Party of Ideas Watch
Aside from the corruption of many of its members, the most notable thing about the House GOP caucus is its lack of an agenda besides corruption. You have conservatives who want to cut taxes a lot, and "moderates" who want somewhat smaller tax cuts. There's no plan for things like governing the country or addressing national problems. Take a look at John Boehner's campaign platform in his race for majority leader and you'll see just that phenomenon -- lots of vague invocations of the need for big thinking and calls for "a majority that matters," but no actual ideas or any idea of how the Boehnerified GOP majority will matter.
This despite the oft-heard and always-annoying complaint that Democrats lack new ideas. There's just nothing happening on the Republican side. Under the circumstances, it's natural that politicians start making bed-feathering and the pursuit of power for its own sake their main mission.
There's no plan for things like governing the country or addressing national problems. yglesias
Thank God! Do you really want to be "governed" by Frist, Hastert, and Delay?
January 10, 2006 9:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am struck by how much better "Boehnerified GOP majority" works in print than it would spoken.
January 10, 2006 9:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
"These patterns of corruption showed a Democratic Party that had grown complacent and self - serving after 40 years of control of Congress, and were a big reason Americans gave control of the House of Representatives to Republicans in 1994. So when it comes to institutional ethics and reform .I’ve got some experience,……. "
Would that experience be the reason you Republicans learned how to game the system in faster time?
January 10, 2006 9:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good point Matt. The Republican Party (in the House at least) long ago stopped fighting for anything but the interests of its paymasters. It has no ideas of its own--it merely promulagates the ideas that its friends on K-Street have paid to have promoted.
That said, though, there is one "idea" (pseudo-idea, really) that the ideologues on the right are beginning to espouse: that the solution to corruption is to make the government smaller. Newt Gingrich editorialized about this on NPR yesterday morning, and George Will was advocating "small government" as the solution on ABC Sunday morning.
I suspect this argument will have some traction. In a certain way it is true: if the federal government didn't spend any money and didn't regulate anything, then there'd be absolutely no reason for anyone to want to influence government policy. K-street and K-ruption would disappear.
I expect the Republicans to embrace this argument fiercely--both as a way to distract attention from their personal crimes and also as a way to use this situation to advance their clients' broader goal of dismantling the federal government. Because of this, it's important for Democrats to keep the focus on the criminal character of the Republican leadership and its tactics.
Less important politically--but still important--is to expose the intellectual vapidity of the argument that small government is a serious solution to K-ruption that can supplant other solutions such as public financing of elections, the end of gerrymandered districts, stricter enforcement of ethics rules, and greater transparency in the legislative process.
There are several problems with the "small government" argument:
- Our government is large and complex because our society is large and complex. Small government is nice to dream about, but its impossible in the real and complex world we live in.
- The Republicans came to power saying they would be the party of small government. But under their reign, the government has grown at record rates. If the party of small government can't reduce the size of the government--or even slow its growth--how realistic is it that we can make government small?
- The biggest segments of the government are those that deal with defense and homeland security and with middle class retirement and health security. How, pray tell, will we make those smaller given the current trends in our world and our economy?
- How exactly do we make government significantly smaller? Place limits on spending? Maybe, but such limits would have to be drastic to make any difference. With budgets in the trillions, we'd have to cut by several orders of magnitude before the amount of money involved would be small enough for corruption to disappear. That's just impossible. Another approach would be to limit the ability of congress to regulate anything--but how would this be done? I've yet to see any proposals from the conservatives. Would we repeal the commerce clause? Ban all regulation? Or try to come up with rules to distinguish a priori between good regulation and bad (rather than leaving it to our representatives to debate each proposed regulation on its individual merits)? All of this seems highly impractical and not particularly wise.
Anyway, look for the small government argument to get promoted on FOX News and the other right-wing media outlets. It will be interesting to see just what kind of "legs" this argument has in today's environment.January 10, 2006 9:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is a point I've been making here and elsewhere for a while now, but it goes deeper than just the Republican Party. The conservative movement itself is out of ideas, with people pretty much jaded by more tax cuts, and hostile to the religious evangelizing of the rest of the conservative movement. Instead of promoting a vision for the country the conservatives are reduced to harping on the absurdly trivial and irrelevant.
January 10, 2006 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
And here I thought this was a family-oriented blog. . . .
January 10, 2006 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
the solution to corruption is to make the government smaller
This is how they reel people like my BIL-- a nominally artsy, sensitive-but-stable type-- back in, with this "small government" argument. As Matt has pointed out several times (and as I tell my sister repeatedly in private, since politics are almost verboten in her household), no one really believes in small government per se; it's more like they believe that the government should spend money freely on things they like, and that savings would be realized by cutting only the programs they happen not to like. This has no basis in reality, of course, but it engenders loyalty by affirming people's instinctive biases as a moral & economic good... which is SOP for the Republicans anyway.
Our government is large and complex because our society is large and complex. Small government is nice to dream about, but its impossible in the real and complex world we live in.
I completely agree, but for some reason the acceptance of this is a huge hurdle for many, which again benefits the right. They promise simplicity while ignoring the extent to which it would require injustice and the tolerance for same, and people lap it because... why? Laziness, a genuine lack of intellectual fortitude, what? I'm not one to argue that Dems need to be more feelings-based & affirming in order to win, but there's a point at which voters' emotional responses become pretty intractable.
January 10, 2006 11:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a conservative who basically agrees with these sentiments. I'm in favor of fresh new leadership in the Republican Party. I'm also in favor of fresh new leadership in the Democratic Party. What a refreshing thought? The media would hate it because there would be no story.
January 10, 2006 3:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
And here I thought Boehner was somehow different than DeLay and Co.
January 10, 2006 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
If ever there was a time to revel, this is it. It is highly improbable the GOP majority will really be dented in the next election -- the media cowtows so much that it believes it is avant garde when it harries the President's press secretary for a day -- and the particular constituency that the GOP represents is fat and happy.
Ideas are for losers.
January 11, 2006 8:18 AM | Reply | Permalink