This sure isn't the representative democracy the Founders
were after.
By Donald
Kaul
If our government were
a card game, the American people would surely have realized by now that they’re
playing with a marked deck. The Republicans are cheating.
In the 2012 elections,
Democratic candidates for House seats collectively won about five percent more
votes than their Republican opponents did overall. Yet the Republicans hung
onto their control over the House of Representatives. They now outnumber
Democrats in that chamber,
234 to 200.
How could that be?
But this is
ridiculous.
Republican state
legislatures, mainly in the former Confederate and western states, have
gerrymandered their congressional districts to make it virtually impossible for
Democrats to achieve House representation commensurate with their support.
You would think that
would be enough for them, right? Wrong.
House Speaker John
Boehner has said that he won’t let the immigration reform bill come to the
floor for consideration unless it has the support of a majority of the
Republican caucus.
That means just 118
members (read tea partiers) wield a virtual veto over anything President Barack
Obama, the Senate, or simply the majority of House members want to do.
That’s not
representative democracy, that’s political bullying.
All of which would be
bad enough if the Republicans actually wanted to do something. But they don’t,
unless you count cutting taxes until the government dies of starvation. Hard as
it is to believe, the true believers in the Republican Party, the Paul Ryans
and Rand Pauls of the world, believe that we’d all be better off if we stopped
relying on government for things — those frills like health care, public
schools, and safe food — and threw ourselves on the tender mercies of
multi-national corporations that, as we know, care deeply about our well-being.
Obama gave a
rip-roaring speech at Knox College the other day in which
he listed his legislative priorities for the coming three years. He wants to
build prosperity by expanding the middle class through education, re-training,
and job creation. He would undertake a public works program to repair our
broken infrastructure. He would fund research and development programs to keep
us competitive in the world.
He would, in short, do
the common-sense things that every Democratic president of the past 80 years
has promised to do.
The Republicans
treated the proposals with absolute derision. He would do none of those things,
they said. They wouldn’t let him.
Instead, they threatened
to shut down the government if
Obama went ahead with his health care plan. In addition, they drafted
legislation to cut the
Environmental Protection Agency by 34 percent, kill greenhouse gas regulations,
reduce financing for the Fish and Wildlife Service by 27 percent, and halve the
Endowment for the Humanities budget.
Other proposed
Republican bills would eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and
cut education grants to poor students by 16 percent.
GOP lawmakers are
saving their biggest guns, however, for their continued assault on the
Affordable Care Act — which seems to be working despite Republican claims that
it isn’t.
Republican leaders
have sent out a letter announcing their intention to block raising the debt
ceiling on September 30 if so much as one penny is spent on
implementing Obama’s landmark health care law. When asked whether he’s worried
about how this do-nothing stance could hurt his party, Boehner declared that
Congress “ought
to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
Let’s review:
Republican leaders refuse to acknowledge or do anything to deal with climate
change and are dead set against expanding health care coverage for the
uninsured and under-insured, improving the regulation of financial
institutions, supporting research, expanding public works, and respecting our
public cultural institutions.
Their vision of the
nation looks like a gated community in a rich area of Florida, surrounded by
slums.
And the rest of us?
We’re in those slums.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul grew up in Detroit and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
OtherWords.org
