On hostage-taking

I intended to start this blog in the next week or so with a post better-suited to the title; something related to skepticism, rationality, humanism, non-theism, or something like that, but this was posted today to Facebook and I wanted to take some more time to clean it up and get it up here.

(Also, the more I think about it, the more I think that the theme of skepticism fits anyway. The problems I see stem in large part from a lack of taking a skeptical eye to the talking points being used by members of the House (and Senate) GOP leadership, a failure to look at the things they're saying in historical context to see if they're actually TRUE. I realize that the same accusation could be made of me for the below, though I do not think it could be done with any merit, so I will endeavor over the coming days to add footnotes and references to any factual claims I make below. The opinions are my own. We're all entitled to our own opinions. We are not all entitled to our own facts, even if reality has a proven well-known liberal bias.)

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I had truly hoped that between the Tea Party shutdown and the unmitigated disaster that a national default would be for the global economy, it would finally mean that the GOP's fever would break and we would see the return of a sane opposition party. Because I really really want that. As a progressive, I want competing ideas even if I don't agree with them because I believe that the best policies come from the synthesis of ideas. But that's not what we have, nor is it what we have since the 2008 elections (and to a greater extent since the 2010 midterms.) What we have had is a party with no ideas BUT opposition. You cannot govern as a party which does not believe in the legitimacy of government. You cannot govern as a party which wants to "be judged not by how many laws it passes but by how many it repeals". You cannot govern in any sort of party system (be it two-party or more) if you are not interested in being an active and constructive partner in governing, but only in being a roadblock to everything the other party tries to do. That is not governance; it is nihilism and vandalism.

I no longer think that the shutdown, or even a default, is going to make the fever break. Poor of a leader as he is, John Boehner saw to that when he started the line that the president wouldn't "negotiate", leading to the rash of "BOTH SIDES ARE TO BLAME" stories when, in fact, the president did negotiate over the ACA... when it was a bill being negotiated. Since then it has been passed by both houses of congress, signed by the president, upheld by the US Supreme Court, and was one of the central issues of an election in which Republicans lost. Those negotiations happened. What makes me sick is that for the last 4 years, Republicans have refused to negotiate unless they have a gun to the head of the US economy, and when they do "negotiate" they refuse any concessions themselves. They will only wait until their counterparts offer a sufficiently conservative step backwards from progress already made before doing their job. Over and over again, Republicans have entered into fiscal negotiations saying they would accept no new revenues, no cuts to defense spending, nothing but cuts to "entitlements" (and isn't that word a rant for another time...), cuts in spending for programs that help do things other than kill people on other continents, cuts in regulations which help people but cost money to the GOP's wealthiest donors.  The GOP idea of "concessions" in negotiations over the last 5 years has been "We will start by listing 10 things that you don't want to do, and as long as you agree to 5 of them, we'll... let the government continue to pay its bills." Compromise involves give-and-take, not take-and-agree-not-to-take-more-until-next-time.

A side note here - this list of demands I mention isn't a metaphor. Some time ago, Republicans actually presented a menu of sorts of what they would take to raise the debt ceiling for a month, 6 months, a year, etc.  The end result was that in order to actually get the issue out of the way for any appreciable length of time, President Obama would have had to transform himself into Willard Romney, or at least govern as though Republicans hadn't lost the election.

The profoundly sad thing is, they know that the Democrats legitimately care about the welfare of Americans (the core ideology of the Tea Party being a profound lack of, and in fact disdain for, empathy) and so they will eventually cave and give in. That is not "negotiation", it is not "compromise", it is a hostage negotiation. Negotiating under such circumstances would be literally catastrophic for the future of the presidency. Blaming the president for the shutdown is like blaming the police when hostages are shot. It makes no sense unless you are trying to alleviate blame on the party actually responsible.

I'm sick of it. I'm sick of people pointing to the fact that the Democrats control the Senate as though the GOP minority hasn't filibustered more (and more routine) bills than any other Senate in history.

I'm sick of people acting like refusing to pass a budget without a complete defunding of the Affordable Care Act is legitimate while ignoring the fact that a) the House Rules Committee changed the rules 2 hours before the shutdown so that a clean CR CAN'T be brought before the House unless the Speaker or the Majority Leader introduce it, b) the ACA reduces the deficit that they pretend to care about as long as there's a Democrat in the White House, and c) they are literally demanding that affordable health coverage be taken away from millions of Americans.

I'm sick of otherwise-intelligent people buying into the "default won't be so bad" talking point when nearly every economist in the world says otherwise. I have seen this frequently paired with false equivalencies of a national economy to a household budget, with facile comparisons to taking out credit cards to pay off the old ones. This argument is simplistic in the extreme.

I'm sick of people saying that the ACA is a "government takeover of health care" when it is nothing more than regulation of the PRIVATE insurance industry. That has NOTHING TO DO with your doctor, Koch-backed commercials with creepy Uncle Sam doing OB-GYN exams notwithstanding. At the same time, I'm sick of people conflating the employer mandate and the individual mandate, as though they were at all similar and that the suspension of one (because it was not ready to be implemented) somehow means that the other should be suspended when the individual mandate, and the resultant broadening of the risk pool, is the lynchpin that makes the ACA function and allows it to require extending coverage to higher-risk individuals. The employer mandate impacted a tiny percentage of employers who were not already offering health coverage. The individual mandate is a major part of the law which would cause the entire law to fail if it were delayed. (And yes, I know that's the reason for wanting the delay, but that's not the argument being made so far as I can tell.)

I'm sick of seeing people refer to the President as a "liberal extremist" when he's governing somewhere right-of-center (about even with Eisenhower), and he could only be considered far-left because the far-right has staked out a position so extreme that you can only define "center" as merely "very conservative".

I'm sick of posts about how, by "refusing to negotiate" the White House is governing for only half of the country that voted for him when what he is defending is a law which benefits the entire country. You want to know what a group governing only for their supporters looks like? The House GOP. Even if you disagree with the President, he is actively working to make your life better. If you're gay, a woman who wants control over her own health care and life choices, poor, unemployed, old, young, sick, not religious, or a minority, the Tea Party platform is to actively work to make your life worse. That's why I want to shake people who defend them. That's why I want them to lose their hold over the Republican party. Because I think that there are Republicans who believe in the usefulness of limited government in finding solutions to problems and I think that those Republicans can profitably contribute to policy debates. Based on their words and actions, members of the Tea Party caucus are not among them, given that Tea Party groups threaten to primary out of office any conservative politician who does so.

More than anything else, though, I'm sick of the Tea Party hurting Americans on purpose and then telling me that I hate America and I'm sick of people who should know better believing it.