In December of 2008, congressional Republicans were in an odd place. Their president was serving out the last days of his failed presidency, but all the important decisions were being made by people like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. On January 9th, 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that 524,000 jobs had been lost in December, 2.6 million jobs had been lost in 2008, and 1.9 million jobs had been lost in just the last four months. The Financial Services sector was in ruins. Detroit was bankrupt. The Dow Jones Industrial average had fallen from the 14,000’s in October 2007 to the 8,000’s. By March it would be in the 6,000’s. People’s homes were being foreclosed on left and right, and lives were being ruined and wealth destroyed at a devastating pace.
John McCain and Sarah Palin had suffered a resounding defeat, as had the Republicans in Congress. Suddenly, for the first time in many years, the Republicans had no real leadership. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner were on their own. But, if they were suddenly liberated from the burden of walking Bush and Cheney’s party line, they also were responsible for the chaos they saw all around them. The Congressional Republicans had worked with Bill Clinton to deregulate the banking industry. A Republican administration and a (mostly) Republican-controlled Congress had neglected to provide meaningful oversight of the derivatives markets or the mortgage industry. Republican tax cuts and unfunded wars and new entitlements had depleted the treasury without providing the promised economic growth. Now everything was in ruins.
Their ideology had failed in spectacular fashion, and they had been forced to bite the bullet and vote for an enormous bailout for the banks. A new Democratic president was assembling his team during the transition, trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding and prevent a second Great Depression.
It was in this context that Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor hatched a plan of total obstruction. During meetings in December 2008 and early January 2009, they decided that they would insist that their members provide no cooperation and no votes for anything major that the president wanted to do. It didn’t matter what the president suggested. Substance wasn’t the point.
Here’s an example of what I am talking about:
David Obey, then-chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, met with his GOP counterpart, Jerry Lewis, to explain what Democrats had in mind for the stimulus and ask what Republicans wanted to include. “Jerry’s response was: ‘I’m sorry, but leadership tells us we can’t play,’” Obey told me. “Exact quote: ‘We can’t play.’ What they said right from the get-go was: It doesn’t matter what the hell you do, we ain’t going to help you. We’re going to stand on the sidelines and bitch.”
To give this a little more flavor, let me add the following:
“We were in disarray,” recalls Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. “People were comparing us to cockroaches, saying we weren’t even relevant. We had to change the mind-set.”
“We came in shellshocked,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “There was sort of a feeling of ‘every man for himself.’ Mitch early on in this session came up with a game plan to make us relevant with 40 people. He said if we didn’t stick together on big things, we wouldn’t be relevant.”
Rather than feeling any shame for what they had done to the country, the Republicans decided to oppose everything the new president tried to do to clean up their mess. It didn’t matter whether they agreed with the policy in the past. They just wanted to be “relevant” and do whatever they could do to undermine Barack Obama.
Republicans recognized that after Obama’s big promises about bipartisanship, they could break those promises by refusing to cooperate. In the words of Congressman Tom Cole, a deputy Republican whip: “We wanted the talking point: ‘The only thing bipartisan was the opposition.’”
When you look back at the president’s 2008 campaign about hope and change, remember how the Republicans decided to strangle hope and change in the crib, just because they could. The president offered his hand and it was slapped away. It’s tragic that the American people never really understood what happened and who was to blame for partisan gridlock. The Republicans were richly rewarded in 2010 for their bad faith and deeply un-American strategy.
We have to tell this story because the more people who understand it, the fewer people will be fooled a second time.
