voting for the party most responsible for preventing any bipartisan cooperation, nor by staying home and letting that party win by default. Vote to throw the bums out . . . but only the bums.