Congress More Popular with Republicans!

Link: Congress approval rating is substatially higher among Republicans than Democrats.

Though it doesn’t actually surprise me, given how the Democratic majority has enabled the President and allowed the minority to be obstructionist without even a loud and symbolic protest (such as making them actually filibuster everything, instead allowing the procedural nicety of letting the matter drop quietly after a failed cloture vote in the Senate). But the gains in favorable opinion among Republicans are not, I suspect, approval of how the Democrats are steering the ship, or more precisely how they are steering it right at a reef, but for how industriously the Republicans are staving in the timbers down below the waterline in a very effective attempt to scuttle the ship.

This is an intolerable state of affairs. I want the Republicans to absolutely HATE the Congress. They are amused, and I want them infuriated. To be fair to the Democrats, we are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs: and we tied it there. The first thing we did upon retaking the majority was to restore regular order in the rules of Congress. By doing so, we allowed the minority Republicans a voice and say in the process that they denied to us by making the Congress less of a deliberative body than Bush’s own private parliament. We could have continued playing by those corrupt rules, but America would no longer have had a democratic legislature, but a just a dictatorial rubber stamp body for the use of whoever could capture the majority. I applaud the wisdom and the statesmanship of our Democratic leadership than preserved us from that fate. I have no doubt that if and when the GOP retakes the majority, minority rights will soon end once again. That is a point that every Democratic Congressional candidate should make central to their campaigns. But that’s the price of being the party that actually practices democracy.

But even worse that the Republicans’ evident amusement is that Independents take an even more jaundiced view of Congress than do frustrated Democrats. That does not bode well for 2008 and should merit very close attention by pollsters as to whether that dissatisfaction stems from the Democrats’ captaincy or the Republicans’ sabotage.

Democrats have accomplished a surprising amount of decent policy given their narrow margin and a hostile President, but all of our accomplishments in the majority have not even begun to claw back the worst excesses of the Bush Administration. Nor are our best efforts likely to do so as long as Republicans command a veto stamp and 41 votes in the Senate. Those weapons are sufficient to stave off any real reversal of the Bush legacy. But we can make them pay politically for that rear-guard action.

We can make sure their intransigence has to be loud, public, explicit, and electorally costly. But our leadership in Congress is failing to do that. What is reflected in the polling is a failure for the blame to fall where it belongs, and that is entirely the fault of Democrats who insist on pretending to a degree of ‘bi-partisanship’ in their legislative strategy. It is a tempting trap. Many GOP members are deeply uncomfortable with the results of the last 7 years. Bi-partisanship enough to make those on the margins side with you often enough to squeak out some victories seems productive and laudible. But what we really need to do is to unapologetically frame issues that force them to choose sides: are you with the American people, or your dysfunctional party? Too often our leadership is failing to force that choice on wavering Republicans.

We have another 15 months of the Bush Presidency; until Bush is out of office, bi-partisanship is just a means of handing political victories to the GOP. I don’t care if not a single additional piece of legislation is passed until January 2009, we have to make it clear what our agenda is though our proposed legislation, and make the minority take a stand and show that the GOP is absolutely unwilling to let Americans have that agenda. We need to stop focusing on slicing the baby so that we get a little bit of it, and instead show the American people what that infant would look like if allowed to grow into full and ambitious legislative agenda. We need to make Bush and the GOP fight tooth and nail to kill that kid.

The SCHIP issue is a great example of good legislative strategy. Hearing Bush threaten that veto brings a smile to my face. The ads write themselves, "President Bush and the Republicans in Congress say they want ‘No Child Left Behind’ but yet they want to leave millions of your kids behind without health care…" That’s the way we need to be running the Congress. We should do family leave, mandatory sick time, universal health care, new consumer protection and environmental laws – everything we would do if we have a larger majority and a Democratic President. Then make the GOP kill it all messily and tragically dead. Over the next 15 months, I want to see Bush use his veto enough to make up for the past 6 years of inaction, and I want every GOP Senator to have sleep deprivation-induced psychosis from all the late-night shifts maintaining filibusters. You’ll see those polling trends standing on their heads.