Dana Milbank needs to lay off the Knifey Moloko. I mean, what in the hell?
The prevailing view is that a Republican Senate would only compound Obama’s woes by bottling up confirmations, doubling the number of investigations and chipping away at Obamacare and other legislative achievements.
Yet there’s a chance that having an all-Republican Congress would help Obama — and even some White House officials have wondered privately whether a unified Republican Congress would be better than the current environment. Republicans, without Harry Reid to blame, would own Congress — a body that inspires a high level of confidence in just 7 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup survey last month finding Congress at a new low and at the bottom of all institutions tested.
There would be no more excuses for Republicans’ failure to put forward their own health-care plan, immigration proposals, specific cuts to popular government programs, and pet causes involving abortion, birth control and gay rights. This would set up real clashes with Obama — who could employ the veto pen he hasn’t used a single time since Republicans gained control of the House in 2010 — and sharp contrasts that would put him on the winning side of public opinion.
It is not hard to imagine a Republican takeover of the Senate causing conservatives in both chambers to overreach. House Republicans would get more pressure from their base to take a swing at impeachment, because the odds of convicting Obama in the Senate would be better (if still prohibitive). Alternatively, Republican leaders, recognizing that the public will hold them responsible now that they have complete control of Congress, might try to compromise with Obama.
If your head hasn’t exploded and you still have brain function, read on:
Alternatively, Republican leaders, recognizing that the public will hold them responsible now that they have complete control of Congress, might try to compromise with Obama…
…I hold out hope that a Congress under unified Republican control might react the way it did during Bill Clinton’s presidency, producing a balanced budget and welfare reform.
Reading this analysis from Milbank is like having your dentist slip and inject novocaine directly into your brain stem.
A lot of us tried to do analysis based on the assumption that all this “Obama is a secret Muslim socialist Nazi Kenyan anti-colonialist” stuff was just an act. Maybe it was in the beginning. But it’s factual now. For the Republican base and even many actual Republican lawmakers, there can be no compromise with Obama. And there won’t be, ever. If the GOP takes over control of both chambers of Congress, the government will shutter its doors and we will have a constitutional and economic crisis of the highest order.
The leadership lost control a long time ago. Ask Eric Cantor; he’ll tell you.
Wankerific. That article is a truly awe-inspiring accomplishment.
He lives inside the beltway wank-o-sphere where they’re all high on each others endless production of wank-o-spheric gases. The giveaway was that he is hoping for more “accomplishments” like a balanced budget and welfare “reform.” Oh, boy! If he gets his way, maybe we’ll finally get entitlement “reform”! Can we just stop pretending that tools like Milbank are liberals. Then we will no longer need to feign perplexity over their bullshit.
Milbank gets paid to write this stuff? Did he miss the part where the Republicans attempted to repeal the ACA more than 20 times? Or the never ending investigations of Benghazi? How about Dick Cheney’s statement that “Deficits don’t matter?” How about the irrational assumptions written into every budget that Paul Ryan ever put his hand to?
Republicans in both houses of Congress are so shit scared of electoral challenges from their right that, if they were in the majority, the actual business of the nation would stop, replaced by long winded speeches accompanied by attempts to impeach Obama, reinstate school prayer, and ban abortion.
If Milbank is a pundit then I’m a sage.
+40 times, or is it 50 by now.
rename all the post offices they just named, that’s high on the agenda; think of reasons to take days off, also high
I’ve had a lovely day, and won’t let it be ruined by idiocy, so I’m just going to laugh.
“Not hard” if one doesn’t look at the GOP candidates. Democrats will retain control of the Senate with -3 to +3 from their current numbers.
Barkeep,
I’ll have what Dana’s having.
Make it a double, and call the guys with the butterfly nets, pronto!
Umm, doesn’t the existance of an actual high crime/misdemeanor have to precede impeachment proceedings? I guess he’ll get back to us on that.
It didn’t have to last time
The US surpassed Saudi Arabia to become the number one oil producer in the world.
I can’t wait to see how the Wingnuts say that means Obama should be impeached.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-04/u-s-seen-as-biggest-oil-producer-after-overtaking-saudi.htm
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[QUOTE]”The shale production story is bigger than Iraqi production, but it hasn’t made the impact on prices you would expect,” said Blanch. “Typically such a large energy supply growth should bring prices lower, but in fact we’re not seeing that because the whole geopolitical situation outside the U.S. is dreadful.”[/QUOTE]
So we “drilled, baby, drilled”, despite Palin’s crowd not taking the White House and not gutting already too loose regulations and because the war mongering neocons screwed up the Middle East we still are paying too much for oil and aren’t more secure.
Got it. These guys really want to be in charge? I doubt it because they haven’t been too keen on accountably and factual evidence of the consequences of their actions.
Sounds like this is Dana’s pitch to be a substitute host
on Meet The Press.
The only upside to the GOP owning Congress is that they will own the dysfunction and constitutional crises that result. Obama will probably be impeached and see his approval ratings go up and Democrats could win back both Houses in 2016.
But compromise….?
The poll numbers part is the part Milbank sees clearly, because he’s a sportswriter, and a crappy one with upside-down priorities. He covers politics like a horse-race journalist who thinks the story isn’t the race but the odds, and has no clue that politics is the front end of another story of how government affects people’s lives.
He assumes that the poll numbers are the politicians’ top priorities too. Therefore why wouldn’t a majority leader McConnell and Obama reach a compromise? It would make them more popular! And continues to believe this obvious bullshit because he sees everything through the filter of his cynical assumptions: all evidence that he’s right. The “wanker” epithet is so precise and perfect for this guy.
Precisely. Whenever I read the wapo the entire paper,except maybe the Metro section reads like the sports page. Who’s winning and losing rather than what is actually good and bad news for the citizens of the nation outside the Beltway.
If the Repukes get the Senate, they will also have the house.
Articles of Impeachment will be filed immediately.
Really? Having total control of congress will lead them to think that now they have to compromise with him?
I think what is more likely is that the base will bray mightily that with the House and the Senate, they hold two out of three branches of government (Judicial? Huh?) and therefore Obama is required by the constitution to sign whatever they send him or be executed for treason.
I think what we would end up with would be appalling in that the standing of the US as a functioning country deserving of inclusion with other world leaders would be seriously in question.
Yes, the only benefit that could conceivably come from a fully Republican Congress would be a crushing Democratic victory in 2016. But we would have to survive two years of permanent crisis to get there.
While I’m no fan of Millbank, some of his central points would be relevant if certain other realities existed:
If the Dem Party Leadership was not institutionally centrist to its core but rather stood for and vigorously promoted practical liberal/true progressive principles rather than trading them away pre-emptively or making excuses why they can’t push for them now to conceal their ‘risk averse’ caution related to preserving their own careers.
If the Dem voting base realized that the centrist Dems we’ve been electing and re-electing ovber the last 30 years are every bit as much of a problem as the GOPers are now because their impact has moved the party so far to the right that in reality there’s not enough difference between the respective party orthodoxies to establish the dynamic tension required to actually stimulate meaningful debate and discussion in the public arena on the actual substance of the major issues of the day. That we need to primary out the bad centrists and replace them with true/progressives/practical liberals and that such a restoration of the party to functionality will not happen overnight.
If there was any indication that the president would change any of his currently terrible major policy trajectories including the push for privatization of public education, the maintaining of an inequitable, regressive tax structure, a thoroughly destructive foreign policy agenda including both the aggressive militarization parts and the international trade bits.
Unfortunately, none of these conditions exist so Millbank’s ideas, some relevant in some circumstances, some completely idiotic, are moot regardless. All the GOPer nutballs and dedicated conservative GOP ‘machers’ could be ‘disappeared’ from the planet and we’d still be in a world of hurt from the Dems left behind. Those with power and influence in the party now internalized and signed on to the very conservative Neoliberal dogma quite a while ago.
So, Republicans have zero responsibility for the mess that is Congress, a mess brought about by years of refusal to even try to govern, because of Harry Reid, but I’m supposed to believe that one Reid is gone, they’ll magically start to govern again and work with Obama.
Or, back here in reality, they’ll blame Obama for everything, shut down the government, throw the economy into chaos, open impeachment hearings, and wreck everything, all the while with morons like Milbank saying “You know, if Obama would just resign from office along with Joe Biden, the Republicans would then be responsible for everything and they would have to govern.”
As if the nation can survive another round of the horrendous crap that the GOP Congress and DEM POTUS bequeathed to us from 1995 to 2000. Crap for their own and separate interests neither Party owned in the financial meltdown and both pray that with enough new debt the economy can limp along well enough that the public won’t demand repeal of the crap.
“So, Republicans have zero responsibility for the mess that is Congress”… only if you place all of the blame entirely on the spineless journalists who gave them microphones and shilled in every way possible for their idiotic and malicious ideas.
Shorter Dana Milbank:
“I’m totally irrelevant and you can ignore me, safely, for the rest of time.”
Will do!