Dana Milbank points out something that ought to be obvious but really isn’t.
[Rep. Paul] Ryan and his fellow House Republicans…know their budget will never become law. They are free to be as reckless as they want to be, to throw as many bombs as they wish…
…Ryan is free to propose such a cockamamie plan because he knows that President Obama and Senate Democrats will never go along with it.
It’s a little more complicated than that, however. It’s not really true that the House leadership is “free” to offer up a draconian austerity budget plan. Rather, they are “compelled” to offer up this plan. It’s the price they paid to the wingnuts to get them to agree to raising the debt ceiling. In a greater sense, it is the price they are paying now for feeding their wingnut base a constant stream of bullshit about economics for forty years without pause.
In fact, the word “free” seems like one of the worst adjectives one could choose to describe the House leadership’s choices on the budget, on guns, on immigration, on climate, and on women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights.
You could call it: live by bullshit, die by bullshit.
The Democrats engage in some of this behavior. They all supported the Employee Free Choice Act when they knew it would be filibustered, but enough of them opposed it when they had the technical power to pass it that it died. Harry Reid certainly made it sound like he regretted not listening to Senators Merkley and Udall when they called for filibuster reform in 2009. Yet, he didn’t listen to them in 2013 when he had the chance to reconsider.
Party leadership will sometimes bullshit their base. It happens. But the Democrats don’t do this routinely. It isn’t central to their strategy. What Democratic officeholders say they want is mainly what they really want, and it lines up closely with what their base wants, and it isn’t based on delusions or lies. We want universal health care because it’s a cheaper and fairer way of providing health care than what we have now. We want to stimulate the economy to improve the employment situation, and we base that on sound and proven economic theory. We want to preserve a woman’s right to choose because we think all kinds of horrible things happen when women don’t have that choice, not because we think God has ordained it. We think people should be able to vote because greater voter participation creates a more accurate measure of the Will of the People, not just because we think it will be to our advantage.
You can go down the list. The Democrats have not fed their base a bunch of bullshit and created a totally confused and paranoid and logic-impaired segment of society that they rely upon to act in a stupid and self-destructive manner.
The GOP in Washington is not free to be sensible. They are not free to use evidence. They are not free to negotiate or compromise. They are compelled to behave in the way that they trained their base to expect them to behave.
They are slaves to their own bullshit.
