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Rushing Things
The emerging favorite Republican tactic for killing reform measures without actually admitting that they want to kill reform is to complain that Democrats are "rushing things." They're not against reform, they just want enough time to do it right.1
This was the pitch on healthcare reform from the GOP members of the Senate Finance committee, even after hundreds of hours of meeting. It's the pitch from George Voinovich on climate legislation. And now it's the pitch from Bob Corker on financial regulation. Tim Fernholz shakes his head in dismay:
What in the world does he want to talk about? It's not like Corker is pushing some specific agenda or has offered any major ideas, at least publicly. These issues have been at the forefront of the policy debate for a year now, and certainly have been bubbling underneath for a long time. If he doesn't have any specific concerns, its hard to conceive of this as anything but a delaying tactic that simply substitutes vague delays for substantive engagement.
....There's a pretty big argument going on in the Democratic party between those who want to reshape the financial sector fundamentally and those who want to nudge it towards responsibility, which I talk about in my article today. Sometimes, though, it's easy to forget that there is also an opposition party out there that believes we should do virtually nothing.
Well, it's not really that easy to forget. After all, Republicans remind us of it pretty much every day. Which is OK! They're Republicans. They're the opposition. They don't support things like providing healthcare for everyone, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and regulating the financial industry. The only question is why an opposition that controls 40% of the Senate and represents about a third of the population should be allowed to routinely stop all this stuff in its tracks.
1Unless, of course, the subject is Afghanistan. In that case, taking the time to do things right is "dithering" and "playing Hamlet."
Republicans are about
Republicans are about thirty-seven million times better at politics than Democrats. Seriously. This kind of shit drives me crazy. For Democrats to seize power and enact their solutions into law, the country and its economy have to be on the very brink of collapse.
Conservadems
The real opposition party. They are the problem at this point. The Repukes would be irrelevant otherwise.
"about a third of the population"
Last week, I looked for a source for how much of the U.S. population is represented by Republican senators, and couldn't find anything, so made this spreadsheet below (from a mixture of government sources and wikipediia). (It was a choice between Top Chef or Excel, and Excel won. :-) ) A link to someone else who has done this exercise would be useful.
The bottom line is that (assuming no significant mistakes) Republican U.S. Senators represent about 36 percent of the U.S. population. Maybe a little more if you count a fraction of Lieberman.
Here are the raw tables suitable for data import into excel (they were cut and pasted from excel). Only Republicans senators are counted. I didn't know how to count the two independent senators (VT/CT) (didn't count them), and fudged on whether to count the district of columbia. The formulas should be obvious. The numbers are Republican senator count/millions of people.
nevada 1 2.6 1.3
arizona 2 6.5 6.5
utah 2 2.74 2.74
idaho 2 1.52 1.52
wyoming 2 0.53 0.53
sd 1 0.8 0.4
nebraska 1 1.78 0.89
kansas 2 2.8 2.8
oklahoma 2 3.64 3.64
texas 2 24.32 24.32
iowa 1 3 1.5
missouri 1 5.91 2.955
louisiana 1 4.41 2.205
indiana 1 6.38 3.19
ohio 1 11.49 5.745
kentucky 2 4.27 4.27
tennessee 2 6.41 6.41
mississippi 2 2.94 2.94
alabama 2 4.66 4.66
georgia 2 9.69 9.69
southcarolina 2 4.48 4.48
northcarolina 1 9.22 4.61
florida 1 18.33 9.165
newhampshire 1 1.32 0.66
maine 2 1.32 1.32
alaska 1 0.69 0.345
vermont 1 0.62 0.31
connecticut 1 3.5 1.75
dc 0 0.59 0
108.785 304.06 0.357774781 303.47 0.35847036
not counting vt/ct (counting dc) (not counting dc)
No Fair
You aren't being fair to the Reps--they're truly a model of intellectual consistency. They believe in reading the whole thing, all 1900 pages of the bill. Of course, their administration had big problems in reading all 90 pages of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq back in the day.
Calling unmanageable
Calling unmanageable spending and crushing debt 'reform' is like putting lipstick on a pig.
Republicans want more time.
Bismarck brought universal health care to Germany in the 1870's. Three generations later America attempted to duplicate that advance under Franklin Roosevelt and failed in the 1930's, Truman in the 1940's, Johnson in the 1960's, Clinton in the 1990's, Obama in the following century,..... That's the better part of three lifetimes. How many lifetimes will they need?
“To turn your back on the corrupt Republican Party and the corrupt Democratic Party---the gold-dust lackeys of the ruling class----counts for something. It counts still more…to join a minority party that has an ideal, that stands for a principle, and fights for a cause.“ Eugene Victor Debs from his 1918 speech at Canton, Ohio for which he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in this “the land of the free”.
Oh the irony...
I believe Obama was about to announce a plan for Afghanistan (some time ago) and it was the military and Republicans who said "wait, we want this reconsidered" and now they call that waiting "dithering".
I think they just didn't want Obama to leave Afghanistan (making the public happy) just before the Nov elections. They often claim everything Dems do is political (see the post on healthcare reform and Sen. Hatch saying it's political) when in reality it's they who try to time actions and announcements and form policies which serve political goals (see Bush administration).
What we need is more bipartisanship to benefit ALL of America. Apparently that's just too hard for Republicans.