10 Questions Every Liberal Should Ask Every Republican

[JAD_333]

There is always room for compromise no matter where you are on the spectrum.

I should have used a modifier when I said, 'no room to compromise', because you're right; there is always room. So I'll amend that to, 'there is very, very little room for compromise'.

Speaking of room for compromise, it might interest you to know that the current Congress has passed only 60 new public laws so far in the first session. With only 3 weeks to go, it's looking like an all-time record. The previous low was 88 in 1995.

Commenting the other day, Speaker of the House John Boehner, said, “Listen,...we have a very divided country and we have a very divided government. And I’m not going to sit here and underestimate the difficulty in finding the common ground, because there’s not as much common ground here as there used to be.” Am I right, or what...?

Lately though anyone that reaches out to the other side gets slapped by his own party whip.

You have a somewhat exaggerated view of how Congress works. The whip's is an elected member of the leadership whose primary job is to score votes and make sure members turn out for important roll calls. They keep discipline with favors, promises, and subtle warnings. But all members do that with each other. It's called politics.

It's not a whips job to stop members from reaching out to the other side. Crossing the aisle goes on all the time. McCain is known for it. Right now, we have Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand teamed up with an unlikely pair of Tea Party senators, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, to push through a bill on how to prosecute sexual harassment in the military. Rep Ryan is working with his democratic counterpart in the Senate to hammer out a deal on debt limit and government funding. You have the Gang of 6, the Gang of 8 and a slew of other lesser known bipartisan groups.

It's not the whip's threats that keep party members close together on major issues, but the prospect of re-election. You have to understand that each member is trying to score legislative points for the constituents back home. It's your party affiliation and your loyalty to the party that yields rewards. Maverick members get little done. That's the way it has always been, and that's the way it will always be, as long as we have a democracy. It's messy, but it works; it worked during the New Deal and in every era of legislative achievement before and since.

Had those "rhinos" towed the party line they still would have a job. The tea party is not known for playing along or compromising in any way shape or form.

Perhaps, but then they wouldn't be rhinos anymore, would they? They'd be like the late Senator Strom Thurman, a southern Democrat, who broke with his party over its liberal shift , to join the GOP. He survived.

The 'no compromise' stance of some Tea Party members goes back to the time when they were campaigning for office. It was a campaign promise because that's what their constituents wanted. BTW, not everyone identified with the Tea Party ran on that promise. There are different gradations of Tea Party types in Congress. Most GOP candidates got Tea Party support simply because they were Republicans. The Tea Party label is overused and falsely meant to demean Republicans who speak out against liberal policies.

I beg to differ. We did our best work, ie the Constitution and Declaration of Independence without the two party system and there was plenty of compromises in the Constitution.

Really you should read more history. Our work in the Continental Congress does not compare to our work in the government which grew out of it. We were creating a new nation, not working on healthcare.

Also, there were factions in both the 1st and 2nd Continental congresses: The loyalists in favor of petitioning King George to settle colonial grievances and remaining loyal to the Crown and 'Tories' who believed petitions wouldn't work and came to favor a complete break from the Crown, i.e.,independence. The latter were right. War broke out thanks to King George's arrogance and stupidity. Gradually the loyalists gave way, and by unanimous vote, the Congress declared independence. The Declaration of Independence was indeed good work, but it was not law, per se.

The constitution they wrote was not good work. It created a confederacy of the former colonies with a weak central government that couldn't even levy taxes. The states controlled the purse. BTW, in this there were 13 factions, one for each of the 13 states. Soon enough, the central government began staggering. A convention was called to fix the first constitution. What emerged was a completely new constitution, the one we have now, plus some later amendments. All pretty good work, except the issue of slavery was left unresolved. Soon after the new constitution took effect, factions developed. Washington hated factions, but could not stop them from forming. His cabinet was split by factions, Hamilton and the Federalist one side and Jefferson and his followers on the other. These factions remained an undercurrent throughout the presidency of John Adams, becoming formal during Adam's bid for a 2nd term, which he lost to Jefferson. The election of 1800 was a brutal war of accusations, gross lies and manipulated newspapers. It set the stage for all that followed in party politics. And throughout all that time, we've done some pretty good work.

Again I beg to differ. holding your nose and voting the lesser of the evils is now the norm.

What makes you think it's a new phenomenon?

Really? How many republicans were thrilled that Romney got the nod? He got the nod because the party thought he had the best chance at getting Obama's job.

Enough and correct.

The primary was a dog and pony show to give the illusion that the voters had a say. Still, the voters didn't get to construct the party platform, nor did the voters have much of a say when Grover went in and made republicans follow his "don't raise taxes or else" program.

No illusion. The voters voted. The results were tabulated. One candidate got the most delegates. End of story.

Why should voters get a direct say in drafting the party platform? Remember the Tower of Babble... Convention delegates do it.

Read Grover's pledge. There is no mention of an 'or else'. Grover's pledge reflects GOP sentiment. Grover is a nuisance.

Not really. If you are not in one party or the other you simply don't have the money to run against those that do.

It's not easy, but like you say, it can be done. Since about 1880, we've had "31 U.S. Senators, 111 Representatives, and 22 Governors" that were not members of either major party.

Right now the democrats and the republicans have all the cards and the money in addition to being able to divide and conquer the voters which swings the odds heavily in the favor of a republican or a democrat getting the seats.

I don't see anything wrong in that. Each party broadens its base by tailoring its message to many segments of the electorate. People go with the party that best represents their beliefs. If the party strays too far from its base, people go elsewhere. Perhaps a 3rd party will form and replace it, as happened in the past to the Federalists and the Whigs. It's in a party's interest to broaden its appeal. The voter is like a consumer, and the party is like a business, always trying to design a product the voter will like. In this way, the VOTERS are the ones actually influencing the party's agenda. Look at how the dems attracted Latinos in the 2012 presidential election.

Core principles limit how far any party will go. But parties have been known to change core principles. For example, the Democratic party was staunchly pro-slavery before and during the Civil War, and protective of segregation after it. Today it can count on 90% of the black vote. Adapting to a new reality saved the party. This is the way the party system should work.

[JAD_333]

astralis,

It is patently unfair to throw history, let alone actual facts, at someone who’s entire argument is ideological.

Keep up the good work!

You are referring to yourself?

[bonehead]

bonehead,



lol. time for a history lesson, then.



Bracero program - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

U.S. Immigration Legislation: 1948 Displaced Persons Act

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



National Firearms Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gun Control Act of 1968 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



sigh.

Progressive Party (United States, 1912) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Progressive Party of 1912 was an American political party. It was formed by former President Theodore Roosevelt, after a split in the Republican Party between himself and President William Howard Taft...In the social sphere the platform called for A National Health Service to include all existing government medical agencies.

Second Bill of Rights - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fair Deal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Amongst the proposed measures included federal aid to education,[8] a large tax cut for low-income earners,[9] the abolition of poll taxes, an anti-lynching law, a permanent FEPC, a farm aid program, increased public housing, an immigration bill, new TVA-style public works projects, the establishment of a new Department of Welfare, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, an increase in the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents an hour, national health insurance, expanded Social Security coverage, and a $4 billion tax increase to reduce the national debt and finance these programs.[10]

History of health care reform in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1970, three proposals for universal national health insurance financed by payroll taxes and general federal revenues were introduced in the U.S. Congress.[17] In February 1970, Representative Martha Griffiths (D-MI) introduced a national health insurance bill—without any cost sharing—developed with the AFL–CIO.[18] In April 1970, Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY) introduced a bill to extend Medicare to all—retaining existing Medicare cost sharing and coverage limits—developed after consultation with Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) and former Johnson administration HEW Secretary Wilbur Cohen.[19] In August 1970, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) introduced a bipartisan national health insurance bill—without any cost sharing—developed with the Committee for National Health Insurance founded by United Auto Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther, with a corresponding bill introduced in the House the following month by Representative James Corman (D-CA).[20] In September 1970, the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee held the first congressional hearings in twenty years on national health insurance.[21]
In January 1971, Kennedy began a decade as chairman of the Health subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, and introduced a reconciled bipartisan Kennedy-Griffiths bill proposing universal national health insurance.[22] In February 1971, President Richard Nixon proposed more limited health insurance reform—a private health insurance employer mandate and federalization of Medicaid for the poor with dependent minor children.[22] Hearings on national health insurance were held by the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee in 1971, but no bill had the support of committee chairmen Representative Wilbur Mills (D-AR) or Senator Russell Long (D-LA).[22]
In October 1972, Nixon signed the Social Security Amendments of 1972 extending Medicare to those under 65 who have been severely disabled for over two years or have end stage renal disease (ESRD), and gradually raising the Medicare Part A payroll tax from 1.1% to 1.45% in 1986.[23] In November 1972, Nixon won re-election in a landslide over the only Democratic presidential nominee ever not endorsed by the AFL–CIO, Senator George McGovern (D-SD),[24] who was a cosponsor of the Kennedy-Griffiths bill, but did not make national health insurance a major issue in his campaign.[25]


===

in short, with the exception of gay rights (which only came to prominence in the 90s-early 2000s), every other thing which you name has been a Democratic priority for the last 60-80 years. there are reasons why liberals venerate FDR and LBJ, and why conservatives hate both of them so.

Immigration:
What the current Democrats are pushing is for somewhere between 10-15 million criminals to be given a path to citizenship. The Bracero program was to get migrant help in the time of war when our men were off fighting.Do we have a shortage of workers in 2013? Sure this program was extended but the premise was that THEY WOULD RETURN TO MEXICO when the work was done The Bracero was a guest worker program not a path for citizenship which is a huge fundamental change.


The U.S. immigration act of 1948 was designed for those who were predominately from Europe fleeing Nazi persecution. This was for refugees who lawfully entered the U.S. Homosexuals were categorically denied.

The hart-celler act limited visas to 170,000 and focused on immigrant's skills and family relationships with citizens of the U.S. Since when was the ability to sneak across the border and trespass skills the U.S. wants?


The actin 1986 was supposed to be a one time deal to fix the problem with the illegals. It affected about 3 million and has been called a complete failure for what it was designed to do. Reagan called signing it one of his greatest mistakes. We have the mess today directly because of this act. BTW this act was voted in by the more current democrats..not those of 40 years ago.


Sorry Astralis but you have failed to come up with anything that even hinted that the democrats 40 years ago would have given a free pass to 10-15 million illegals.








Gun control:

You are close to the mark but that is all. The National firearms act was clearly aimed at mobsters (fully auto and sawed off guns) and not the general public as Clintons AWB was. The newer version Feinstein trotted out recently was even more restrictive. Mostly based on looks and added magazine bans. The act in 1968 was basically a different version of the National firearms act and included explosives. Look at todays democratic strongholds(cities) Many have had complete gun bans and are more restrictive than any democrat in the 40's had even imagined. Again we are talking a huge magnification in scope and breath.



ACA: sigh. I don't have the time to tackle this one at the moment.

[DOR]

So, the party that is dead set against activist courts doing what should be done by elected officials is suing the President because they couldn’t swing enough votes to reverse the law that was passed with sufficient votes (and the President’s signature, and the nod from the Supreme Court) . . . because they object to the President delaying implementation of the very law they tried to overturn time and again.

Republicans to sue Obama over health law - CNN.com

[zraver]

Or they object to the side lining of their constitutional authority by an out of control executive who sees himself as an Augustus rather than a Washington.

[astralis]

further irony is that the border state republicans want Obama to do executive orders given the recent Republican failure to even agree on their OWN border bill.

note how eager Obama is whenever republicans try the whole "out of control executive" shtick. in fact his entire talking point lately is that he's doing something because Congress will not act. apparently polling wise it's pretty popular otherwise he wouldn't do it.

[Gun Grape]

Or they object to the side lining of their constitutional authority by an out of control executive who sees himself as an Augustus rather than a Washington.

I know the man who bullies his stuff through Executive Order. Bypassing the Constitution and going off on his own.

Oh wait He has signed Fewer Executive Orders than the last 10 Presidents.

As Emily Latella use to say " Never mind"

[astralis]

An upending of reason in the House - The Washington Post

By Dana Milbank

After conservatives on Thursday brought down House Speaker John Boehner’s bill to address the border crisis, the new House Republican leadership team issued a joint statement declaring that President Obama should fix the problem himself.

“There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” the leadership quartet proclaimed, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”

Who’s in the what now?

Just the day before, House Republicans had voted to sue Obama for using his executive authority. They called him lawless, a usurper, a monarch, a tyrant — all for postponing deadlines in the implementation of Obamacare. Now they were begging him to take executive action to compensate for their own inability to act — even though, in this case, accelerating the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children coming from Central America would likely require Obama to ignore a 2008 law.

This was not a momentary lapse, but a wholesale upending of reason.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), the Appropriations Committee chairman who had been leading the GOP side in the border legislation debate, told reporters much the same thing after the legislation was pulled from the floor. “I think this will put a lot more pressure on the president to act,” he said, according to The Post’s Paul Kane and Ed O’Keefe. “He has the authority and power to solve the problem forthwith.”

Apparently, if Obama is using his executive authority to advance a policy House Republicans support, it’s a meritorious exercise of presidential authority; if he uses that same authority to aid a policy they oppose, it’s time to write up articles of impeachment.

In another action this week, Republicans acknowledged, at least tacitly, that Obama has the executive authority to postpone deportations. The House majority drafted, and scheduled a vote on, legislation that would forbid the executive branch from anything that would “expand the number of aliens eligible for deferred action.”

But in proposing such legislation (which was pulled from the floor along with the border bill), Republicans implicitly acknowledged that Obama has such power now. Therefore, until both chambers of Congress can pass such a law by veto-proof margins, Obama retains the power. This is probably why House Republicans, just two weeks earlier, scoffed at the suggestion that they pass this sort of legislation when the idea came up before the House Rules Committee.

If the GOP position sounds contradictory, that’s because it’s less about the constitution than cleavages within the party. There are real questions about Obama’s abuses of power — say, the spying on Americans by the National Security Agency or the use of drones to kill U.S. citizens overseas — but the opposition party has left those largely untouched. The planned lawsuit was a bone thrown to conservatives to quiet their impeachment talk. The legislation restricting Obama’s executive authority on immigration was a similar effort to buy off conservatives who had been encouraged to rebel by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

But the efforts to placate conservatives aren’t working. The new House GOP leadership team took over on Friday, but a mere two hours after Eric Cantor gave his valedictory as majority leader on the House floor, his successor did a face-plant.

All morning, GOP leaders had been predicting that they had sufficient Republican votes to pass Boehner’s border bill. But then conservatives, under pressure from Cruz and far-right interest groups, began to go squishy, and the new majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, announced that he was pulling the border bill from the floor and that members could depart early for their five-week summer break.


What followed was as close as Congress gets to one of those fistfights in the Taiwanese parliament. Mainstream Republicans besieged Boehner and McCarthy on the House floor, noisily demanding that they do something about the border crisis before going on holiday. Half an hour later, McCarthy announced that “additional votes are possible today.”

Boos and jeers rained down on the new leader. The speaker pro tempore, Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), banged the gavel violently for order. Some lawmakers had to be called back from National Airport.

The hapless new majority leader, and his equally hapless new majority whip, Steve Scalise, called Republicans to an emergency meeting, where after fierce argument it was decided . . . that they would meet again on Friday.

Boehner, earlier in the day, tried to be philosophical. “I take my job one day at a time,” he said.

The problem with day-by-day leadership, though, is inconsistency: What you do on Thursday has a way of contradicting what you said on Wednesday.

[zraver]

I know the man who bullies his stuff through Executive Order. Bypassing the Constitution and going off on his own.

Oh wait He has signed Fewer Executive Orders than the last 10 Presidents.

As Emily Latella use to say " Never mind"

Its not how many, but what. re-writing whole parts of the ADA on a whim to protect his allies in the House and Senate is not in any way part of a functioning representative system.

[Gun Grape]

Its not how many, but what. re-writing whole parts of the ADA on a whim to protect his allies in the House and Senate is not in any way part of a functioning representative system.

Could you tell me which EO that was.

[JAD_333]

The suit is thin gruel. It probably won't be accepted by the courts. They hate to get in the middle of a political fight.

It seems to me the dems and Obama are responding to the suit in the wrong way. Calling it a political ploy, which it may well be, doesn't speak to the allegations. And ridiculing the GOP may rebound come fall. A lot of Republicans, including myself, want to air out the question as to whether Obama is exceeding his constitutional authority, and the ACA is as good a place to start as any.

One line of attack the dems are using defies logic altogether. They say that the suit arises out of the GOP's relentless effort to scuttle Obamacare. Granted, it looks that way, but the dem's logic amounts to saying that legislators should not act to correct a constitutional violation unless they originally supported the law in question. Obama himself calls it a waste of Congress' time.

But most conservatives don't see it that way. They have been hot to put a stop to what they perceive as a trend in the abuse of presidential power that actually predates Obama. So, they're happy to see Congress doing something about it, even if the suit does no more than put the issue before the public.

As one digs deeper into the background of the suit, things become more interesting. Obama did exceed his constitutional authority when he postponed deadlines in the ACA and granted exemptions. These were piddling changes that an executive ought to have been able to make as the overall administrator of the ACA. But the law is the law. The administration's lawyers probably told the president or someone high up in his administration that making unilateral changes would be illegal. This happens all the time with all sorts of laws. Usually the White House simply drafts a 25-word amendment and sends it to Congress where it would be passed with little fuss.

But anything that had to do with the ACA, which the GOP-dominated House of Reps was out to kill, was unlikely to get passed. Rather than try and certainly be rejected, which would have made it harder to defy Congress, Obama gambled a bit, and defied the law on his own authority. So, there's the heart of the matter, piddling but still violations.

What's going to happen next? The courts will not weigh in unless a private party comes forth and claims to have been materially affected by the changes Obama made. That could take years to work its way through the court system. In the meantime, The GOP will be satisfied with a political outcome, namely gaining control of the Senate this fall.

[DOR]

Its not how many, but what. re-writing whole parts of the ADA on a whim to protect his allies in the House and Senate is not in any way part of a functioning representative system.

Ditto:
Could you tell me which EO that was?

[dalem]

Ditto:
Could you tell me which EO that was?

Help for the hard-of-comprehension:

z-man didn't mention EOs. GG did. You can keep pounding that EO straw man as long and hard as you want, but it doesn't change facts.

(Hello friends! For everyone else, sorry folks, meant to put "po" into my browser for Powerline, put "wo" instead and it brought me back. Then saw a necrothread and a Like, took a peek. Won't happen again.)

-dale

[DOR]

OT: Interesting week for anniversaries . . . 100th for WWI, 50th for Gulf of Tonkin Incident and 40th for Nixon's resignation.

[Officer of Engineers]

Help for the hard-of-comprehension:

z-man didn't mention EOs. GG did. You can keep pounding that EO straw man as long and hard as you want, but it doesn't change facts.

(Hello friends! For everyone else, sorry folks, meant to put "po" into my browser for Powerline, put "wo" instead and it brought me back. Then saw a necrothread and a Like, took a peek. Won't happen again.)

-dale

Help a Canadian to understand, whose freaking fault is it that you Americans elected Obama?