Why Republicans Can’t Govern
I am convinced that Republicans govern stupidly on purpose. It’s the only rational explanation.
When Grover Norquist infamously said he wanted to drown government in a bathtub, he wasn’t kidding, and he didn’t mean “drown only the wasteful parts of government.”
I see this in action especially at the state and federal levels. Republicans take a program that works — CHIP, Social Security, Cash for Clunkers, whatever — and try to purposefully ruin it so they can claim it as a failed program and axe it. The process is literally that basic and that absurd.
In the case of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in Texas, the GOP outsourced it to a private company who messed up enrollment in the program while “accidentally” dropping a ton of people who were enrolled. Then, the Texas GOP could — and did! — claim that demand for the program was down and that it was time to get rid of CHIP.
And the GOP is still trying to get rid of SCHIP! Even as Congress debates what form health care reform will take, GOP leaders are trying to kill SCHIP. Kill the State Childrens Health Insurance Program! In the middle of a health care debate! I couldn’t imagine a more ridiculous position if I tried.
At the beginning of Bush’s second term, the GOP tried to kill Social Security, one of the most successful and popular government programs of all time. This attempt was met with enormous popular backlash, and the attempt was one of only a handful of GWB’s “regrets” (not mistakes, no never!) at the end of his Presidency. GWB probably only regrets that the attempt made clear the not-so-secret desire in the heart of today’s GOP to cut good government services — or sell them to their rich buddies and then cut them. The American people were rightly disgusted with such behavior.
Now the GOP is trying to kill the Cash for Clunkers program, which, so far, is a success and is having exactly the economic and environmental effects that it was designed to have. If a program is working that well, it should receive renewed funding and attention, not a first class ticket to the chopping block. But today’s GOP believes that for its own survival it has to prevent any Obama administration initiatives from succeeding at any cost, regardless of the price of failure for us all.
The deliberate GOP sabotage of government programs that work is a major reason why the American people rejected Republican rule in 2006 and 2008, and why they will do so again in 2010 and 2012.
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August 4th, 2009 at 11:26 am
This reminds me of how strange I find it when conservatives complain about government, but yet those same conservatives aspire to be apart of the government they constantly complain about.
August 4th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
The problem is that today’s conservatives (and maybe conservatives in general) have no vision for what effective government is like, so they get in there and burn the whole thing down when they can.
August 14th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Or maybe the conservatives get tired of having to fight the same stupid battles all the time. What happened to fiscal responsability? The cash for clunkers program has had a good response I agree, it has also dropped so many trash cars into junkyards that there is a whole new set of issues that have arisen. Social Security must be overhauled, the system, regardless of how popular it is, is not working the way it should. There simply is not enough money coming in and too much money going out. But perhaps we can simply approach this problem the same way that the left approaches most problems…let’s throw more money at it. Who cares if we have a balanced budget? We print the money, we’ll just make more. And if we need more, then we’ll simply take more in taxes from the people, after all we rule them right? If a program is not working as it should, then it needs to be reexamined, overhauled, or replaced. The idea the bush had to let people manage their own social security was a fantastic one, if people had simply invested in modest mutual funds, they would have more than enough to live on. Oh, but wait, if people actually can meet their own needs, then they won’t need to come get handouts from the government, and there goes the entire platform of the democratic party. Saying republicans can’t goven makes no sense. The democrats are just as bad if not worse. The problem in governement is that there are few statesmen left, people who turely care about the people they represent and about the nation they serve. It’s mainly just politicians, people too concerned about their own power and prestige and money to give a rat’s rear end about the people or the nation. And when you get a genuine statesman into office, generally the liberal left will do anything they can to discredit him or her becasue they simply don’t like the idea of the people having to work, and make their own decisions…you’d rather do it for them. It’s the same old story…give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Give it to him again the next day and he’ll eat again. Keep giving it to him and soon he will come to think that he is entitled to a fish a day, but when you’ve got no more fish to give him, he starves, fights, and steal’s someone elses. It would have been better in the beginning to teach him to fish, so that he could then work daily for his own food, and support himself and others, rather than becoming a drain on a fruitless system.