Democrats are employing the tactics they condemned Republicans for using. The difference is, Democrats are using those tactics to force compromise, while Republicans were using them to fight compromise.
Are Democrats becoming more like Republicans?
Democrats are adopting tactics they condemned in the Obama years. But they still want to compromise. By Ezra Klein @ezraklein Updated Jan 22, 2018, 1:48pm EST
On October 7, 2013, President Barack Obama took the podium at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and made the case to the American people that compromise, not ideological showdown, was what the country needed.
America was in the midst of a weeks-long government shutdown, a fiasco triggered by the Republican Party’s demand to defund the Affordable Care Act in exchange for funding the government, and Obama’s remarks from that moment are worth reading today. They show how much the Democratic Party has changed — and how much it hasn’t:
I heard a lot of talk over the weekend that the real problem is, is that the President will not negotiate. Well, let me tell you something — I have said from the start of the year that I’m happy to talk to Republicans about anything related to the budget. There’s not a subject that I am not willing to engage in, work on, negotiate, and come up with commonsense compromises on.
What I’ve said is that I cannot do that under the threat that if Republicans don’t get 100 percent of their way, they’re going to either shut down the government or they are going to default on America’s debt so that America for the first time in history does not pay its bills. That is not something I will do. We’re not going to establish that pattern.
In this, you hear Obama make two arguments. One is that budget negotiations should be limited to policy “related to the budget,” that the functioning of the federal government shouldn’t be used as leverage on other policy issues. The second is that Obama is ready and willing to compromise, and that the problem is Republican unwillingness to cut a deal.
Today, Democrats still believe half of that formulation.
On Friday, congressional Democrats voted en masse against funding the government’s continued operations. They did so not because of anything in the bill, but because of something that wasn’t in it — a deal to grant legal status to the young unauthorized immigrants known as DREAMers. This has left Democrats in an uncomfortable position: In holding government funding hostage to another policy priority, they are employing the same tactics they condemned Republicans for using in the past. Indeed, in 2013, Sen. Chuck Schumer used immigration as an example of a non-budgetary policy that it would be ridiculous to shut the government down over.
continues (with video) at vox.com |
