If I thought President Obama was attempting to be “serious” in the manner that Washington insiders usually mean that term, I would have to agree wholeheartedly with Marc Thiessen:
Let’s imagine you were a Democratic president who just lost control of Congress to the Republicans, and you wanted to make it really, really clear that you are not serious about governing. What would you do? Simple: Use your State of the Union address to propose hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes that will never be enacted, in order to fund a slew of new government programs that have no chance of being approved.
Welcome to President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address.
Yup. It’s pretty obvious that the president isn’t being “serious.” In fact, it’s impossible to argue with the following, too:
On Tuesday night, Obama will ask the new Republican Congress to approve $320 billion in tax increases. To see how absurd this is, imagine for a moment what the reaction would have been if, after losing control of Congress to the Democrats in 2006, President George W. Bush had used his next State of the Union address to propose $320 billion in growth-oriented tax cuts. Would anyone have taken him seriously? The media would have dismissed Bush as delusional. Democrats would have laughed. Everyone would have asked: What’s wrong with him? Didn’t he get the message of the 2006 midterms? What planet is he on?
Yeah, that is precisely right. No doubt about it.
This, too:
Obama is not delusional. He knows his plan has no chance of becoming law. White House officials, according to Politico, “aren’t holding their breath that Obama’s new proposals will pass Congress now that Republicans control both chambers.” (Which raises the question why, if Obama were serious, didn’t he propose them when Democrats controlled both chambers?) The goal is for “Obama to position himself as a defender of the middle class” and put Republicans in the “politically awkward” position of resisting tax increases on the rich to pay for programs that benefit the middle class.
In other words, Obama’s move is completely and transparently political.
I can’t argue with a single word of that. It’s spot-on.
But, here’s the thing. This is what I want the president to do, not because I think it is “serious” in the sense that it demonstrates that the president is interested in signing legislation, but because it indicates that he is serious about not passing a Republican agenda. If he can’t do what he’d like to do, he can at least block the Republicans from doing what they’d like to do.
It might seem like a small thing, but this is not what Clinton did when faced with a similarly hostile Congress in the last two years of his crippled presidency. Here’s what Clinton did. He signed the:
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Balanced Budget Act of 1997
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Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997
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Iraq Liberation Act
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Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act
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Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act
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Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000
You might want to familiarize yourself with this list of legislation because it all combined to set the stage for the war in Iraq and the Great Recession. That’s what being “serious” about working with a Republican Congress looked like, and history doesn’t look kindly on the results.
So, I’m pretty grateful that our president has no intention of going out and giving a State of the Union address where he will explain how he is going to meet John Boehner and Mitch McConnell halfway. I’m glad he isn’t reacting to the midterm elections as if they give the Republicans a mandate to do anything.
Yes, it’s true, these proposals are transparently political and designed to make the Republicans squirm and look bad. Yes, he might have proposed these policies when he had a friendlier Congress and some prospect of seeing them enacted (although, thanks to Bush and Clinton, he had a pile of shit to clean up first).
I wish the Republicans could come up with something worth signing, but they can’t. And I’m glad that we elected a president who knows better than to try to score points inside the Beltway by being the kind of “serious” they expect him to be.
Before President Obama was even sworn in, the GOP developed a strategy of “no compromise,” and that’s what they should expect now.
The Republicans crushed us on Election Night and the president intends to respond by proposing “hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes” on rich people to pay for tax cuts and other initiatives for the working poor and middle class.
Bill Clinton, he is not.
