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How Republicans Continue to Cripple the US Government with Gridlock

Toure talks with political scientist Norm Ornstein about the way Republicans have managed to hijack the government and escape criticism from the media.

Photo by Wikimedia user Gage Skidmore.

The endless reign of Trump atop the Republican polls may be evidence of the lunacy of some of our fellow citizens, but it's also more than that. There are some very rational reasons why so many Americans are so fed up with the political system that they are fervently supporting non-politicians like Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina or politicians who have made attacking government their brand like Ted Cruz. Those very rational reasons are the end result of a chain of events that has been moving through our political system for decades. And this chain of events is not at all accidental, it's part of a political strategy meant to make you so disgusted with politics that you don't want to participate in the system at all. Allow me to explain what's been going on.

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Throughout the Obama administration the Republicans on Capitol Hill, both in the House and the Senate, have tried to obstruct everything that the President wanted to push through—from critical things like Obamacare, appropriations, and who will lead the ATF to small things like renaming post offices. The point was to make the business of Washington seem so ineffectual and the gridlock so intractable and disgusting that voters were turned off. And it worked. People are fed up with Washington. You see it in the success of Trump et al in the polls, you see it in Congress's historically low approval rating which in 2014 averaged 15 percent, up a bit from 2013's 14 percent.

Important within all this is that the so-called objective media (ie, mainstream media, not right or left wing media) reports on gridlock and obstruction as a "both sides are to blame" situation, thus cloaking the real roots of the problem in a veil of false equivalence. In that environment, voters find themselves disillusioned with both parties—as Jay-Z said, "don't argue with fools cuz people from a distance can't tell who is who." When people are mad about Washington, they fall into a "throw the bums out" mentality—but, paradoxically, they still tend to retain affection for the local official who they feel they know personally. So they are mad at Congress but re-elect their own Congressperson—Congress's incumbent re-election rate was 96 percent in 2014. The job that is most endangered by all of this is actually the Presidency. That the President was able to overcome this in 2012 is beside the point—Republicans are obstructing the legislative process in order to make it harder for the President to win re-election.

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Republicans block Obama from action on important issues and then, at election time, accuse him of being ineffective and incapable. They say he's done nothing on this and that, knowing that they are the reason why. They accuse him of being unwilling to reach across the aisle when they've bitten his hand every time he's tried. It's an insidious game. Decades ago, there was campaigning and when it ended there was governing and compromise. Nowadays, the campaigning never stops.

I learned about this game, this way of using obstruction to attack the President politically, in one of the greatest books about modern politics, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism by Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann. Ornstein and Mann are longtime non-partisan observers of the political system and because of that their argument was extremely well received when the book came out in 2012. But I was wondering, how are things now and have they gotten better or worse? I called Norman Ornstein to find out.

VICE: Since you wrote the book have things gotten worse?
Norm Ornstein: In most ways, yes. I did some show with Barney Frank and he said my next book should be It's Even Worse Than It Was When It Was Worse Than It Looked . There's a lot of truth to that. But there are some mechanisms here and there to ease the pressure and keep things from becoming completely disastrous. It's kind of interesting that Bob Corker [Republican Senator from Tennessee] worked with Ben Cardin [Democratic Senator from Maryland] to devise this process that let the Republicans have their cake in a sense by letting them all vote against the Iran deal and say how horrible it is, but also kept them from being blamed for the disastrous consequences if the deal was voted down by basically letting it go through.

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That seems like slight progress.
But look at where we are in Congress now that Republicans have taken over both houses and the obstruction and the ruthlessly pragmatic choices of trying to block everything has led to a big gain for them in the House and a Republican Senate. And yet we're heading for another confrontation and potential government shutdown in October, another confrontation over the debt ceiling.

I think the House has become even more out of control. Then you look at how this has played out on the presidential campaign trail and they're moving further and further into crazy land. It's hard to say that things are getting better. You have a country that has grown more polarized and a Congress that have grown more tribal in nature. It's become tribal and almost sectarian. Part of what's generated that is that Republicans, going back to [Newt] Gingrich [Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999] and all the way forward to [Mitch] McConnell [current Senate Majority leader] and [John] Boehner [current Speaker of the House] and [Eric] Cantor [House Majority leader 2011-2014] et al, made deliberate decisions to get their party to unite like a parliamentary minority against Bill Clinton in the first instance and Barack Obama in the second and it worked like a charm.

You say the right wing media is a problematic part of all this—but the left wing and objective media are also part of the problem?
Yeah, the objective media are culpable here, too. There is this deep-seated unwillingness to suggest that the polarization is asymmetric or that one party is more to blame than the other. The need to be even-handed or say both sides do it is so deep it is really hard to shake no matter the evidence to the contrary. I had an email exchange with a veteran Washington Post reporter who said our job is to report both sides of the story and I wrote back no, your job is to report the fucking truth. Sometimes that truth will have two sides. Sometimes it'll have ten sides. But sometimes it won't have two sides and the idea that your job is to report two sides of the same story is like saying about a hit and run accident, "The victim was unavailable for comment, the driver said it was all his fault, he stepped into the crosswalk."

Some people feel like there's a racial component to why this level of obstruction happened to this president. But my feeling is that this is the outcome of a historic trend that began with Gingrich and manifested in a potent level in 2008. If it had been Hillary or some white male in the White House, we would have seen a similar outcome. What do you think?
You're fundamentally right. You look back at Bill Clinton becoming president and the effort to demonize began immediately. The Wall Street Journal ran editorials suggesting Clinton had been an accessory to murder when he was governor of Arkansas. There certainly was a conscious effort to do that and there's little doubt in my mind that if Hillary had won the election we would've seen a similar process at play. But you can't deny that race is there because it's always there.

But Mitch McConnell and John Boehner…
The driving force for them isn't race, it's winning. But I think there's another component here. The driving force of the Republican Party, the single largest component, is the South. And the South is different. It's different culturally. One of the issues that's much stronger in the South is this anti-immigration nativism and that along with Obama being black and the sluggish economy has meant that the Democratic party has been losing ground with working class whites while the Republican party has come close to shutting the door on expanding the base to any minorities. We're moving towards having one party be an overwhelmingly white and the other party becoming a predominantly minority. So you take race and overlay it on top of partisan and ideological tribal factors and it's dangerous as hell in a world where you're not just viewing the other side as an adversary you want to beat, but as the enemy.

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