Block And Blame Republicans

There is a telling graphic inside Friday's New York Times that puts into perspective the Republican Party's summer theme song, "Do-Nothing Congress." It bears remembering as just one example of the difference Democrats are trying to make in how our country is governed—and evidence that the Republican spin that Congress can't get anything done under Democratic rule is just plain wrong.

On one column, there is a list of Republican scandals: Rep. Billy Tauzin getting a lucrative pharmaceutical trade association job after pushing through Congress a bill benefiting the industry, Jack Abramoff buying favors from Republican lawmakers with lavish trip and other gifts, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham inserting money into an appropriations bill for a defense contractor whose owner bundled campaign contributions on his behalf, former Rep. Bob Ney receiving illegal gifts from lobbyists but, though jailed and disgraced, still able to receive his lifetime pension.

Alongside that column are provisions of the ethics reform legislation passed August 2 by the Democratic-controlled Congress that would address each one of those Republican abuses.

Republicans promised ethics reform in 2006, when they replaced their ethically defiant majority leader, Tom DeLay, with the ethically nonchalant John A. Boehner. But they did not deliver. They had to be pushed out of control of Congress in order for a consequential ethics reform bill to get through Congress. The bill now going to the White House is not perfect, of course, but the dark alleys where lobbyists and lawmakers cut their deals will be better illuminated and more regulated—that is, if President Bush signs the bill, which the White House has hinted he may not.

In spite of accomplishments such as this one, conservatives will nonetheless pound that "do-nothing Congress" line relentlessly this month, with the expected result that public approval of Congress, already low, will get even lower. If Republicans can't have their way, it seems, they will wreck the entire governing process if necessary to make sure Democrats don't, either.

With that, the idea of an evil "Rovemort," as depicted in a Campaign for America's Future video, is quite apt—a dark lord pulling the strings of the Republicans in Congress as well as the conservative spin machine for seemingly no end other than to protect the benefactors of Republican rule and to keep Democrats from representing the people who elected them. Conservatives are deeply invested in the idea that not only is government incapable of solving problems, but it must not be allowed to even try. Hence the hysterical objections raised to Democrats' efforts to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program that it would lead to "government-run health care"—an objection that loses all meaning if anyone, as Michael Moore did in his movie, "Sicko," pointed out all of the "government-run" services that function quite well when they are allowed to, thank you very much.

It is a frame that is being rejected by a growing majority of the American public, which is why Democrats were put in control of Congress to begin with. Add to that the fact that Democrats, when they put their fractious minds to it, are proving that they can accomplish quite a lot, even on issues such as tightening up ethics loopholes in a way that means giving up some of the perks that come with high-stakes lawmaking. "In spite of all of the obstruction ... we are getting things done," said Sen. Debbie A. Stabenow, D-Mich., in a conference call sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future on Friday. It is the Republicans, she said, who have chosen obstruction as a conscious strategy because "they have nothing positive to say."

It is true is that especially in the Senate, where Democrats have the thinnest of majorities, the progressive agenda of the Democrats—the agenda, in fact, that a majority of the American public voted for in 2006—has up to now been no match for lock-step, block-and-blame Republicanism.

Their Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, is perfectly suited to lead the stop-everything mentality that has become the Senate Republicans' operating principle. A dour man who is better known for his ability to extract campaign money from Republican business interests than for actually getting any legislation passed, he is an ideologically rigid standard-bearer for a party that has taken down its "big tent" and, with it, any pretense of a positive agenda for the majority of the American public.

In his own way, he is the perfect complement to President Bush, who had gone an unprecedented five-and-a-half years of his presidency without vetoing a single bill before putting the kibosh on a stem-cell bill while Republicans were in control, but who now has issued some 48 vetoes since the Democrats took charge of Congress in January. His veto threats have included virtually single every appropriations bill that Democrats are writing, even though there is less than a 2 percent gap between the budget proposals drafted by Congress and those submitted by Bush. His vow to veto rather parsimonious appropriations bills for domestic programs—programs that even with the Democrats' increases will barely keep pace with the needs—is a cruel irony in the face of the budget-busting combination of tax cuts for the wealthy and a war whose expenses are being put on a credit line.

Given the facts, it is hard to believe that the Republicans will get away with spinning their obstruction strategy into something that makes Democrats the obstructionists. But it would be dangerous to underestimate a conservative movement that has consistently over the 40 years succeeded in persuading people to buy into nostrums like Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" even as it hoards more and more government power for its own oligarchic ends.

That is why August is a month where the progressive movement has to turn up the heat to make sure the public knows to focus not on the "do-nothing Congress" cliché but the block-and-blame Republican reality. One way to do that is to send a message to Rovemort and his Senate minions, "We know what you are up to, and we intend to obstruct your efforts to block the reforms we asked for in November 2006." The stakes—from the need to bring the ruinous war in Iraq to an end to righting an economic ship that for the poor and working-class people is diastrously off-course—could hardly be higher.