In its early days, the Tea Party and its supporters made a great show of their reverence for the U.S. Constitution. At Tea Party rallies, speaker after speaker would reach into a back pocket, suit pocket or purse, pull out a copy of our government’s founding document and wave it to the crowd as a symbol of their loyalty.
But today, in their mounting self-righteousness, they are participating in the undermining of that document and the unraveling of the constitutional form of self-governance that has been this nation’s foundation. And it has to stop.
The Constitution is not a complex document. If you want to pass, alter or repeal a law, it lays out a straightforward mechanism for doing so. You get a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate and the president’s signature, and voila, you have your new law.
Right now, of course, Republicans in Washington lack the votes to make that happen. But in their infinite wisdom, the Founding Fathers built a mechanism into the Constitution to address that problem as well. It is called an election, in which you go out and win the votes you lack. We had an election less than a year ago, as you may recall. President Obama was re-elected, and Democrats picked up two seats in the U.S. Senate and eight seats in the U.S. House.
That compounds the Republicans’ predicament. They don’t have enough votes in Congress to repeal Obamacare and pass other bills that they’d like, and they’re losing rather than gaining ground with voters. Using the mechanisms provided under the Constitution, they are stymied. So instead, they have decided to go outside the Constitution, adopting a tactic that would have horrified our Founding Fathers and that undermines the entire system of representative democracy.
It comes down to blackmail. As of late this week, House Republicans had leaked a long list of GOP demands, from postponing Obamacare to building a new oil pipeline to dictating to states how they handle lawsuits. If President Obama refuses to agree to those demands, House leaders say, the House GOP will refuse to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, a step that would probably start a stampede on the stock market and a collapse of the economic recovery.
Let’s be clear about three things. This is not some extraordinary, one-time response to some extraordinary situation. Over the last few years, Republicans have also used this extra-constitutional blackmail strategy to demand cuts in the budget and to try to prevent tax hikes on the richest 1 percent of Americans. It has become a routine ploy on their part.
Second, the GOP has adopted this tactic because it has lost faith in its ability to achieve its goals constitutionally, by winning elections. It is an act of desperation by a party that knows it is losing its grip on legitimate levers of power.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan bolstered that reading of the situation.
“The reason this debt limit fight is different is, we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves,” Ryan admitted. “We are stuck with this government another three years.”
In other words, having lost an election, and thus their chance at changing policy through legitimate means, Republicans feel compelled to stoop to radical, extra-constitutional measures to get their way.
Third, if this tactic is rewarded, it will be used over and over again, for increasingly less important reasons and by both parties, until our system of representative government becomes unworkable. It has to be stopped. Right here and right now.
