THE GOP NEEDS A LOT OF GAP YEARS
WASHINGTON — It should now be clear to everyone: The Republican Party is incapable of governing.
Sure, this sounds partisan. In fact, it’s an analytical reflection based on what is happening right before our eyes.
You would think that with our nation facing its most profound economic crisis since the 1930s, married to a public health disaster and growing unrest over racial injustice, the party that controls the White House and the U.S. Senate would get serious.
Instead, the Senate’s Republican majority and the Trump White House are in chaos, unable to produce a coherent relief bill to keep the economy from spiraling further downward.
A telltale sign of the GOP’s flight from responsibility is that they waited until the last minute before launching their haphazard scramble because they were hoping to avoid having to do anything.
The Democratic House passed a $3 trillion relief bill on May 15. Did Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, spend the intervening 10 weeks to pull his troops together for the inevitable counter-proposal? No. They offered pipe dreams that maybe COVID19 would abate, maybe the economy would come roaring back on its own … maybe, maybe, maybe.
The truth is that the GOP simply hates the idea that Washington should have a big role to play when catastrophe strikes. The GOP never much liked the first rescue packages, strongly shaped by Democrats, even though they helped Trump’s economic ratings when his poll numbers sagged everywhere else.
Absent help, unemployed people don’t have money to spend, state and local budgets wallow in red ink, health systems are overburdened, hunger rises — and that’s just a sampling of tribulations that can’t be eased without robust federal intervention.
You also sense that some Republicans have already concluded that Trump will lose and are preparing themselves for the post-election recriminations — and never mind the damage that will be done to the economy and people’s lives in the meantime.
The administration’s insistence on slipping into the Senate bill an entirely irrelevant $1.75 billion for a new FBI building is just the latest indication that the president’s only real interest in government relates to how it can serve his private interests.
The Republican implosion has been a long time coming, and its causes have been documented over many years. In 2012, the political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, historically respectful of both parties, concluded that the GOP that had become “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” (Disclosure: They’re friends and sometime co-authors, but you can’t write on this subject without citing their brave early protest.)
This year, MSNBC producer Steve Benen persuasively chronicled how
Republicans had become a “post-policy” party in his book whose title brings home his point: “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics.”
And in “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” also published this year, Harvard Professor Thomas Patterson points to the GOP’s narrowing demographic and ideological base, its dependence on right-wing media and monied interests, and its “disregard for democratic norms and institutions.”
Having skipped their homework, having spread the virus with a spring break fantasy that bars and restaurants and everything else could open wide, Republicans had the nerve on Wednesday to ask for an extension. Pass a “skinny” bill extending some unemployment insurance provisions and a rent moratorium.
Sorry, but you reach a point when political parties, like wayward students, must be given a “F.” I hope Republicans will be ready to govern again someday. Right now, the party has earned itself only a multi-year expulsion.