How Republicans turned the unprecedented into the new normal

How Republicans turned the unprecedented into the new normal

by Jon Perr at the Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/21/1486973/-How-Republicans-turned-the-unprecedented-into-the-new-normal

"SNIP..........


As the GOP's "Defund Obamacare" campaign ramped up over the summer of 2013, Todd used his NBC "First Read" column to actively illuminate rather than passively mislead. As he put it on July 9:


Here's a thought exercise on this summer morning: Imagine that after the controversial Medicare prescription-drug legislation was passed into law in 2003, Democrats did everything they could to thwart one of George W. Bush's top domestic achievements. They launched Senate filibusters to block essential HHS appointees from administering the law; they warned the sports and entertainment industries from participating in any public service announcements to help seniors understand how the law works; and, after taking control of the House of Representatives in 2007, they used the power of the purse to prohibit any more federal funds from being used to implement the law. As it turns out, none of that happened.

That's exactly right. Despite their opposition to the Part D legislation, Democrats didn't just refuse to obstruct Bush's completely unfunded $400 billion windfall for pharmaceutical firms. In Washington and in the states, Democrats helped ensure the successful implementation of a Republican program whose badly bungled 2006 launch even John Boehner acknowledged was "horrendous."

Why did Democrats choose cooperation where Republicans chose sabotage? Because it’s not true that “both sides do it.” Because we’re living in age of “asymmetric polarization” in which one political party has now normalized the previously inconceivable. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in summing up their 2013 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks:



............SNIP"