Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell announced the Senate would forego the first two weeks of its
anticipated August Recess. The move was unusual on its face, but the reason offered
was sheer partisan political poppycock. Leader McConnell blamed Democrats and
their “Unprecedented Obstruction,” for the delay and abbreviation of the
Senate’s much anticipated month-long summer hiatus. He then cited a couple of
examples of the lack of cooperation the mean old Democrats were foisting upon
his genial GOP colleagues.
This post is straight forward, and will be
brief. It begins and ends with my observation that Mr. McConnell is either
operating with an extreme memory deficit, or he doesn’t believe his fecal
excretion is malodorous. Unprecedented Obstruction? Puhleeze!
The GOP instituted an obstruction plan so
sublime it inspired a book. I’ll get back to that. First, let’s face it. McConnell’s
own fingerprints are all over the Party’s efforts to obstruct President Obama.
In October 2010, speaking of the GOP, he famously said, “The single most important
thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
For a time,
many of us thought the Republican Party’s organized anti-Obama recalcitrance
started there. It would take a while, but we would later learn that we were wrong,
and that the Republican Party’s maleficence started the night of President
Obama’s first day in office. Contemporaneous with the evening’s Inaugural
Balls, a cabal of GOP Congressmen met for dinner and deception at the Caucus
Room, a high-end D.C. establishment about a mile from the evening’s main
festivities. Their master plan, devised over several hours, was a plot, not
just to win back their recently lost political power, but also to waylay
President Obama’s legislative agenda.
The book,
referenced above, written by Robert Draper in 2012, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of
Representatives,” details the steps the GOP laid out as the way
forward. According to Draper, the guest list that night included a
proverbial Congressional Who’s Who. In attendance were:
1. Rep.
Eric Cantor - VA
2. Rep.
Kevin McCarthy –CA
3. Rep.
Paul Ryan - WI
4. Rep.
Pete Sessions - TX
5. Rep.
Jeb Hensarling - TX
6. Pete
Hoekstra - MI
7. Dan
Lungren - CA
8. Sen.
Jim DeMint - SC
9. Sen.
Jon Kyl - AZ
10. Sen.
Tom Coburn - OK
11. Sen.
John Ensign - NV
12. Sen.
Bob Corker - TN
13. Newt
Gingrich (Former GA Representative and noted GOP intellectual)
14. Frank
Luntz (Event organizer, GOP wordsmith)
Notably
absent were then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, and House
Minority Leader John Boehner R-OH – who, according to Draper, had an
acrimonious relationship with Luntz. The group devised a four-point plan. The steps of which included:
· Go after Geithner. (And
indeed Kyl did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing
around it—please?’)
· Show united and
unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later,
Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against
Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)
· Begin attacking
vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican
Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)
· Win the spear point of
the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the
Senate in 2012. (Despite their best efforts, that White House gambit did not pan out).
You want a
blueprint for obstruction Mr. McConnell, I would say, this is it. At the end of
the meeting Newt Gingrich said:
“You will remember this
day. You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.”
It’s
instructive to recall, at
that time 700,000 people a month were losing their jobs and the American
economy was in the most horrible tailspin since the Great Depression.
And the
Republicans wanted to keep it that way.
That dear reader is some obstruction
for you. McConnell is not alone in grousing about Democratic obstruction.
Conservatives often lead with that trite lament. My curt response always is, “Consider
the example of the last eight years.” I have been known to express empathy for
a variety of reasons, but quite frankly, the temerity of anyone suggesting such
a thing strikes me as ludicrous. Particularly if said someone was either a
party to snubbing President Obama’s agenda to repair our fractured country, or said someone was supportive of the efforts of
those who did so. Quite simply, the current claim is bogus, and I frame it thusly,
“Unprecedented
Obstruction: The Unmitigated Inconvenience of Karma!”
I’m done; holla back!
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