This is a must–read column for at least two reasons.
1.
He concisely identifies the most important conflict we face
today: a party that has turned its back
on compromise and democracy.
2.
He reminds us that perhaps the single best illustration of
this is that this party focuses its energy on passionately opposing their own
ideas because the other side embraced them in an effort to forge a compromise
so democracy can thrive: subsidizing a
private sector approach to health care instead of replacing it with a
government run public approach.
Read this column: ‘This fall, every important domestic issue
could crash into every other: health care reform, autopilot budget cuts, a
government shutdown, even a default on the national debt.
If
I were betting, I’d wager we will somehow avoid a total meltdown. House Speaker
John Boehner seems desperate to get around his party’s Armageddon Caucus.
But
after three years of congressional dysfunction brought on by the rise of a
radicalized brand of conservatism, it’s time to call the core questions:
Will
our ability to govern ourselves be held perpetually hostage to an ideology that
casts government as little more than dead weight in American life? And will a
small minority in Congress be allowed to grind decision-making to a halt?
Congress
is supposed to be the venue in which we Americans work our way past divisions
that are inevitable in a large and diverse democracy. Yet for some time,
Republican congressional leaders have given the most right-wing members of the
House and Senate a veto power that impedes compromise, and thus governing
itself.
On
the few occasions when the far-right veto was lifted, Congress got things done,
courtesy of a middle-ground majority that included most Democrats and the more
moderately conservative Republicans. That’s how Congress passed the modest tax
increases on the well-off that have helped reduce the deficit as well as the
Violence Against Women Act and assistance for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.
All
these actions had something in common: They were premised on the belief that
government can take practical steps to make American life better.
This
idea is dismissed by those ready to shut the government down or to use the debt
ceiling as a way of forcing the repeal or delay of the Affordable Care Act and
passing more draconian spending reductions. It needs to be made very clear that
these radical Republicans are operating well outside their party’s own
constructive traditions.
Before
their 2010 election victory, Republicans had never been willing to use the
threat of default to achieve their goals. The GOP tried a government shutdown
back in the mid-1990s, but it was a political disaster. Experienced Republicans
are trying to steer their party away from the brink, the very place where
politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz and a group of fourscore or so House members
want it to go.
Particularly
instructive is the effort to repeal health care reform. The very fact that
everyone now accepts the term “Obamacare” to refer to a measure designed to get
health insurance to many more Americans is a sign of how stupidly partisan we
have become. We never described Medicare as “Johnsoncare.” We didn’t label
Social Security “FDRsecurity.”
Tying
the whole thing to Obama disguises the fact that most of the major provisions
of the law he fought for had their origins among conservatives and Republicans.
The
health care exchanges to facilitate the purchase of private insurance were
based on a Heritage Foundation proposal, first brought to fruition in Massachusetts
by a Republican governor named Mitt Romney. Subsidizing private premiums was
always a Republican alternative to extending Medicare to cover everyone, the
remedy preferred by many liberals.
Conservatives
even once favored the individual mandate to buy insurance, as MSNBC columnist
Tim Noah pointed out. “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to
wear seat-belts for their own protection,” the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart
Butler said back in 1989. “Many others require anybody driving a car to have
liability insurance.” Since all of us will use health care at some point,
Butler argued reasonably, it makes sense to have us all in the insurance pool.
But
that was then. The right wing’s recent rejection of a significant government
role in ending the scandal of “a health care system that does not even come
close to being comprehensive and fails to reach far too many” — the words were
spoken 24 years ago by the late Sen. John Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican —
tells us why Congress no longer works.
The
GOP has gone from endorsing market-based government solutions to problems the
private sector can’t solve — i.e, Obamacare — to believing that no solution
involving expanded government can possibly be good for the country.
Ask
yourself: If conservatives still believed in what both left and right once saw
as a normal approach to government, would they speak so cavalierly about
shutting it down or risking its credit?’
Dionne is a Washington Post columnist. He can be reached at ejdionne@washpost.com
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