"The sad truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about policy substance...I'm talking about their apparent inability to accept very basic reality constraints, like the fact that you can't cut overall spending without cutting spending on particular programs...
...Consider what went down in Congress last week.
First, House leaders had to cancel planned voting on a transportation bill, because not enough representatives were willing to vote for the bill's steep spending cuts. Now, just a few months ago House Republicans approved an extreme austerity budget, mandating severe overall cuts in federal spending--and each specific bill will have to involve large cuts in order to meet that target. But it turned out that a significant number of representatives, while willing to vote for huge spending cuts as long as there weren't any specifics, balked at the details...
...Then they held (a) pointless vote on Obamacare, apparently just to make themselves feel better...And then they went home for recess even though the end of the fiscal year is looming and hardly any of the legislation needed to run the federal government has passed.
In other words, Republicans, confronted with the responsibilities of governing, essentially threw a tantrum, then ran off to sulk."
At this point in his editorial, Mr. Krugman attempts to explain how House Republicans were flim-flammed by Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin). He is the one who wrote the austerity budget that the House passed a few months ago--the same budget plan that the Congressional Budget Office said was so devoid of detail as to be meaningless."What's happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan's big talk into actual legislation--and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can't be done...
...When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything...
...And the party establishment can't get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to (their) base voters that they were lied to.
The result is what we see now in the House: a party that...seems unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing...
...So America can't be governed at all unless a sufficient number of...House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist."
It's become a case of rhetoric meets reality, and the Republicans are adrift in the riptide. Let's hope Mr. Krugman is wrong and a reasonable Republican quorum can be found before they pull the entire country underwater with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment