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Mann and Ornstein: Brighter future for politics and policy requires a different Republican Party”

The Republicans have become a party beholden to zealots -- with little respect for science, facts or compromise

By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
Saturday, Sep 14, 2013 05:30 AM PST


Rand Paul, Ted Cruz(Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Excerpted from "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism"

From the perspective of November 7, the day after the election, change looked promising. Barack Obama won a second term with a clear majority and, in the process, became the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to win both election and reelection with 51 percent of the vote or more. Republicans lost a net of two seats in the Senate, after going into the campaign confident that they could gain several seats, even enough to recapture the Senate majority. Democrats gained seats in the House while falling seventeen short of taking back the majority, but did win the popular vote—the aggregated national votes cast for House elections—by 1.4 million votes. And there were some early signs in its aftermath that the dynamic might have shifted, especially from some of Speaker John Boehner’s comments on November 7:

Mr. President, this is your moment.

We’re ready to be led, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.

We want you to lead—not as a liberal or a conservative, but as the President of the United States of America.

We want you to succeed.

Let’s challenge ourselves to find the common ground that has eluded us.

Let’s rise above the dysfunction, and do the right thing together for our country in a bipartisan way.”

But the same day, Mitch McConnell offered words that were more mean-spirited than generous:

The American people did two things: they gave President Obama a second chance to fix the problems that even he admits he failed to solve during his first four years in office, and they preserved Republican control of the House of Representatives.

The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the President’s first term, they have simply given him more time to finish the job they asked him to do together with a Congress that restored balance to Washington after two years of one-party control. Now it’s time for the President to propose solutions that actually have a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a closely-divided Senate, step up to the plate on the challenges of the moment, and deliver in a way that he did not in his first four years in office

The dueling postelection statements indicated to some degree the conflicting and swirling views among national Republicans—an understanding that the party had been thumped in the election and needed to rethink its approach to voters and policy if it were to avoid being marginalized in presidential elections, but a continuing view among many lawmakers and others, including major funders, that the heart of the party was on the bedrock right.

The deep dysfunction that has gripped our political system for the past several years has not disappeared. If anything, it is even more pronounced in the House of Representatives and in many states. Lizza noted in his March 2013 New Yorker profile of Cantor: “House Republicans as a group are farther to the right than they have ever been. The overwhelming majority still fear a primary challenge from a more conservative rival more than a general-election campaign against a Democrat. They may hope that the Party’s national brand improves enough to help win the White House in 2016, but there is little incentive for the average member of the House to moderate his image.”

However sincere Boehner’s professions of desire for conciliation, the Lizza description of the House Republican majority dominated the policy and political dynamic in the weeks following the election, as Congress and the president grappled with the looming “fiscal cliff”—the expiration on December 31, 2012, of all the Bush tax cuts from 2001 and 2003, of the payroll tax cut and other Obama-sponsored tax reductions to stimulate a tepid recovery, and of a series of tax extenders including the research and development credit, along with the first wave of across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester, enacted as part of the last-minute deal in 2011 to avert the breach in the debt ceiling.

The resolution of the fiscal cliff showed both that dysfunction continued to be dangerously high and that any successes in policy making through at least the remainder of the 113th Congress would come via the route of bipartisan supermajorities in the Senate (with a half dozen or more Republicans joining almost all of the Democrats) forcing the hand of the more partisan and reluctant House. After initial postelection discussions between Republican congressional leaders and the White House, Speaker Boehner came up with an alternative plan to resolve the problem, which he called “Plan B.” Boehner understood that the president had the high ground in negotiations over tax increases, since a failure to act would automatically produce massive increases (after which Obama would be able to propose a massive tax cut for all those making under $250,000). As his counter to the White House’s proposal to raise taxes on those earning over $250,000, Boehner suggested increases on those making over $1 million.

It was clear that with Plan B, Boehner sought to give House Republicans some traction in negotiations with the White House, knowing that there would be some tax increase, but trying to raise it as much as possible above the president’s threshold of $250,000 in income. But there was the small problem of the more radical members of his own team. A full court press by Boehner and his leadership team to get his House conference behind the plan failed; despite confident assurances by Majority Leader Cantor that the votes would be there, the Speaker, in a humiliating public fashion, had to abandon the plan on the evening of December 20 before bringing it to the floor, as he had planned, the next day. Boehner then withdrew from any negotiations as the clock ticked toward the deadline. It took late discussions between Vice President Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to come up with a compromise, which included leaving in place the increase in taxes for those making over $400,000, delaying the sequester for two months, and raising the debt limit sufficient to meet the government’s borrowing needs until roughly mid-2013. For McConnell, now that he had failed to achieve his number-one goal of making Obama a one-term president, there were reasons to compromise with the White House, including both the hard reality that a failure to deal would result in a massive tax increase which the president could then turn into a call for a new tax cut, and that any damage done in the short run to the fragile economy would likely be blamed on the Republicans who had lost the election.

The Biden-McConnell compromise quickly passed the Senate with eighty-nine votes, including support from some of the most conservative Republicans, such as Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey. But it soon became clear that House Republicans were unmoved either by the imprimatur from those iconic conservatives or the wave of Republican support more generally. In contrast to the overwhelming support from Senate Republicans, only eighty-five House Republicans, barely over a third of the majority, voted for the plan. In a further sign of trouble ahead for Boehner, the second-and third-ranking GOP leaders, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, voted no, while John Boehner, in a rare and striking move for a Speaker (they rarely vote), went to the floor to cast a conspicuous aye vote—a clear sign from the Speaker that he was not happy with those members who undercut his Plan B, much less with those of his fellow leaders who undercut the difficult compromise that Boehner had not brokered but had strongly supported.

Go READ the whole thing. It's ONE page, but it is a long one from these MOST respected authors who have followed congress for all these years .. Remember it is an excerpt from their book ... ;)
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/14/mann_and_ornstein_brighter_future_for_politics_and_policy_requires_a_different_republican_party/