POLITICS-Once again, the Republicans in congress are engaging in a giant act of extortion. They are holding the debt ceiling hostage to their ideology, just as they did before, and bringing back memories of 1996 by threatening a government shutdown. Even if the congress passes a stopgap measure, we can expect the obstructionism to continue unless we change the terms of debate. Curiously, there is a solution available to the Democratic party if it would only take note of one little fact.
In a nutshell, our national political problem begins with the fact that the average, run of the mill conservative voters have been getting a free ride. They have enjoyed the luxury of being able to vote for radical right wingers without suffering any ill effects. That's what Democratic strategists have to understand, and it provides the key to putting a stop to the chronic blackmail that the Tea Party faction has been using.
Economist Paul Krugman pointed out a decade ago that the modern Republican Party is not so much conservative as it is revolutionary. It has made a point of breaking the rules and violating the traditions that have been at the core of governance for the past two centuries. The most obvious example is the propensity of Senate Republicans to filibuster every judicial nomination and every administrative appointment coming from this Democratic president, and to demand 60 votes for commonplace items of legislation that would have been handled by simple majority rule in the past.
But what the Democrats have failed to grasp is that they have been allowing this to happen. They have a countermeasure available to them, if only they choose to adopt it. The strategy involves driving a wedge between the average conservative voter and the crazies who run the right wing of the Republican Party.
The key to this strategy is to recognize that the average Republican voter is not insane, even though Republican policies often seem insane to the rest of us. But the average Republican voters also have been under little pressure to oppose the extremists within their own party. Republican voters can cast ballots for extreme right wingers in primary elections, and the elected Republicans can support the threatened government shutdown, because neither these voters nor their Congressmen have been made to feel pain for doing so.
As much as I dislike the use of sports metaphors in political discourse, this is the exception. In football, the saying goes that "you have to make 'em pay." If the other team's wide receiver goes over the middle and jumps up for a pass, you make him feel the hurt. In the language of my onetime teammates, you have to "stick" him. (For the non-players, that means hit him hard.) Let him feel the pain.
If you don't make him pay, that receiver will do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. It's the same thing for the runner who challenges your line. I lost count of the number of nose bleeds I got challenging opposition players, but the bone spurs on my x-rays remind me of the basic principle.
But when it comes to threats to shut down the government, obstruct the debt ceiling vote, and do damage to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), the Republicans in congress are not being made to feel any pain. We're not making them pay.
Making them pay is not accomplished by going through the ritual of speech-making in the House or cloture motions in the Senate. We all know how un-useful those have been.
There is a strategy that would work, though. You start by making it clear to conservative voters that there are consequences -- severe ones -- to their own failure to get their elected officials under control. And the way you do this is so simple and so traditional that it is amazing that it is not being used to beneficial effect right now.
Let a few chairs of critical committees in the US Senate pick up their blue pencils and replace a few appropriation figures with different, lower numbers. This can be done quietly or it can be done dramatically. It doesn't really matter, because the voters who will be most affected by the cuts will find out rapidly that their jobs and local economies are in danger, and they will beg their elected representatives for help. This is the path towards bringing congressional Republicans into real negotiations. To get congressmen to take action, you have to make them need something, and the way to make that happen is to get their own voters to make demands of them.
Let's start with one basic principle: For every unreasonable demand that the Republicans make, there is a dollar price. If they don't allow a presidential nomination to come to the floor of the Senate, then quietly blue pencil a few tens of millions of dollars off the budget for red state federal installations.
If they don't want to vote on the debt ceiling or the federal budget, then go one step further. Make it clear that if they cause a government shutdown, then from now on, all federal funding for red state military and NASA installations will be zero based. Every dollar will have to be justified not only in terms of real worth to the nation, but also in terms of political cooperation by the Republican Party.
The voters whose jobs and local economies depend on federal funding will get the point. They will defend their own interests desperately, and they will rapidly discover that their best strategy is to communicate to their elected officials that it's time to negotiate with the hated Democrats. That will be because the Democrats are the ones who are in the position to do them a favor.
Take Huntsville, Alabama with its Marshall Space Flight Center. If you go online, you can find all kinds of proudly declared facts about the facility. It serves NASA (ie: a federally funded operation). Here's the central point. Somewhere in the bragging about rocket design is the figure of $2.5 billion as the contribution to the Alabama economy. I'm proud of our nation's contribution to space science, but in this titanic political battle, Marshall should be as vulnerable as food stamps, farm subsidies, or the National Institutes of Health.
Personally, I would like to see money diverted to cancer research, and I can live with Marshall being cut down a bit.
I should admit that I have been a fan of our space program since I was barely old enough to go to elementary school. I watched the Mercury and Gemini launches on television. I have the autograph of the last man to walk on the moon tacked to my bulletin board. I would dearly love for the research and development going on down in Huntsville to continue. But it can continue elsewhere if necessary, such as the now abandoned facilities in southern California, or it can be cut by, say, twenty percent next year and another twenty percent the year after. I want to see our space program continue, but even more than that, I want to see an end to the damage being done to our country by congressional Republicans.
Of course none of this has to happen. It's up to the conservative voters and their representatives on Capitol Hill. If they want the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville to stay open, then they will have to negotiate for it. Or consider the contribution of military spending to the economy of Pensacola, Florida, which is well in excess of $7 billion.
The geographic center of the political extortionists has been noted by political viewers. The voters of the old confederacy and to a certain extent the mountain states are the core of the Tea Party faction. They not only get a free ride politically, they have also been getting a free ride economically. On the average, blue state taxpayers get a lot less back in federal spending than red state inhabitants. The net effect is a subsidy to red state economies by blue state taxpayers. It's time to put a stop to it, or at the very least, to force the subsidized red states to understand that this is a two way street. They have to give a little to get a little.
If they want us blue state taxpayers to continue funding Huntsville and Mobile and Fort Benning and Pensacola and so many other places in conservative country, then they should understand that they have to negotiate -- and do so in good faith -- with the rest of the United States. That includes allowing the Senate to function, it includes expediting the opening of the Affordable Care Act, and it means acting in a more rational manner over economic issues.
In short, it's time that the president and the Democrats in the Senate make clear that Republican obstructionism not only damages the country as a whole, it is going to begin to damage the regions that have been the center of its political support.
It doesn't have to be so. I think that many Republicans are not as extreme, deep down, as the rightwing party leaders. But the damage to our country has been enormous and it cannot be allowed to continue. Millions of Americans will benefit by being allowed to buy medical insurance under the new law, if only the federal government will do what it promised almost four years ago. The petty, infantile behavior of the Republican congressional leadership cannot be allowed to destroy the Affordable Care Act and what it will do for our people. Likewise, the Tea Party faction cannot be allowed to destroy the credit of the United States by taking us into default.
This is the time for the rest of us to apply what used to be called tough love. If they continue with their irresponsible antics, make 'em pay.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 79
Pub: Oct 1, 2013
