I didn’t want to let the day go by without remarking on the supplemental spending bill AKA “humanitarian aid bill” passed by the House yesterday. I disagree with nearly every characterization I’ve read of it so far.
It was not a defeat for Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats. It was not a victory Majority Leader McConnell, President Trump, or the Republicans. The Democrats were overtaken by events. The situation at our southern border is a crisis and it’s not a crisis created by President Trump. It’s the same crisis as was faced by President Obama: families with children crossing the border in unprecedented numbers. House Democrats realized that they could not coherently rail against the Trump Administration’s detention practices but refuse to fund more humane detention practices in favor of what is euphemistically called “comprehensive immigration reform” without being reasonably accused of playing politics with people’s lives. Trump did not back them into a corner. Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Honduran migrants did.
It was a pragmatic decision.
Here’s my major point. Stuff like this used to be easy or at least easier. It used to be much easier to do the right thing without every editorial page in the country complaining about defeat. It didn’t used to be the case that the only way to win was for the other party to lose.
Most people under the age of 40 don’t remember it but it wasn’t always this way. It hasn’t always been duels to the death 100% of the time. You can blame it on Newt Gingrich or farther back to Jim Wright but Congressional politics has not always been as fiercely partisan as it is now.
I’ll catch shit, but I distinctly remember Wright going nasty. So do historians.
In any event, your point, I think, is spot on. We went from “less filling, tastes great” and then to “if you don’t agree with me your mother sucks cocks in hell” and then to “I’ll use the law to destroy you.”
Its sad. But I don’t think the current situation is just the next iteration. The very power and economic structure of Big Washington is under attack. And they aren’t happy. And they know how to destroy people. This is an inflection point, and precious few understand it.
At its core, its going to come down to a tug of war on power: media vs grass roots people.
Trump did not create this? Maybe, but it looks like he made it worse. Look at any chart of border apprehensions or family crossings. The policy of deterrence by cruelty has not worked, and being a one trick pony (Wall!) has not worked.
More broadly you are correct. I think it probably started when we lost some critical percentage of politicians who served in WWII. I mostly remember Wright for being incredibly corrupt, and if he was running now he would probably be a Republican, but whenever it actually started it has been almost continually accelerating.
Steve