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At long last, the Democrats have passed the health care reform bill
after a tortuous journey during which the Republicans tried to gummy up the
works at every turn. For months Pres. Barack Obama and the Congressional
Democrats attempted unsuccessfully to forge a bipartisan consensus with
Republicans on health care reform. In the end, the Democrats used their huge
majorities in the House and Senate to muscle through the most far-reaching
social legislation in four decades.
The Democratic attempt at bipartisanship is laudable and it was part of
Pres. Obama’s appeal during the presidential elections. But the obdurate
obstructionism of the Republican Party renders it foolhardy. Bipartisanship has
a chance when both parties have a genuine interest in achieving a desired goal.
The Republicans have plainly calculated that their political fortunes and, to a
lesser degree, ideological belief in limited government, are best served by
tying up the government in knots.
Whipped up by angry Tea Party mobs and right wing provocateurs, like
Glen Beck and Sean Hannity posturing as talk show hosts on Fox News, as well as
polemical radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, spewing all manners of half truths
and canards, Republicans have chanced upon a political lifeline just a year
after being cast into the political wilderness following eight disastrous years
of the George W. Bush presidency.
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| President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden react as the House passes the health care reform bill, March 21, 2010 |
Now that the Republican posturing on bipartisanship has been exposed as
a sham and a trick, it’s time for Pres. Obama and the Democrats to wise up and
call the Republican bluff by getting on with the business of the country with
or without their support. To be sure, it is advantageous if political goals and
legislative solutions are broadly shared, but bipartisanship for its own sake
has no intrinsic value. Political compromise can even be downrightly harmful if
it undermines public policy, or worse, simply guts it, which appears to be the
opposition’s agenda.
Republicans have a fundamentally different view of the role of
government and an individual’s relationship with the state than Democrats. If
they had their druthers, some of them would love to see the government
eviscerated, which the more extremist Tea Party fanatics seem prepared to
accomplish violently. The reductionist view of government is a valid — even if
naive — political philosophy and Republicans have had their opportunity to
exercise that worldview, both during Bush’s eight catastrophic years and
earlier, more successfully, with their guiding light, Pres. Ronald Reagan.
Under Obama though, Republicans have stoked public anger to intimidate
opponents and deployed every possible parliamentary trick, such as the
filibuster and legislative holds in the Senate, to ground government to a halt.
Regrettably, they have been aided in their quest by Pres. Obama’s misplaced
propensity to cultivate bipartisanship, even as they perversely denounce the
Democrats for using parliamentary tricks to advance legislation to counter
their reckless and politically calculated obstructionism.
It is time the Democrats abandoned the hand-to-hand combat of
bipartisanship with the Republicans, reported back to their desks and left the
opponents to their preferred task of baying at the moon and the endless
apocalyptic nightmares the most fanatical extremists among them constantly
conjure up.
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