Ezra Klein writes that the Republican strategy to stop health reform–elevating Democratic process maneuvers made necessary by Republican obstruction to the level of crimes–threatens to discredit the entire legislative process.
The result of this constant assault on how a bill becomes a law — a process that has never before been subject to such 24/7 scrutiny from cable news and blogs and talk radio — will be ever more public cynicism. Evan Bayh put it well in his New York Times op-ed. “Power is constantly sought through the use of means which render its effective use, once acquired, impossible,” he wrote. Republicans, who’re likely to return to power with a majority that’s well below 60 seats in the Senate and a 40-vote margin in the House, will soon find themselves on the wrong end of that calculus.
Ezra’s scope is really too narrow. Over time, the GOP has managed to make controversial the humane treatment of people detained in American custody. The Cheney family is on a crusade to eliminate the entire concept of due process by casting anyone accused of terrorism as automatically guilty and any lawyer who represents them in court as a traitor. Republicans have managed to harness a great deal of public anger and aim it at aspects of the legislative process that will make it difficult for them to govern when they retake Congress-but they’ve also mounted a campaign to discredit the entire American legal system–assisted in part by the Obama administration’s arbitrary and politicized adherence to the rule of law.
All of this makes governance difficult, particularly liberal governance, since the government failures caused by GOP recklessness merely reinforces the conservative thesis that government can’t be trusted except when it is using its monopoly on force against defined cultural “others”. As Chris Hayes wrote in Time, the GOP’s attacks on democratic institutions coincide with a general failure of America’s public institutions, not just those of government:
In the wake of the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority, this new decade will have to be about reforming our institutions to reconstitute a more reliable and democratic form of authority. Scholarly research shows a firm correlation between strong institutions, accountable élites and highly functional economies; mistrust and corruption, meanwhile, feed each other in a vicious circle. If our current crisis continues, we risk a long, ugly process of de-development: higher levels of corruption and tax evasion and an increasingly fractured public sphere, in which both public consensus and reform become all but impossible.
As Hayes notes, there’s something profoundly dangerous about all this that goes beyond the mere passage of health care legislation, which is a descent into a society where there really is no such thing as legitimacy.
