{"id":9042,"date":"2006-11-12T09:00:19","date_gmt":"2006-11-12T14:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9042.html"},"modified":"2006-11-12T09:00:19","modified_gmt":"2006-11-12T14:00:19","slug":"sunday-discussion-group-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/sunday-discussion-group-75\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Discussion Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that Dems have reclaimed the majority in Congress, one of the many questions to consider is how the party will run the show. The outgoing Republican majority didn’t exactly offer a model of efficacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. […]<\/p>\n

American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by consensus — so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft — a fact the Republicans don’t even bother to conceal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can appreciate that this may seem like inside-pool to most Americans — congressional procedure usually doesn’t sound like a riveting subject — but the way in which the Republican majority would operate the mechanics of government was truly embarrassing. It’s not that they’d mistreat the minority party; it’s that they decided that the minority party was literally irrelevant. Dems were, in the eyes of the GOP, annoying children to be ignored.<\/p>\n

Legislation was written without Dem input; bills were passed without letting Dems read it; Dems’ bills were denied hearings and votes; Dems weren’t allowed to offer amendments to legislation; Dems weren’t even allowed to use hearing rooms. If Dems managed to win a key vote on the floor, Republicans would simply keep the vote open — literally for hours, if necessary — until enough arms could be twisted and\/or lawmakers bribed. Being a congressional Democrat in recent years was frequently nothing short of humiliating.<\/p>\n

Now, of course, Republicans are the minority party on the Hill. The question is obvious: does the Democratic majority treat the Republican minority the way they were treated?
\n
\nI suppose the reflexive answer is, of course they do<\/i>. Republicans treated Dems like dirt; now it’s time to return the favor. But consider two sides to this:<\/p>\n

* We should treat Republicans the way they treated us — The GOP needs to be taught a lesson. No majority party has ever run Congress with dictatorial impulses shown the Republican majority in recent years, and if Dems don’t show them what it’s really like, they’ll simply get away with their ridiculous behavior. The shoe is on the other foot, and it’s time to stop getting stomped on and start doing the stomping. Better yet, Dems need not worry about political consequences for hardball tactics — most Americans don’t know or care about procedural issues, and even if the GOP raised a fuss, Dems could simply say, “We’re just following the precedent set last year by the other side. What are they complaining about?”<\/p>\n

* We shouldn’t follow the Republicans’ bad example — Like it or not, Dems are the grown-ups. We could act like the GOP acted, but then we’d be just as ridiculous as they are. Reciprocation may be tempting, but it’s just creating a cycle of bitterness and animosity that further poisons the political process. It’s not fair that we suffered as the minority party and they shouldn’t, but that’s the cost of being the responsible, reasonable party in a democracy. The GOP lost perspective and corrupted how Congress operates, but we’re better than them and here’s our chance to prove it. We can show the nation, once and for all, which party deserves to run the legislative branch.<\/p>\n

So, what would you do? Is there value in playing by fair rules, or is it better to stack the deck the way the GOP did? Is this a good-for-the-goose dynamic, or should Dems hold themselves to a higher standard?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that Dems have reclaimed the majority in Congress, one of the many questions to consider is how the party will run the show. The outgoing Republican majority didn’t exactly offer a model of efficacy. It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways of giving the shaft to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}