NYT Krugman: The Real Governments of Blue America
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/shutdown-democrats.html
Officially, a big part of the federal government shut down late last month. In important ways, however, Americas government went AWOL almost two years earlier, when Donald Trump was inaugurated.
After all, politicians supposedly seek office in order to get stuff done to tackle real problems and implement solutions. But neither Trump, who spends his energy inventing crises at the border, nor the Republicans who controlled Congress for two years have done any of that. Their only major legislative achievement was a tax cut that blew up the deficit without, as far as anyone can tell, doing anything to enhance the economys long-run growth prospects.
Meanwhile, there has been no hint of the infrastructure plan Trump promised to deliver. And after many years of denouncing Obamacare and promising to provide a far better replacement, Republicans turned out to have no idea how to do that, and in particular no plan to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Why cant Republicans govern? Its not just that their party is committed to an ideology that says that government is always the problem, never the solution. Beyond that, they have systematically deprived themselves of the ability to analyze policies and learn from evidence, because hard thinking might lead someone to question received doctrine.
And Republicans still control the Senate and the White House. So even when (if?) the shutdown ends, it will be at least two years before we have a government in Washington thats actually capable of, or even interested in, governing.
But not everything is on hold. For America has a federal system, and the 2018 elections set the stage for a wave of actual governance of real efforts to solve real problems at the state and local levels.
Justice Louis Brandeis famously described the states as the laboratories of democracy; right now theyre the places where were seeing what it looks like when elected officials try to do what they were elected to do, and actually govern. If were lucky, two years from now that attitude may re-establish itself in the nations capital.
Maybe the "states rights" repugs have actually pushed us into an effective way forward.
Seems like the repugs can't do much right except to Mitch and Bone about what others do