Entangled Alliances

Last Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favour of President Obama’s Economic Stimulus Package, despite every single House Republican voting no. Yes, you heard that right – not one Republican congressman voted in favour of economic stimulus, despite Obama granting them face-time to discuss their concerns and significant concessions in the bill itself. The legislation is  now being sent to the Senate, yet in ominous news it looks like Obama hasn’t learnt his lesson, promising to reshape the bill to ensure the support of Republican senators.

This slavish devotion to the continued courting of Republicans over the stimulus package  is not just nonsensical in the wake of the House GOP effectively telling Obama to go f— himself but downright dangerous as well and yet another example of the mystifying american obsession with “bipartisanship”.  I explain why over the fold.

Whether Wednesday’s unanimous “hell no” vote by House Republicans was carefully orchestrated or just coincidental, their reaction to it was unambiguous and unequivocal. They’ve spent the last few days beating their chests, playing ‘eye of the tiger’ and generally acting like this is the start of some glorious insurrection:

NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) repeated the request during his own briefing for members Friday – telling Republicans that they need to get over the idea that they’re participating in legislation and ought to start thinking of themselves as “an insurgency” instead.

With stuff like that it’s painfully obvious that no matter how hard Obama tries to compromise with them they simply aren’t interested in coming together with Democrats to make good legislation – they’d rather simply be the party of “no”.  Republicans, as ever, are proving themsleves to be the ultimate bad-faith bargainers. So why, in the face of such rebukes by the Republicans in the House, is Obama now offering concessions to Republicans in the Senate?

Maybe it’s a move to get votes. Whereas democrats have safe-ish majorities in the house, in the Senate they are, at the moment at least, at 58 seats – two short of the 60 seats required for a filibuster-proof majority. Therefore at least two Republican senators need to go along with the stimulus to get to that all-important 60.   Nonetheless, this isn’t a satisfactory explanation. True, a couple of Republican votes are needed. But with or without significant alterations to the stimulus, there are already a handful of moderate Republican senators – with a history of occasionally siding with the Democrats – who will vote with them a lot more over the next two years for the simple reason that they face re-election in 2010 in what are now strongly Democrat-leaning states. Arlen Specter, facing a tough re-election in Pennsylvania, and Judd Gregg from New Hampshire are two such possibilities, as is Olympia Snowe from Maine.  Maine’s other senator Susan Collins was re-elected last November but, being a New England Senator, is likely to vote yes anyway. But even if the count is close, are we really expected to believe that Obama can’t dip into his considerable political capital to sway a vote or two without gutting the legislation itself?

What about political reasons – that is, getting enough republican support so that the fortunes of the Republicans as well as the Democrats are tied to the sucess of the stimulus? Clearly, this is only helpful if the stimulus fails – in that scenario Obama can point to Republican support to alleviate the blame. But if this is what’s going on – and we surely still have faith enough in Obama to believe that it’s not – then there is something tragically ironic about the  possibility of the stimulus being altered in such a way as to make it less likely to succeed… to cater for the possibility of the stimulus not succeeding. My head hurts!

Perhaps then, this is simply a genuine, tenacious example of Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship; of people from both parties bringing something to the table and thus improving the bill on the table. If so, he needs to think again. Bipartisanship is not an inherently wondrous thing, though you wouldn’t know it from the tremulous, hallowed tones with which some centrist-minded commentators in America talk of it.   Bipartisanship only works if both parties have something good to offer.  As Markos Moultisas put it over on Daily Kos recently:

So if you’ve got two parties that fundamentally disagree on how to solve our nation’s problems (including one that created said problems), it’s not better to take the good ideas, take the bad ideas, and somehow “meet in the center”. That doesn’t make the “good” ideas any better. In fact, it makes them worse. …

Bottom line, there is nothing inherently good about “bipartisanship”. The only thing that matters is whether a solution is good or not. Consider that two of Bush’s biggest disasters — his tax cuts and Iraq — were “bipartisan” affairs. Getting votes from the opposite party doesn’t make the underlying legislation any more likely to succeed. If anything, our nation would’ve been better served with more partisanship during those times.

The dangers of bipartisan wrangling are particularly evident with regards to the stimulus package. If the Democrats believe that their stimulus is the right remedy for the economic problems, then isn’t compromising the legislation for the sake of bipartisanship risking the very recovery of the economy it’s designed to ensure?  Efforts to bury this rather glaring reality have resulted in some demented logic. Some democrats have declared that some spending, though worthy, should be saved to later in the year. As Chris Bowers has noted on Open Left, thinking that you’ll save money if you postpone a proposal to another, later bill, is like saying that 2+2 is less than 4.

Even the president himself is at it. On Sunday’s NBC interview, Obama said that he would push for lawmakers to remove provisions from the bill “that are not relevant to putting people back to work right now.” Why? If we want to do it at some point, why not do it in the stimulus? Also, what does “now” mean?  True, some provisions of the stimulus – such as those to do with education and healthcare – don’t all directly benefit the economy in the same way that the package’s infrastructure spending and tax cuts do,  but they nevertheless indirectly benefit it by ensuring that all aspects of our lives are improved, thus making us all the more able to get jobs and hold on to them. The effects of these may not be felt straight away – or, more pertinently, by the time of the 2010 midterms – but they are all part and parcel of a long term recovery.

The crux of the matter is this:  If Obama and Senate Democrats allow the stimulus package – a package that has already been correctly criticised for not being big enough to address the problem – to be stripped of  further valuable provisions, then this will bode ill not only for the American economy-  the recovery of which rests on the passing of a good stimulus -  but for Obama himself, who might find if he is not careful an unfortunate pattern emerging: kowtowing to the Republican minority on major legislation for no political or substantive gain.  As a strategy, it ain’t all that.

So let’s abandon this mythical, “virtuous” bipartisanship and be done with it. This is the time for simple partisanship – red in tooth and claw.  Over the next few days of Senate activity someone might want to remind Obama that it is he, and not the bad-faith Republicans, that won power on that glorious night last november.