Bipartisanship-- The Real Kind, Not The Kevin McCarthy Cynical Bullshit Kind

In a wave election-- with a DCCC recruiting some real garbage, dumb-as-a-brick candidates to run-- you get some really ignorant freshmen in Congress. And we do. So some of them might not know who Kevin McCarthy is... let alone what his role has been and what his likely intentions are. On Thursday he penned a letter: Dear Members of the Democratic Class of 2019, not, you'll notice, Dear Members of the Class of 2019.

McCarthy's something of a dolt, but a dolt with an extremely inflated self-image. And being a dolt doesn't mean he isn't crafty... like his pal, Trumpanzee. Democratic freshmen need to hear from Democratic sophomores, juniors and seniors, about Republican bipartisanship while they controlled the levers of power in the House. This gives little more than a hint:

"When the new Congress is sworn in," he reminded the freshmen eager to break through, "we will all bear the 'solemn responsibility' of acting on behalf of our fellow citizens, as you wrote in a letter to your party's leadership earlier this month. " And he's happy to help him undermine their leaders. "In the spirit of that responsibility," he continued in the spirit of well-known Republican comity and generosity, "I am writing to express my willingness to work with you for the good of the country-- and to extend an open invitation to meet with you int the new year."

So the idiot who led the partisan food fight of the last several years is now trolling for Democrats of the Josh Gottheimer mold who are willing to work with him against Democratic values. No more partisan food fights! Not when there are more Democrats with arms than Republicans!

There are several different ways to work across the aisle. McCarthy is hoping some of the Democratic freshmen will take guidance from Wall Street Democrats like the aforementioned Mr. Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ) and come to think, reflexively, that compromise and bipartisanship is selling out-- and there are rewards for that-- their own constituents "for the greater good," "greater" as in corporate good. Some of the most accomplished-- and respected and admired-- Democrats in Congress know how to successfully work across the aisle without selling out their constituents and without selling out their values.

McCarthy worked tirelessly this week to make sure that what Bernie accomplished yesterday with Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY)-- a bipartisan resolution to end American participation in the Yemen genocide-- would not even get a vote in the House. That's how Kevin McCarthy, when he still has any power to do anything other than lure greedy and mentally impaired freshmen across the aisle, expresses his devotion to ending the food fights!

One skilled legislator who learned how to compromise and work for her constituents' best interests with good faith efforts with her colleagues in the state legislature is Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). She passed legislation in Olympia, working with Republicans eager to also benefit their own constituents-- not shallow hypocrites like Kevin McCarthy-- that benefited both Democratic and Republican Washingtonians... and without selling out the progressive values that have propelled and energized her stellar career as an organizer, activist and political leader. This morning we asked Pramila to help us understand the art of successful, forward-looking bipartisanship, something the freshmen Democrats should pay attention to instead of McCarthy's hollow, staff-generated empty words.

Pramila is a skilled close-quarters negotiator who helped create Seattle's Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. Even before going to Congress, she worked with Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain on an immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013. She worked with them to get that bill passed.

When we first met her in January of 2016 she was helping Republicans in the state Senate to see common ground on bills she was trying to pass-- to lift the statute of limitations on rape and sexual assaults and for free community college education.

Just before we talked she has testified at a hearing in the Senate Governmental Operations committee on her bill to expand democracy through automatic voter registration (SB 6379). She worked on the bill with Washington's Republican Secretary of State, Kim Wyman.

"The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy," she explained when she introduced it. "Yet while our state is a leader in so many things, we are struggling to get Washingtonians to cast ballots and have their voices heard. It is the duty of elected officials, regardless of party, to ensure everyone has the opportunity to be heard. That is the goal of this bill. There should be no barriers between the people and voting, and with this bill one more barrier has been removed. We have worked very hard over the past several months to develop a bipartisan piece of legislation that fits Washington’s particular needs."

Secretary Wyman concurred: "I am pleased to join Senator Jayapal and a bipartisan group of legislators in proposing this welcome expansion of access to the voter rolls. We have a sizable group of people who have not chosen to register through the normal routes of online, motor-voter, mail or in-person registration. We know that some of these potential voters have already given proof of citizenship to the DOL or to health exchange, and so automatic registration should be allowed for them. Our goal in the election community is to register every eligible voter, to remove any barriers to voting, and to promote robust turnout."

Analysis shows that automatic voter registration boosts numbers of registered voters as well as turnout at elections. In addition to increasing voter rolls, SB 6379 reduces paperwork and streamlines the registration process, allowing agencies to integrate voter registration services into existing forms and online prompts. "Passing a bill like this with support from both sides of the aisle helps rebuild trust that we can break political gridlock," said Jayapal. "While voting issues can be divisive at times, we have a bipartisan mandate with this bill. Let’s get it passed through the Legislature and onto the governor’s desk for signature."

If you want to know what GOP intentions are, forget McCarthy's sirens song. Go no further than George Packer's essay early this morning for The Atlantic, The Corruption of the Republican Party. He explained that the corruption he was addressing "has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power-- power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake-- the foam is scummy with self-dealing-- but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, the defeated representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries. But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing."

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering-- in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats-- so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change-- longer than in progressives’ dreams-- but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.

Taking away democratic rights-- extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters-- is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders-- Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others-- were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.

...Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom-- unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative-- from Goldwater (who, in 1996, joked that he had become a Republican liberal) to Ted Cruz, from Buckley to Dinesh D’Souza. Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse-- all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

...The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma-- democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?