Bipartisanship's Willing Executioners

By Jon Perr Wednesday Dec 23, 2009
CrooksandLiars

Republicans win, even when they lose. That appears to be the conventional wisdom after the Democrats' crucial victory in the Senate health care vote this weekend. In its wake, media outlets gave credence to John McCain's assertion that thanks to President Obama, Washington is "more partisan" and "more bitterly divided than it's been." That followed the pronouncement of CNN's supposedly moderate Republican analyst David Gergen, who proclaimed the party line vote "a tragedy" since it did not garner a "super majority," a result for which "blame is pretty evenly divided."

To be sure, McCain and Gergen are right that bipartisanship is dead. But it is the Republican Party which killed it.

The numbers don't lie. For over a generation, Democrats have acquiesced in the GOP's budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while Republicans instead presented a unified rejectionist front on the economic programs of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Worse still, the Republicans' record-breaking use of the filibuster since being relegated to the minority in 2006 has made the 60 vote threshold a permanent fixture of the Senate. As for Gergen's nostalgia for the political parties that passed Social Security and Medicare with bipartisan majorities, they simply don't exist anymore.

(Continued here.)