[Vision2020] Republicans Against Reality

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 4, 2013
Republicans Against Reality By PAUL
KRUGMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html>

Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th
time<http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/02/19835524-recess-bound-house-votes-to-gut-obama-health-care-law-for-40th-time?lite>to
repeal Obamacare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no
effect whatsoever. But it was a stand-in for what Republicans really want
to do: repeal reality, and the laws of arithmetic in particular. The sad
truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate
in actual governing.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about policy substance. I may believe
that Republicans have their priorities all wrong, but that’s not the issue
here. Instead, I’m talking about their apparent inability to accept very
basic reality constraints, like the fact that you can’t cut overall
spending without cutting spending on particular programs, or the fact that
voting to repeal legislation doesn’t change the law when the other party
controls the Senate and the White House.

Am I exaggerating? Consider what went down in Congress last week.

First, House leaders had to cancel planned voting on a transportation
bill<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/opinion/sunday/republican-no-shows-in-the-budget-wars.html?ref=opinion&_r=1&>,
because not enough representatives were willing to vote for the bill’s
steep spending cuts. Now, just a few months ago House Republicans approved
an extreme austerity budget, mandating severe overall cuts in federal
spending — and each specific bill will have to involve large cuts in order
to meet that target. But it turned out that a significant number of
representatives, while willing to vote for huge spending cuts as long as
there weren’t any specifics, balked at the details. Don’t cut you, don’t
cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree.

Then House leaders announced plans to hold a vote cutting spending on food
stamps<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/us/politics/gop-push-to-slash-food-stamps-puts-farm-bill-in-jeopardy.html>in
half — a demand that is likely to sink the already struggling effort
to
agree with the Senate on a farm bill.

Then they held the pointless vote on Obamacare, apparently just to make
themselves feel better. (It’s curious how comforting they find the idea of
denying health care to millions of Americans.) And then they went home for
recess, even though the end of the fiscal year is looming and hardly any of
the legislation needed to run the federal government has passed.

In other words, Republicans, confronted with the responsibilities of
governing, essentially threw a tantrum, then ran off to sulk.

How did the G.O.P. get to this point? On budget issues, the proximate
source of the party’s troubles lies in the decision to turn the formulation
of fiscal policy over to a con man. Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman
of the House Budget Committee, has always been a magic-asterisk kind of guy
— someone who makes big claims about having a plan to slash deficits but
refuses to spell out any of the all-important details. Back in 2011 the
Congressional Budget Office, in evaluating one of Mr. Ryan’s
plans<http://www.cbo.gov/publication/22085>,
came close to open sarcasm; it described the extreme spending cuts Mr. Ryan
was assuming, then remarked, tersely, “No proposals were specified that
would generate that path.”

What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big
talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it
can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality.
Instead, they’re just running away.

When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to
their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how
the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything.

Think of it this way: For a long time the Republican establishment got its
way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized
as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals
were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to
mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People.
Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its
real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.

At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base
voters actually believe the stories they were told — for example, that the
government is spending vast sums on things that are a complete waste or at
any rate don’t do anything for people like them. (Don’t let the government
get its hands on Medicare!) And the party establishment can’t get the base
to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to
those base voters that they were lied to.

The result is what we see now in the House: a party that, as I said, seems
unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing.

What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a
majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a
sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality.
And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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