Turning The Ballot Box Against Republicans

Women's health is a single issue? Really? BTW, I'm not on the 'left.'

Have you heard of the republican gridlock yet? Just wondering.

2003 - Governor Deval Patrick recalls Grover Norquist’s comments on plans for a “permanent Republican majority.”


At our 25th college reunion in 2003, Grover Norquist — the brain and able spokesman for the radical right — and I, along with other classmates who had been in public or political life, participated in a lively panel discussion about politics. During his presentation, Norquist explained why he believed that there would be a permanent Republican majority in America.


One person interrupted, as I recall, and said, “C’mon, Grover, surely one day a Democrat will win the White House.”

Norquist immediately replied: “We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.”

2009 - As Michael Grunwald reported, these two ideas coalesced into a Republican plan on how to respond to the election of President Barack Obama.


…the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.”


2010 - Having implemented that plan in response to President Obama’s proposal to reform health care, former speech-writer for President George W. Bush - David Frum - is ejected from the party for writing this:


At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo - just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994…


Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan…Too late now. They are all the law.

2011 - Former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren explains the strategy.


A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.


So let’s be clear…this was a consciously thought-out strategy by Republicans to create dysfunction in Congress that never fit the “both sides do it” meme embraced by much of the media.

As I’ve pointed out before, President Obama has engaged a lot of different strategies to deal with this obstruction that have each had various amounts of success at different times. But as we head into the next presidential election, we’re likely to hear a lot about how Washington doesn’t work.

That will be the big challenge for the Democratic nominee in 2016. I only wish it was possible for them to take Paul Waldman’s advice.


So imagine if a candidate in the general election, or a president in his inaugural speech, said, “This is my program. I realize that the folks in the other party don’t like it. There may be a few places where we can compromise, and if so, that would be terrific. But I’m going to treat the voters like adults and tell them that I’m not expecting a whole lot of cooperation. I’m going to fight for what I promised to do when I ran, and if you don’t like the results, you can turn me out in four years.”


That would at least be honest, and nobody would be disappointed when the result is partisan fighting.

You seem to be blind to what is actually happening, Baldimo. This isn't a case of the GOP selectively opposing some of Obama's proposals. They have blocked more than any past Congress has ever done, from legislation to appointments.

Obama spend 6 years trying to get a deal from Congress on immigration. They weren't interested. Your 4 month argument is completely disingenuous.

You're right. Our government wasn't designed for one party to get everything they want. So which party is it who's rhetoric and actions have been where they refuse to compromise on anything? Look at this from an unbiased stance and you might be surprised.
From lack of legislation to refusal to budge on the budget to refusal to approve judges in a timely fashion there can only be one answer
. Obama has hardly done more than any other President. Reagan issued a lot more Executive orders than Obama has.

Obama didn't get his way and that is called obstructionism. Keep crying about it Parados. Obama was more a friend to the Iranians then he was to his own citizens.

I guess that is always the last desperate post to make when you have something else to say.

10 years for a democratic house. Elect dem governors. Redo house districts. Elect dems to state houses. Its what the republicans did.

You seem to be blind to what is actually happening, Baldimo.