For Republicans, Compromise Equals Betrayal And Democrats Will Always Be Worse
Republicans have found themselves in a particularly difficult position with the almost hourly revelations that show Judge Roy Moore, the GOP candidate for Senate in Alabama, is apparently a serial sexual predator. That the party finds itself in such a situation is largely of its own making, based on its past and current dalliances with the fringes of the American right, its own continual lies and obfuscations to its own base, and the implicit assumption that compromise equals betrayal.
Of course, any normal party would immediately repudiate Moore and try to get him removed from the ballot. Since that is not possible at this late date, any normal party would then urge their voters to still reject Moore even if that means that a Democrat would be elected. That is especially true when it comes to Alabama, where the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, is no flame-throwing liberal but a centrist to his core. And, in fact, it wasn’t that long ago, back in 1991, that the Republican party did just that. Then, President G.H.W. Bush forcefully repudiated the Holocaust-denying racist David Duke who was running for Governor, saying, “When someone has a long record, an ugly record of racism and of bigotry, that record simply cannot be erased by the glib rhetoric of a political campaign. So I believe David Duke is an insincere charlatan. I believe he’s attempting to hoodwink the voters of Louisiana, I believe he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for.”
But 1991 is a long time ago and the Republican party is nothing like that today and instead has become far more radical and extreme. Republicans like Mo Brooks are reduced to tacitly supporting Moore by saying things like “I believe the Democrats will do great damage to our country. I believe that the Democrats will do great damage to our country on a myriad of issues.” Because after two decades of describing any Democrat as the devil incarnate, Republicans are now forced to support a sinner, a child-molesting serial sexual predator, over the devil himself. Even though Doug Jones is a centrist in every sense of the word.
And this is just a reprise of what we saw in the 2016 election. Donald Trump admitted on tape that he was a serial sexual predator. And, while Republicans of all stripes showed their “concern”, not one Republican leader, both officeholder and not, came out and stated that they would support Clinton. And only a handful even declared Trump unfit and openly repudiated him.
The de-facto position of the Republican party these days is that any cooperation with Democrats is an ultimate betrayal. That is what cost John Boehner his job. By refusing to engage in helping to craft the ACA, the only political option to the law for Republicans was repeal and when that proved to probably not be a winning strategy, it became repeal and replace. But replace was never a serious idea, just part of a slogan to get to repeal. And so when the time came to actually effect health care reform, in contrast to the lies that the GOP had told for years, a significant portion of their base came to understand that it was Obamacare that was providing them with Medicaid or subsidized health insurance, instead of the story that it was one of those special deals only for minority Democrats, like the Obama phone. And the small slice of the electorate that was truly being hurt by higher health care costs was nothing compared to the masses who were being helped. And once that realization set in, anything the Republicans did to repeal the law would be massively unpopular. But that didn’t and won’t stop them from trying.
This refusal to even consider bipartisan legislation is what drives the total abandonment of regular order in both the House and the Senate. There are no hearings anymore. There is no expert testimony about the effects of proposed legislation. The legislation is simply dropped on the majority of members, including large numbers of Republicans, with a demand to vote on it within literally hours. Because going to regular order might actually create an environment where a bipartisan bill could be crafted and that would be the ultimate betrayal to the Republican rabid base, still a minority of the electorate, that dominate the current the GOP. So you end up with situations where vulnerable Republicans vote on a health care bill that will strip insurance from 30 million Americans without even really understanding that fact. Or a situation where, under the current PAYGO rules, the GOP tax plan will force $25 billion in Medicaid cuts and over $100 billion in other cuts in 2018 and most Senators are unaware of that fact. Yes, there will be a number of Republicans who think that will be great, but probably not enough to actually get the bill passed. Or Republicans try once again to kill Obamacare by including it in the tax bill.
Any normal party with total control like the Republicans achieved in 2016 would have come in and started off with a large infrastructure plan that would have easily had bipartisan support. Then, having shown they could actually govern, they could have moved on to a bipartisan tax reform plan that would address some of the issues with corporate taxation and the offshoring of profits and still provided a healthy tax cut for everyone, even the top 1%. I’m pretty sure they could have got Democrats like Joe Manchin and Joe Donnelly to come on board with something like that. But both of those options would have meant working with Democrats and that would be unacceptable.
More importantly, they had made Obamacare repeal the centerpiece of their opposition so it was impossible to avoid. For years, GOP controlled states had refused Medicaid expansion, denying thousands of their own citizens health care for no other reason than it would have meant engaging with a “Democratic” program. It would have cost nothing, but it would have been a betrayal. But, having actually won control, the party probably could have finessed the problem by tinkering around the edges to control premiums for those who don’t receive subsidies and tweaked Medicaid costs and declared victory. But that would have been seen as a betrayal, if only because some Democrats would have signed on and that the ACA would still live in some form. That was unacceptable.
For Republicans, every election is a Flight 93 moment and often the “terrorists” in the cockpit are Democrats. Combine that with the realization that the party itself is a minority party, maintaining power by extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression, while at the same time seemingly breaking apart, and the only option for survival is to remain as pure as possible. And, when survival seems less and less likely, the last remaining option is to give the plutocratic donors everything they want so that the war chest might be large enough to perhaps live another day.
