Democrats Must Reject the Coming Bipartisanship Trap

Democrats Must Reject the Coming Bipartisanship Trap
by David Atkins December 23, 2017

Misbehaving dogs, mischievous children and cheating spouses all share a common behavior: once they’ve been caught behaving cruelly and selfishly, they swindle their victim with ersatz overtures of affection, often publicly in front of others. Refusing these overtures makes the victim look mean and unforgiving. Accepting them opens the door to further, more aggressive wrongdoing.

Republicans are set to engage in the same manipulative game with Democrats in 2018. Knowing that voters are set to punish them severely for promoting wildly corrupt and unpopular policies, they’re hoping to ploy Democrats with promises of bipartisan policy. Republicans expect that if they offer false olive branches and Democrats refuse them, voters will grow angry at everyone and throw up their hands in collective frustration. They assume the media will pliantly adopt their usual both-sides-refuse-to-work-together template pieces.

But it won’t work. If Democrats are smart they will reject the gambit and refuse to be played.

To be sure, there are many issues that will require basic compromises in the next legislative year so that vulnerable people are protected and so that the government continues to function. Budgets will need to be adopted, DACA will need to be dealt with, the children’s health insurance program re-extended, debt ceilings lifted, and much else. Republicans will need Democratic votes, and Democrats should use all the leverage they can to force Republicans to observe the minimum priorities in keeping with simple human decency.

But the GOP has already demonstrated shocking bad faith in the past two years that goes beyond political differences and veers into direct and open malevolence. Republicans in Congress and their media allies have gone far out of their way to protect a clearly incompetent and unstable president from investigations into crimes of state, collusion with a hostile foreign power, abuse of power, obstruction of justice, tax evasion and beyond. They have done so by attempting to lambaste the country’s own intelligence agencies and employees–even Republicans who were appointed by other Republicans–as somehow in league with Democrats and engaged in a coup against the president, even though the reality is that partisan FBI agents in the New York leaked a bogus October Surprise on Anthony Weiner’s laptop to conservative media figures, shifting the election to Trump at the last minute.


https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/12/23/democrats-must-reject-the-coming-bipartisan-trap/