Bipartisan Combat

At long last, the Democrats have passed the health care reform bill after a tortuous journey during which the Republicans tried to gummy up the works at every turn. For months Pres. Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats attempted unsuccessfully to forge a bipartisan consensus with Republicans on health care reform. In the end, the Democrats used their huge majorities in the House and Senate to muscle through the most far-reaching social legislation in four decades.

The Democratic attempt at bipartisanship is laudable and it was part of Pres. Obama’s appeal during the presidential elections. But the obdurate obstructionism of the Republican Party renders it foolhardy. Bipartisanship has a chance when both parties have a genuine interest in achieving a desired goal. The Republicans have plainly calculated that their political fortunes and, to a lesser degree, ideological belief in limited government, are best served by tying up the government in knots.

Whipped up by angry Tea Party mobs and right wing provocateurs, like Glen Beck and Sean Hannity posturing as talk show hosts on Fox News, as well as polemical radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, spewing all manners of half truths and canards, Republicans have chanced upon a political lifeline just a year after being cast into the political wilderness following eight disastrous years of the George W. Bush presidency.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden react as the House passes the health care reform bill, March 21, 2010

Republicans have a fundamentally different view of the role of government and an individual’s relationship with the state than Democrats. If they had their druthers, some of them would love to see the government eviscerated, which the more extremist Tea Party fanatics seem prepared to accomplish violently. The reductionist view of government is a valid — even if naive — political philosophy and Republicans have had their opportunity to exercise that worldview, both during Bush’s eight catastrophic years and earlier, more successfully, with their guiding light, Pres. Ronald Reagan.

Under Obama though, Republicans have stoked public anger to intimidate opponents and deployed every possible parliamentary trick, such as the filibuster and legislative holds in the Senate, to ground government to a halt. Regrettably, they have been aided in their quest by Pres. Obama’s misplaced propensity to cultivate bipartisanship, even as they perversely denounce the Democrats for using parliamentary tricks to advance legislation to counter their reckless and politically calculated obstructionism.

It is time the Democrats abandoned the hand-to-hand combat of bipartisanship with the Republicans, reported back to their desks and left the opponents to their preferred task of baying at the moon and the endless apocalyptic nightmares the most fanatical extremists among them constantly conjure up.