Coalition Government

Mike Johnson suddenly got it.

The accidental Speaker of the House was, shall we say, reluctant to provide military aid for Ukraine. Then two things happened.  The first thing is that Johnson saw intelligence that showed that Ukraine would end likely end up as a republic in the Russian Federation if it didn't get U.S. aid and that Poland or Lithuania might be next.  The second thing is that one of Johnson's sns has been accepted at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, and the possibility of this son getting into a war in Eastern Europe suddenly got real.  He placed the billon the floor and it passed with the votes of anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats.  

Thus the Democrats and the non-MAGA Republican wing have formed a coalition government in the House of Representatives.

The U.S. constitutional system, of course, isn't meant to support coalition governments, at least not in the European sense. In European countries, multiple parties win seats in Parliament and there is usually no clear-cut majority, so likeminded parties have to form a coalition to pick a prime minister to present his or her credentials to the head of state.  Here, two parties win seats in the House and the Senate and partisan majorities run the shows.  The President - both the head of government and the head of state - is separately elected.   But it is possible for  two of a minimum of three parties to win enough seats in either House of Congress to deny the party that gets the most seats a majority.  That happened in the 34th Congress of 1855 and 1856, when the Democrats lost control of the House in the 1854 midterms and the Whig Party was ceding the role of opposition to the Democrats to the new Republican Party and the American, or Know-Nothing, Party.  The Republicans got the most House seats but not a majority, so the Republicans and the Know-Nothings, along with Whigs and other minor parties, formed a coalition to run the House.

Such deal-making is normal when ther eare three or more parties, but the fact that we're seeing something similar in the 118th Congress when there are only two parties and the Democratic minority is united says a lot about how fractured the Republican Party is.

And the problem is not Mike Johnson.

The Redeye State

Florida Democrats suffered a literal death blow in November 2022 when Republican governor Ron DeSantis and Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio were resoundingly re-elected despite their numerous deficiencies.  Now it may be Ohio Democrats' turn to sink into total oblivion.

Ohio has always been something of a bastion of political conservatism.  Every U.S. President who was either an Ohio native or an Ohio resident, except for one, was a Republican . . . and the exception, William Henry Harrison - sometimes credited as a founding father of the American Midwest - was a Whig, the Whigs being the forerunners of the Republicans.  (William Henry Harrison's grandson Benjamin, though born in Ohio, established himself in neighboring Indiana before assuming the Presidency.)   Ohio's most famous U.S. Senator, Robert Taft, epitomized the party's conservative values so much he was called "Mr. Republican."  No Republican has never been elected President without carrying Ohio, though two candidates - Richard Nixon in 1960 and Donald Trump in 2020 - carried  Ohio and still lost. 

But while the state has long had a largely conservative rural population, it has, up to now, had a decent urban-oriented Democratic base - socially conservative white ethnics who belong to unions, and blacks in the state's major cities.  And there were enough voters statewide who could go either way and make Ohio a swing state in presidential and congressional elections.

Well, here's the stone cold truth - Ohio is becoming more solidly and reliably Republican, thanks to a declining blue-collar base and the belief among remaining blue-collar voters - often correct - that Democrats pander too much to coastal-state elitists to care about them. Democrats haven't controlled the Ohio State Senate since 1985, they've only controlled the Ohio State House of Representatives for one period - 2009 and 2010 - in the past thirty years, Republicans dominate the State's U.S. House delegation, and the state hasn't elected a Democratic governor since 2006.

And Ohio's two U.S. Senate seats?  Well, Tim Ryan thought he had the magic formula for winning back the state's Class 3 Senate seat - not won by a Democrat since John Glenn in 1992 - by talking up working-class issues and citing his own votes against national Democratic legislation while in the House.  But he voted with Obama and Biden more than he was willing to admit on legislation Ohio voters by and large opposed, and his attitude - "I'm an ass kicker, not an ass kisser!" - didn't jibe with Midwestern niceness.  (Also, his previous efforts at higher office - House Democratic leadership, the Presidency - made him look more like a show horse than a workhorse.)  Ryan ran a strong campaign on issues the voters in his state cared about, and he still lost - and the once-rising star is now a fallen hasbeen. That's how bad off Ohio Democrats are.

Their last man standing is Sherrod Brown, the state's Democratic senior senator, and he's up for re-election in 2024.  Brown has been able to win in an increasingly Republican state three times in the past, but the reality of Ohio's one-party politics may finally catch up with him.  And it's a pretty safe bet that if Brown goes down next November what's left of the Ohio Democratic Party - which includes gadfly-cum-loser Nina Turner - will go down with him.

That will be it. That will really . . . be . . . it. 😢

Time For a New Party

Now that Liz Cheney has been tossed out as House Republican conference chair in favor of Trump sycophant Elise Stefanik (below), anti-Trump Republicans are so ticked off that they've threatened to break away form the GOP and start a new party.

Before you laugh at the idea of a third party being formed, bear in mind that this wouldn't necessarily be a third party.  It could be that party that eventually replaces the Republicans, just as assuredly as the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the 1850s.  Part of the reason the Whig Party died was because the Whigs could not reconcile its industrial capitalist agenda with tolerating slavery, and the party was increasingly relying on outsiders - old soldiers who were war heroes - to run for President, as that was the only way they could win the White House.  Until it wasn't, when General Winfield Scott lost his presidential bid in 1852.  

Now, with noted outsider Trump taking over the GOP and encouraging the party to pursue an incoherent policy agenda, it makes sense for anti-Trump Republicans, conservative-leading independents, and any center-right Democrats who don't feel at home in their old party any more to form a new party to oppose the Democratic Party and propose center-right policies just like the Republicans once did.  And the Republicans can wither on the vine and die.

And I hope all of that happens before Kevin McCarthy becomes Speaker of the House.  

Can You Believe It?

While Kanye West continues his campaign for President with the help of Republicans who believe he could win enough popular votes to deprive Joe Biden of an electoral majority, Russian operatives are spreading rumors of a Biden connection to corruption in Ukraine with the help of Republicans who believe that they can launder the information from Russia to start an investigation of the innuendo.   Republicans believe they can also help Trump by aiding in trying to discourage or just plain stop mail-in voting even as they believe they can discredit Biden's eventual pick for Vice President.  If Biden picks Susan Rice, they believe they can tire her to Benghazi.  If he picks Kamala Harris, they believe they can play up her obsession with identity politics to fire up voters tired of all that.  If he picks California congresswoman Karen Bass, they believe they can use her past support for Cuba against her.

Is there anything the Republicans don't believe?  Yes.  They don't believe in helping the Democrats pass an economic relief package through Congress in the wake of a pandemic.  But Trump believes he can assume the role of Congress by extending unemployment benefits and providing tax relief all all by himself.  He's wrong.  He also believes this will help him in the election.  And he may be right.

Also, Trump attacked Joe Biden's belief in God.

I don't believe any of this!

I also can't believe I summed the past week's news in one short post!

Blue Rising

I gotta tell ya, I was nervous Tuesday night when the returns came in.  It was obvious soon enough that the Democrats were going to take back the House, but I got nervous when Florida Democrats fell short in their bids to win the governorship and hold Bill Nelson's Senate seat.  And I was on the verge of melting down when I saw that Scott Walker was winning his bid for a third term as governor of Wisconsin over Democrat Tony Evers while Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly was going down in Indiana and Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill was losing big time in Missouri.  Beto O'Rourke could not unseat Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate election.  And when I learned that the insufferable Marsha Blackburn was elected to the Senate from  Tennessee, I wanted to throw up.

But the Democrats have won more House seats than originally thought, as the votes continue to be counted. And something interesting is happening in the uncalled Senate contests.  Rick Scott's lead over Nelson in Florida is so tenuous that a recount is likely.  Ditto for the gubernatorial election there. Andrew Gillum has conceded, yet a recount could actually put him in the governor's mansion after all.  Well, it would be easy for him to move there from his house, as he is the mayor of Tallahassee.  But voting shenanigans in Broward County have led Governor Scott to try to stop the process - which would certainly benefit his candidacy!  

And despite his self-serving efforts to block a recount, Scott may have a case. Brenda Snipes, the woman in charge of elections there, is notorious for screwing up the vote count.  Even progressives are angry with her.  (She supposedly helped rig the Broward County vote for Debbie Wasserman Schultz's 2016 re-election bid!) 

Be that as it may, Florida's elections haven't been decided yet, and neither has the Arizona Senate race between Krysten Sinema and Martha McSilly - uh, McSally.  If Sinema, the Democrat, wins, and if Nelson should somehow pull through in Florida - and if Democrat Mike Espy somehow pulls off an upset in the runoff for the Mississippi special Senate election -  the Republicans would have a net gain of zero in their majority Senate caucus.  But who cares when Wisconsin voters, by a narrow margin, sent Scottzo the Clown packing!

Among the victories I did not see coming: Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine winning the governorship in that state - at the age of 71 - on the same day Sherrod Brown, who defeated DeWine's bid for a third term in the U.S. Senate back in 2006, won his third term in the U.S. Senate; Kansas electing a female Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, over phony voter-fraud crusader Kris Kobach; Mark Sanford's old South Carolina U.S. House seat going to Democrat Joe Cunningham after Trump Republican Kate Arrington won the nomination over Sanford for the seat and ran like she was the Donald's best friend, and: Democrat Lucy McBath in Georgia defeating Republican incumbent  Karen Handel for the seat in the state's Sixth U.S. House District, the same seat Democrat Jon Ossoff attempted to win in a special election last year.  Meanwhile, a runoff in the gubernatorial election in Georgia between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams is still possible.

Despite Republican successes here and there, the Grand Old Party faces strong headwinds going into the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. Trump is toxic; the Democratic victories this past Tuesday were a clear expression of displeasure in the way he's "governed" this country.  Democrats, meanwhile, have been warned not to nominate so many progressives - and certainly not one for President - next time around, as so many progressive nominees, especially Ben Jealous, the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland, lost big time.  I'm of two minds about that, particularly where it pertains to the presidential election in 2020.  I'll have more on that later. 

Oh, yeah, Mikie Sherrill was elected to the House from my district.  So let's celebrate the first Democrat to be elected to the House from New Jersey's Eleventh U.S. House District since 1982.  

Ladies and gentlemen, Rebecca Michelle Sherrill!

Oops!  Hold on, I'm still mixed up . . . 

There we are . . . ;-) 

Where Paradise Lay

See this?

Well, you're going to see a whole lot more of it.

Congress just passed a law repealing former President Barack Obama's regulation against dumping coal sludge in waterways without proper testing.  Trump is expected to sign it.

Environmentalists are reportedly "concerned"  (actually, more like "outraged," but let that pass).  On CNN, reporter Rene Marsh explained that environmentalists were afraid that this could lead to more pollution, while coal companies complained that the regulation was too cumbersome and cost jobs.  And that was it . . . and that was all.  No in-depth look at the regulation.  No probing questions about the coal companies' opposition to it.  Only that it was repealed, and so anchor Jake Tapper moved on to something else, which I can't remember.  

Meanwhile, a Senate committee, with only the Republican majority in attendance, approved for full Senate consideration polluter Scott Pruitt's nomination to be Environmental Protection Agency administrator, despite a boycott by committee Democrats.  The GOP simply waived the rules that the minority committee members have to be present.  This is the third time Senate Republicans have suspended committee rules to get a Trump nominee sent to the full Senate for a vote.  The Democrats might as well have not even bothered to attend committee meetings . . . and so begins one-party rule.

But, you probably missed these stories about the fascists in Washington laying waste to the environment . . . because you were too busy following the news about Beyoncé being pregnant with twins.

Morons.

Blocking Votes

If President Obama loses his bid for re-election next year, it may not be because of the economy, and it won't really be because of the November 6 curse I wrote about earlier. It will possibly be because of voter suppression nationwide.

Once the Republicans realized that more young people, old people, poor people, and racial and ethnic minorities voted in 2008 and helped elect Obama President, swinging several key states in the Electoral College, it was inevitable that they would exploit the drop-off in interest among many of these traditional Democratic groups (except seniors, who can easily be coaxed into voting Republican on social issues) in the 2010 midterms and win enough state legislatures and governorships to pass voter restriction laws over Democratic opposition (what there is of it) at the state level. Now, in many states, residents must have a photo ID - usually a driver's license - to register to vote, early voting opportunities have been severely limited, and stricter residency requirements have been set into place. This has a disproportionate impact on traditionally Democratic voting blocs - poor people who can't afford a car and thus don't drive, urban residents who don't need a car and thus don't drive, working poor people who can't vote on the first Tuesday after November 1 because they have a job they have to show up for, and those who don't live in any one place for long, including college students. Folks who gave Obama his victory in 2008 likely won't be able to vote in large numbers in 2012.

I was going to suggest, when I planned to write on this subject, that progressive activist groups who register voters work with these laws, even if it means buying more buses to get more people to the polls in a shorter time frame and paying for driving lessons to get people who don't own a car a driver's license, but it turns out that Republicans have also enacted laws designed to curb mass registration by such groups. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters finds the new rules in Florida - which, among other things, reduce the number of early voting days from fourteen to eight - so restrictive that they've ceased voter registrations efforts in the Sunshine State indefinitely.

At the federal level, congressional Republicans are pushing to abolish the Election Assistance Commission, the four-person group created in the wake of the 2000 Bush-Gore and debacle in Florida to keep elections fair and honest through testing voting machines and offers assistance for proofing ballots. Republicans, who are so concerned about voter fraud that they restrict ballot access at the state level, say the commission has served its purpose in cleaning up voting (even though the new state restrictions cry for the commission's input), and that re-absorbing its duties into the Federal Election Commission will save the government $33 million in five years. $33 million in five years . . . in a budget of over a trillion dollars!

If these anti-initiatives are allowed to stand, the Republicans will undeservedly yet effectively ensure themselves as a permanent right-wing governing elite in America, with only a neutered political opposition - which, after 2012, will not be the Democratic party, which I predict will go the way of the Whigs and die a richly deserved death after caving on their principles one time too many.

Deadbeat Nation

Hoo boy! Republicans drove up the debt under George Walker Bush, they put on a credit card two wars Barack Obama is trying to end on a credit card, and now they're refusing to raise the debt ceiling without deep spending cuts hurting the poor and the middle class while leaving tax breaks for the rich alone?

If they win control of both houses of Congress next year, it will be by numbers - the hard numbers that force the Democrats to defend more Senate seats and try to win back the house in the face of GOP-friendly re-apportionment - and by numbers only.

But then, if the Republicans drive America into default, they will demonstrate to independents, as David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, that they're not fit to govern. Which means there will be a silver lining if America defaults on its debts and all hell breaks loose in the international markets come August 2. This could mean that the country will be a red nation in terms of budget ink but not Republicanism.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan says he doesn't want America to go the way of Greece. that could very well happen if his party brings debt ceiling talks to the form of brinkmanship.

Barack On the Mark

Barack Obama finally got his Irish up (and he does have Irish blood in him, folks) sternly scolding Republicans for refusing to do anything about the debt ceiling without safeguarding tax breaks for the rich and pointing out that his daughters worked to get their homework done when they knew their assignments were due at a specific date - like the due date for raising the debt ceiling (August 2).

So the President finally shows some backbone and takes a hard line against the Republicans and, naturally, the Republicans complain about him being so damn harsh. ("That uppity Negro!") That did not surprise me. What surprised me is that Mark Halperin, a respected and respectable journalist, called him a "dick." He said so on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," with some relish and with more self-consciousness than he was willing to admit. He actually preceded his remarks by saying that he hoped there was a seven-second delay.

Halperin's comments sparked an aghast reaction from many people in less time than that - not so much for what he said, but his choice of words. People didn't necessarily have a problem with Halperin parroting the Republican talking points. Halperin himself apologized, but the fact that he said such a thing at all reveals just how difficult it is for Obama to take a stand. The media - even supposedly Democratic-friendly MSNBC - keep dismissing in a cavalier fashion Obama's attempt to stand up for anything, as if they're encouraging him to be conciliatory with the fat cats who run this country and give them their tax cuts and corporate jet write-offs. Of course. Many media people work for some of those same fat cats.

Now that Obama is finally standing firm, we should encourage him to keep do so, and not let Republicans scold him as if he's an inferior pol who should stay in his place. Both they and Mark Halperin came across looking like, well, dicks. Those uppity Caucasians. :-O

Race and Infrastructure

There are two major stories in the news that, at first glance, don't appear to have a link between them. But I think they do. And I apologize if connecting them sounds rather cynical. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am.

One story, reported just a few days ago, is that more black, Hispanic and Asian babies were born in the United States last year than white babies for the first time in this country's history. And, in all likelihood, that's going to be the trend for the rest of this young century and possibly the twenty-second century as well.

The other story, an ongoing one, involves the nation's infrastructure. President Obama - incidentally, the nation's first "minority" President - is proposing a new federal infrastructure program to build and rebuild highways, railways (especially high-speed passenger rail), airports, bridges, dams, sewer systems, and the like. The Republicans who control the House of Representatives support none of that, complaining that the proposed program spends more money at a time when the government is practically broke and, besides, amenities like high-speed rail sound very "European."

So how do these stories link to each other? Here's the thing. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has noted that public works projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were built as government projects. Chris Matthews has added that Lincoln gave private railroads government support to build the transcontinental railroad and Eisenhower built the interstate highways. Furthermore, Maddow has noted that such public works projects are built with future generations in mind. By building the great public works projects we need, Maddow points out, we're not only helping our economy, we're leaving something behind for the benefit of our children, our grandchildren, and our grandchildren's grandchildren.

So do you think an overwhelmingly white Republican party is interested in building anything for the benefit of future generations when future American generations will be dominated by brown people? Does anyone honestly believe that the Republicans who now control the House are interested in spending money on any public works project that will enhance the lives of Americans in the late twenty-first century when more than half of Americans will be black, Hispanic, and Asian by then? The recent lease of the Indiana Toll Road by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels to a foreign (Spanish-Australian) consortium until 2081 suggests that not only do Republicans refuse to build infrastructure for a future non-white/Hispanic majority, they don't even want that future majority to control the infrastructure we already have now.

Note this: A brown-skinned majority population does not make your country a Third World nation. Lack of public investment in an economic system where all the money flows to the top makes your country a Third World nation.

A Wiser Republican Party?

Having returned from my Easter hiatus, I comment once again on the body politic in America, such as it is.

It seems that the Republican party, much to the chagrin of its many detractors, might regain enough of its collective sanity to, if not get President Barack Obama voted out of office, hold on to the House and take the Senate. The battle for the Senate is the easy part; they only need to gain four seats from the Democrats, and they are defending less than half as many seats as the Democrats - and those ten Republican seats are all considered ultra-safe, even Scott Brown's in Massachusetts. The House is less clear. Democrats only need 25 House seats to retake control, but added seats in Republican states at the expense of seats in Democratic and swing states - many of which happen to currently be under Republican governors and have Republican majorities in one or both houses of their legislature - could give the GOP an advantage in the redistricting based on the 2010 census, which is handled by elected officials in the states. But Paul Ryan's Medicare "reform" proposals could complicate things for the Republicans. The Democrats' chances of re-taking the House should become clearer once the redistricting is finalized.

Two Western Republicans, realizing the stakes, have reacted for the good of their party. In Arizona, Governor Jan Brewer wisely vetoed a bill that would have required presidential candidates to present their birth certificates to be allowed on state ballots. Calling it "a bridge too far," and obviously wanting to dissociate herself from the GOP lunatic fringe, Brewer would have none of this. She clearly wants the party to focus less on the "birther" theories circulating about Obama in Republican circles and concentrate on the issues.

She also vetoed, by the way, a bill that would have allowed students at colleges and universities to carry concealed firearms, calling it "poorly written." In the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Tucson in January, it was poorly proposed as well. Brewer has her faults. Many of them. But fanaticism is not of them.

Meanwhile, Nevada senator John Ensign announced his resignation over the weekend regarding corruption charges referred to earlier on this blog. Nevada's Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, will likely appoint U.S. Representative Dean Heller to the seat. Heller, who had already planned to run for Ensign's seat when Ensign announced he would not seek re-election next year, now has the power of the incumbency and should be able to secure an already safe GOP seat. But maybe not. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com crunched the numbers, and he declared that appointed senators of either party historically have only a 50 percent chance of winning a term in their own right.

It looks to be an exciting election cycle next year . . ..

Republican Acts

I wonder how many independents who voted for Tea Party Republicans in the midterm elections thought they were merely voting for more jobs and less spending. I'm certain many of them weren't voting to limit access to abortion. They probably didn't mean to give control of the House of Representatives to social reactionaries. They did. And now that social reactionaries are in power in the House, they're pursuing a misogynistic agenda to limit a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. (Note that I didn't say "a woman's right to choose" - that's mealy-mouthed Washington jargon. A right to choose? Choose what? A dentist?)

The bill, sponsored by New Jersey House Republican Christopher Smith, would, among other things, ensure that every federal government agency and program is barred from from spending tax money to fund abortions. It also would shut down the private - yes, private - market for health insurance coverage that includes abortion, and bar some rape survivors, as well as women whose pregnancies endanger their lives, from getting such insurance coverage. Oh yeah, it also would prevent the District of Columbia from using public money to fund abortions. This amounts to rich white men telling a poor city dominated by racial minorities what to do on religious and health-related matters. D.C. congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has protested, but without a vote on the Committee on the Whole, there isn't much she can do about it. In fact, there's nothing she can do about it.

And Speaker Boehner? He calls this bill one of the his highest legislative priorities. This is the third bill out of the 112th House, and not one of them deals with jobs. (And not one of them will get through the Senate.)

The bill is called the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which is an obscene name for a few reasons. First, President Obama has already issued an executive order saying that no federal funds will go to abortion, a move abortion rights activists denounced back in March. So title is misleading. Secondly, it's an unwieldy, witless name for legislation that is as childish and dumbed-down as it is fraudulent - just like the title of H.R. 112-1, the Job-Destroying Health Care Law Repeal Act. Personally, I yearn for the days when legislation had boring names, like the Sherman Antitrust Act, which respected the intelligence of voters and expected them to know about the contents and the perpetrators of the bill. This abortion bill should be called the Smith Act, or the Smith Reproductive Rights Act, which would assign responsibility for it and encourage the intellectually curious citizen to find out what it says. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 wasn't called the "Denying Freedom For Unions to Assert the Workplace Rights Of Its Members and to Prevent Right-To-Work Shops That Undermine Employees and Aid Big Business Act," but that's what it did, and that's what people knew it did. And when it was passed by a Republican Congress over President Truman's veto, union members knew they could blame Ohio senator Robert Taft and New Jersey congressman Fred Hartley for it.

One last thing about the current Smith Act (as I'll call it). The Republicans claim that they're all about small government and less government control. Enough people were taken in by this rhetoric to give House Republicans a majority. But people are quickly learning what they're doing with the smaller government and lesser government control they maintain. "I think people who claim to be 'small government' conservatives are disingenuous," said one reader of the Washington Post. "I think they want a government small enough to fit into an individual's bedroom, but too large to fit into a corporate boardroom." Enough said.

Just Say Hell No

The Republican party - a party once expected to fade away until the Democrats got blamed for the foundering economy and ended up looking like the Whigs of yore - has been showing its resurgence by saying no to everything in the lame-duck session of Congress. Senate Republicans have unanimously pledged to stop all Senate business until they get the tax cuts for the rich that they want. Even if the Democrats did stand up to them (don't give it a second thought, they won't), nothing to help the people will get accomplished.

That includes lifting the ban on gays in the military, which got a lot of momentum from a study released yesterday saying it wouldn't have an affect on unit cohesion. Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, military veterans both, have suggested that while lifting the ban can be done, the study fails to say whether it should be done. President Obama should come right out and tell the Republicans not to play semantics with him on this issue and make them feel the heat. Not in this month of December or in any other month will that happen.

As for the tax cuts, the only recourse for the Democrats is to let them expire and let the Republicans take the blame for a sudden tax hike on the middle class. But the Republicans never pay a price for leaving the unemployed high an dry by refusing to extend unemployment insurance, as they just did again. They only get applauded by those who have jobs for not spending more money on freeloading the jobless, even though benefits are meager for individual claimants and it would help the economy by generating two dollars worth of economic activity for every dollar paid out. If taxes go up, and the Democrats try to place the blame on Republicans for their refusal to compromise (again, not going to happen), Frank Luntz will probably come up with some scary slogan to deflect the blame to the Democrats (which will happen regardless).

All of this Republican brinkmanship over taxes have set the tone for the foreseeable future, and possibly beyond that. And the reason the Republicans are not in trouble for their greedy, swinish, nasty values is because the voters also have greedy, swinish, nasty values. Say what you will about Fox News, a lot of people are actually watching it.

Looking More Whiggish . . .

James Howard Kunstler's comparisons of Barack Obama to Millard Fillmore, as a President running a country on the verge of imploding with no idea of how to deal with it outside the realm of petty politics, is suddenly more apt thanks to dissension from the progressive base of the Democratic party. Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are taking a stand against Republican demands for the Bush tax cuts to be extended to everyone, insisting instead that the Republicans vote on a proposal that would extend the Bush tax cuts to the middle class only. And they're doing it whether the White House backs them or not. George Soros, the philanthropist and Democratic party donor, was recently quoted as saying that if Obama can't deliver for the left, then Democrats should look for someone else.

Which is how the Whig party destroyed itself. I earlier noted that the Whigs nominated Winfield Scott, a war hero, to run for President in 1852 because war heroes had helped the party win earlier presidential elections. But there's more to it than that. William H. Seward, an antislavery Whig senator from New York, pushed for a nominee more sympathetic to the party's antislavery wing. (President Fillmore had supported the Compromise of 1850, which allowed slavery to extend into the territories won from the war with Mexico, and he did not believe the federal government had the right to restrict slavery despite his own personal hatred for it.) General Scott was nominated because he was a Southerner with pro-Northern, antislavery sympathies, but a plank in the party platform accepting the Compromise of 1850 undermined Scott's support in the North as easily as antislavery sentiments hurt him among his fellow Southerners. In a latter-day scenario in our own time, Obama could face a challenge from the left in 2012 and lose the Democratic presidential nomination to a candidate without enough party support and lose to an orthodox, activist Republican like . . . Sarah Palin. Franklin Pierce, the man who defeated Winfield Scott for the Presidency in 1852, was nominated for the Presidency for being an orthodox, activist Democrat.

The Republican party of today, however, is much like the Democratic party in 1852 in this respect; it's only stronger by default, as it's ridden with factions of its own and declining rapidly. Michael Moore has even suggested that we could soon face a two Democratic party presidential candidates, a Republican nominee, and a Tea Party candidate, just as there had been a four-way race in 1860. I'm not predicting a repeat of history to the letter, but I am predicting that one of the major parties will disappear and the other will fall into a comatose state when a party that hasn't been formed yet fills the vacuum. The socioeconomic dislocation in the decade that led up to the Civil War made this happen before, and the aftermath was a period of national Armageddon - a conflict joined by disunion. Before 2020, there could be a similar conflagration brought on by decades of predatory capitalism, an angry, deprived middle class, and the ineffectiveness of either party to avert such a conflict. And one side will be disabled long enough to let the other rewrite the laws of the land.

I predict that the Democratic party will fall because they don't know what they stand for and they've been around too long. A new people's party will replace it out of the many parties that form in its dissolution, just as the Republican party was one of the many political organizations aiming to fill the void left by the Whigs. Today's more liberal Democrats - for example, Alan Grayson, just voted out of his House seat in Florida - will either belong to this next major party or belong to a party that doesn't work out, like the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. A Democratic senator elected in 2010 will belong to another party by the time he or she stands for re-election in 2016, just as William Seward began his second Senate term as a Whig and ended it as a Republican. And, like the party that ultimately represents it in the future, the American middle class - if it's to survive at all - will assume a form we do not yet recognize.

Pols and Polls

Barack Obama came out swinging on the unemployment insurance issue, accusing Republicans of playing politics with benefit extensions and saying they have a lot of gall to complain about the deficit after having created it out of a surplus in the first place. He prodded the Senate to overcome obstructionism and pass the benefit extension bill. A lot of liberals were pleased that Obama was fired up and speaking so forcefully on the side of the people.

Ah, but why did Obama wait until West Virginia's interim senator Carte Goodwin was appointed and after Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine made it clear they would support the legislation, giving Obama the votes he needs?

President Obama, always calculating and cautious, only seems to pick fights he knows he can win. That's why you don't see him pressing for another stimulus bill, although economists are calling for one; he has neither the votes nor public support. On the latter issue, it turns out that the voters now have his back on this one. I incorrectly reasoned that voters didn't pay much attention to the unemployment benefits issue because it affects few people. New polls released last week, though, show Americans approving of benefit extensions even at the expense of increasing the budget deficit. Also, because general concern about the deficit and the debt - also borne out in the polls - is boosting Republican chances in the midterm elections, Obama is trying to turn that against the GOP as well. Obama's passion is genuine, but his timing seems too contrived and too calculated. But then, after Robert Gibbs's faux pas on "Meet the Press" last Sunday regarding the possibility of a GOP takeover of the House in November, mabe a little calculation is necessary .

I just wish Obama would be more like this when he's fighting a losing cause. Maybe fighting for a public insurance option in health care reform was a lost cause, despite its popularity, but being more aggressively for it would have re-assured the base of the Democratic party. Some say this is a turning point and that Obama is coming right out saying "No more Mr. Nice Guy," and yes, this time he means it. Maybe. But if you support a policy opposed by the Republicans without the public support or the votes behind it, the White House isn't likely a reliable ally to have.

Mr. Obama Goes To Baltimore

I don't know what President Obama expected to gain by going to a meeting of Republican lawmakers in Baltimore and meeting and answering his critics head-on. It got some good PR for both the President and the Republicans - Obama for taking heat from the opposition, the GOP for having Obama as a guest at their otherwise private party. And the gathering seemed almost European, with the parliamentary-style questioning of the leader by the opposition. But did it lead to any possible paths to solutions on health care? On jobs? Or on campaign finance reform, a newly contentious issue thanks to the Supreme Court?

All the President and the Republicans agreed to do was disagree, if you ask me. And the goodwill generated from the meeting may have given Obama twice as much GOP support as he had beforehand, but how much is two times zero?