Well, now we have it – another government shutdown. Pundits
think the Republicans will be blamed by the voting public, and perhaps they
will. But in fact Democrats are just as responsible as Republicans for the impasse
we have reached.
Michael Barone has an article today
in RealClearPolitics, If Only Obamacare Had Been Passed With Careful Deliberation, that compares ObamaCare with passage of the Civil
Rights Act, another piece of legislation that was highly controversial, but as
he points out, was passed by a bipartisan majority, unlike ObamaCare.
As he says:
Obamacare has been a different story. Universal health care was promised, not to address a high-profile headline crisis, but because President Obama's twenty-something speechwriter wanted an applause line for a campaign speech.
The poorly drafted bill was passed almost entirely on party lines by exceedingly narrow margins -- and in the face of majority negative public opinion.
So it's not surprising that opponents won't accept its legitimacy or permanence. History tells us what that takes.
All political acts exact a price. The
price that the Democrats are paying for the hubris of assuming Obama’s election gave them a mandate to pass major controversial legislation
without any bipartisan support at all is the dogged Republican resistance they now face. That has been a heavy price – it has stymied
most of President Obama’s legislative initiatives.
The bitter partisan warfare in Congress
these days isn’t all due to that single act of hubris and hardball politics,
but it certainly did exacerbate it. What
liberals have to come to terms with is that the nation is almost evenly divided
these days between conservatives and liberals, so neither side has a clear
mandate to push ideological policies favored by their extreme ends. The Republicans learned
that (maybe) the hard way in the last administration.
The Democrats are learning it the hard way (we hope) in this administration.
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