America's strange, Orwellian-tongued politics made a mess of news coverage once again after Senate Republicans thwarted a Democratic measure to bypass the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling.
You may have noticed how Republicans simultaneously manage to argue that President Obama is both a highly effective tyrant yet a totally incompetent administrator who is unable to resolve the nation's problems. Well, the nation's authoritarian party has been applying that same, schizophrenic meme with even more vigor when it comes to the proceedings of the Senate. And for the most part, our news media have been letting the Repubs get away with it.
The Associated Press and some newspapers got it right today: Senate Republicans successfully filibustered a Democratic measure to restore contraception coverage limited by the Hobby Lobby ruling. Sixty procedural votes were needed to invoke cloture and derail the filibuster. That many votes would have ended debate and moved the bill forward to a substantive vote, where the Democrats with their bare and nominal majority very likely would have prevailed.
With the help of several Republicans, Democrats managed to corral 56 votes out of a possible hundred. Now, in any local or national election, winning 56 percent of the vote is a clear mandate, but not in the Senate, where by tradition though not as a matter of actual law, the filibuster raises the requirement to 60 percent. Thus Republicans prevailed despite producing just 43 votes in opposition to cloture. The losers won. Again.
And yet -- the AP's dispatch notwithstanding -- the more frequent media portrayal ran along the lines of Democratic failure. Downplayed was any mention of minority GOP obstruction. Republicans apparently were all out playing hooky while Democrats self-destructed without opposition. Here, for example, was National Public Radios's not atypical web headline: Democratic Effort To Override Hobby Lobby Ruling Fails. That, it's important to note, was almost identical to the headline offered up by the right-wing Daily Caller web site, a conservative/GOP propaganda machine.
Or, as a variant headline put it, "Dem birth control bill stalls." That made me think about my grade school English studies. Several of my elementary teachers would tut-tut whenever we pupils opted for the passive voice. So did the editors who in my newspaper career peered at my copy. Wouldn't it be just as efficient yet more readable and factually rich to say that Republicans stalled the bill? Apparently not! No frontal mention of that interference necessary. Casual readers and viewers are left to assume that Democratic legislators screwed this up all by themselves, which plays into the GOP's "our opponents are incompetent" story line.
Then there was this variant: "Birth-control insurance bill rejected by U.S. Senate" (BusinessWeek). That's a little more balanced, yet still doesn't tell citizens who really did what, or how and why -- key questions that journalists are taught to address at the very top of every news story.
Thus if you are an American voter who doesn't know much about filibusters or cloture votes, many outlets in the nation's news media echoed a long-standing conservative meme: Republicans were just sitting around, minding their own business, wrangling cat's cradles and knitting cumerbunds, while Democrats who "control" the Senate "failed" to pass their own bill. The do-nothing, incompetent Congress strikes again!
Furthermore, if you're an American voter who knows a little bit about the Senate's anti-majority, topsy turvy, arcane procedural rules, then the GOP multi-level marketing machine had you covered, too. Republicans were ready to take sidelong credit for what happened on the floor today while still not overtly taking credit for it, lest women voters notice along with the GOP's Joe the Plumber base.
From the same NPR report that began so badly, diligent readers learned at the very bottom that Republicans sponsored legislation of their own that would counter the Democratic bill. The GOP's measure would "reaffirm that no employer can prohibit an employee from purchasing an FDA-approved drug or medical device, including contraception." Of course, that's a non sequitur since it's just a sly and fancy way of saying, "We're all for Hobby Lobby!" But there I go, relying on pesky grade-school grammar rules again. Added NPR:
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz described the Democratic bill as part of an ongoing attack on religious liberties, citing the lawsuit filed by the Little Sisters of the Poor against the Obama administration fighting the birth control mandate.
"When did the Democratic Party declare war on the Catholic Church?" Cruz asked on the Senate floor. "Right now, the Obama administration is litigating against the Little Sisters of the Poor, trying to force them to pay for abortion-producing drugs."
Ah, another GOP "get your war on" argument. Factually inaccurate BS from Cruz (the drugs at issue don't produce abortions), but at least his rhetoric might give you a slight idea as to who voted how. But that was all buried well past the far more noticeable meme of a lede. The big takeaway here was that Democrats screwed up and/or failed. But the deeper truth, that this was all the result of typical GOP intransigence and gaming around? Relatively if not wholly unimportant, to read many of today's news dispatches.
Hey, Little Sisters of the Poor: Get thee to the sizzle, not the steak.