Grand ol’ pity
Tables turn as Prez, Repubs whine of roadblocks
Here is what the Republican President of the United States said about Democrats on Twitter early Sunday morning, like the avid golfer that he is, taking his first swings on the practice tee:
“The Democrats, without a leader, have become the party of obstruction. They are only interested in themselves and not in what’s best for the U.S.”
Of course, it isn’t just Trump whining about obstructionism these days, even at this time when the Republicans have the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, the political equivalent of a full house.
It is so many phonies from his own party, one that has been unable to put any legislative points on the board this year and desperately wants that to be somebody else’s fault. The hypocrisy of it all, from this party, is only kind of breathtaking.
Because here is John Boehner back in 2010, on his way to becoming speaker of the House, talking to Politico about his agenda on President Barack Obama’s first-term agenda:
“We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
You can see how this goes: When it’s your party doing the obstructing, a good Catholic boy like Boehner can practically turn the whole thing into one of the seven sacraments. At the same time, Sen. Mitch McConnell, now treated like the common-sense prince of Washington, said this to the National Journal:
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.”
Not find a way to work with Obama on getting people back to work, continue to pull the economy out of the sinkhole that Obama inherited from George W. Bush; or find ways to lighten the load for the middle class in America; or prop up small businesses.
No. The only vision from the party that now has the run of Washington was to say no, and keep saying it for eight years.
So now it really is supposed to be somebody else’s fault — after all the years of yelling about Obamacare, as if Obamacare was somehow a greater threat to the well-being of this country than any threat from across the world — and the Republicans come up with a health care plan of their own that fires about as well as a missile being fired by the little nut in North Korea.
Suddenly, and even though Republicans do have the numbers they do in both chambers of Congress, it is somehow Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who keep dragging down the President and McConnell and Paul Ryan from behind.
“The Democrats have turned out to be total obstructionists,” Trump says to John Dickerson on “Face the Nation.”
Then he was talking again about how archaic our system of government is, what a “very, very bureaucratic system” it is, and how it forces even a top, crackerjack dealmaker like himself, a guy who ran and won on being a dealmaker, to make deals “that aren’t the deals you’d make.”
So even after a first 100 days that he keeps trumpeting as even more of a triumph than his election — “If you don’t blow your horn,” the late Jimmy Breslin once said, “there is no music” — he wants the country and the whole world to know that it isn’t just the news media holding him back, isn’t just the obstructionists in the Democratic Party who are hurting the country. It’s the Constitution that Crooked Hamilton and Low-Energy Jefferson helped write.
For now, though, the enemy is Schumer, ringleader of “the great obstructionists.” And the person who must find all of this as amusing as anything he has heard
since Trump took the oath of office, is the guy who took it before him.
It is worth remembering, at this time when Trump’s greatest political triumph is Neil Gorsuch becoming a Supreme Court justice, that McConnell and friends wouldn’t even consider Barack Obama’s own pick, Merrick Garland, for the same job.
It is worth remembering, in this moment of hand-wringing about Schumer, that a year ago Republicans in the Senate announced they wouldn’t even hold hearings on Obama’s budget, or allow members of the Obama administration to testify.
This all happened before the budget had even been released, which means before they’d even seen it. Didn’t matter. And things were no different for Garland: If it was Obama’s, the answer was no.
Now, when anything like this happens to them, it is treated like an attack on everything good and decent. But does it play with Trump’s base? You know the answer to that. It plays as well as his attacks on the news media (when Dickerson asked Trump what he’s learned so far, the first thing out of his mouth was how dishonest the media is), his continued prosecution of the Obama presidency and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
He’s still running against them, and against the media. It worked for him once — he clearly thinks it will again. One hundred days in, he’s already looking a thousand days down the road.