The two year temper tantrum
In January the GOP took control of
the U.S. Congress and immediately got down to business: a two year temper
tantrum.
The Republicans in Congress don’t
like President Obama. I mean, really don’t like the man,and they just can’t miss an opportunity to make that
clear.
There are obvious differences, of course. The
biggest may be generational. Even the “young turks” in the GOP leadership seem
somehow so – yesterday.
Race is of course a part of the
divide. It plagues the GOP in Congress, as it does the nation. The sins of the
fathers – slavery, Jim Crow and segregation – visited on the children.
The GOP Religious Right was born when
mostly southern segregationists abandoned the Democratic Party after the 1964
Civil Rights Act, to take up residence in the GOP, and that legacy has shaped GOP
policy ever since.
Over the next two years progress on
domestic issues will be next to impossible; except the care and feeding of Wall
Street, of course. When it comes to Wall Street, there is no division in
Washington.
But the rest of the domestic agenda –
jobs, better paying jobs, affordable education and health care, the income
divide, the wealth chasm, an end to the immigration wars – forget about it.
For example, the U.S. needs a new
Attorney General. The AG is a member of the president’s cabinet. Used to be,
presidents got who they wanted. No more.
The nominee for AG, who seems to me
as well qualified or better than some recent selections, expressed an opinion
that the president’s executive actions in the area of immigration were quite
legal.
And that was that. Almost the entire
GOP went on the warpath. And now that
nomination is in Washington “limbo” – held up to see what damage can be done in
the interim to hamper the president and his administration.
The delay in confirmation hearings,
says the GOP Senate leadership, is because they want first to “take up” a human
trafficking bill, to attack human slavery and the sex trade. Who could
object? Shouldn’t take more than six
hours to pass that bill and move on.
Not a prayer. The GOP tacked on to
the human trafficking bill an extraneous, anti abortion provision ; and it’s
back to the partisan, religious wars that so engage the many learned theologians
in the Congress. And the Justice Department can wait.
This intense determination to stick
it to the president has now spilled over into vital matters of our foreign
policy, national security, international alliances and matters that have since
the nation’s founding – and for good reason – been principally the
responsibility of our presidents.
The GOP House Speaker invited the
Israeli Prime Minister to Washington to directly challenge the foreign policy
of the President of the United States in a manner calculated to offend the
president.
Juvenile.
A majority of the Republicans in the
Senate then attempted to sabotage U.S. led international efforts to get some
kind of deal going with Iran over its aspirations to develop nuclear energy and
weapons capability.
The president agrees Iran is trouble,
with a capital “T.” He wants to get the government there into some kind of
discussion, dialogue, diplomacy to unwind that coiled spring. The GOP alternative
leads only to more conflict and war.
Like we don’t have enough problems in
that part of the world and elsewhere.
Juvenile and dangerous.
You can make an argument that
American presidents over-reach the powers granted them by the Constitution. Obama
is not the first, and he will not be the last. And you can argue that the
Congress needs to reassert its role as the law maker of the land.
And it can, any time it wants. And if
the Congress would pass the laws needed to address the destruction of the American
middle class and our democracy, it would be applauded and honored across the
nation.
But it now seems likely that what the
American people are going to get from the GOP Congress for the next two years
will amount to little more than a GOP temper tantrum - members holding their
breath, stamping their feet, pulling off stunts and sending out self
congratulatory newsletters until Obama leaves office.
This does not serve the American
people.
