When it comes to acknowledging the realities of today’s political climate, for The New York Times, evidently it’s a case of better late than never.
The flash must have been blinding. When that light bulb suddenly went off, I mean. It could have gone off months ago, or even years ago. It could have gone off on Jan. 6 when all but a scant number of benumbed and shell-shocked GOP representatives still voted in near lockstep to nullify a lawful election, just hours after armed, screaming neo-Nazis in little red Trump hats stormed up and down the hallways of the U.S. Capitol.
That light could have gone off as early as 2009, when not a single Republican voted for the law President Barack Obama and the Democrats painstakingly crafted to pull the country out of the economic abyss of Depression. Or even in 2017, when all but three Republicans voted to take away that same President Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, an action that had it succeeded would have left nearly thirty million Americans without any health insurance options.
Instead, it was Saturday’s vote on the American Rescue Plan that brought the light.
As reported by veteran Times reporter Carl Hulse, the country can now stick that proverbial fork into the rotting corpse of “bipartisanship.” According to The Times, that ghost is finally dead.
Not a single Republican in Congress voted for the rescue package now headed for final approval in the House and a signature from Mr. Biden, as they angrily denounced the legislation and the way in which it was assembled. Other marquee Democratic measures to protect and expand voting rights, tackle police bias and misconduct and more are also drawing scant to zero Republican backing.
The supposed honeymoon period of a new president would typically provide a moment for lawmakers to come together, particularly as the nation enters its second year of a crushing health and economic crisis. Instead, the tense showdown over the stimulus legislation showed that lawmakers were pulling apart, and poised for more ugly clashes ahead. [...]
Anticipating the Republican recalcitrance to come, Democrats are increasingly coalescing around the idea of weakening or destroying the filibuster to deny Republicans their best weapon for thwarting the Democratic agenda. Democrats believe their control of the House, Senate and White House entitles them to push for all they can get, not settle for less out of a sense of obligation to an outdated concept of bipartisanship that does not reflect the reality of today’s polarized politics.
How undeniably satisfying that The Times, and many in the traditional media, are now able to recognize what Democrats and Republicans alike have known fully well for over a decade.
Perhaps the mistaken impression they’ve been under has a reasonable explanation. Perhaps they simply erred, over and over over again, when equating the idea of peeling off one or two votes from an outlying congressperson or senator with “bipartisanship.”
That seems an awful stretch, even for a media regime that has been carefully cultivated to give “both sides” to any story involving matters of opinion or policy. So if that was the only reason they’ve used to keep flogging the dead horse of bipartisanship over all these years, you’d have to think that the real truth lies elsewhere.
Maybe the truth is they never had the guts to admit just how different the parties—and the people who make up those parties—really are. And how absolutely impossible the very idea of bipartisanship has become, given those differences.
Because it’s difficult to reach common ground, or see “eye to eye” with a party whose adherents supported someone like Donald Trump, who essentially came to office through a combination of race-baiting and misogyny. It’s hard for Democrats to reconcile with those who would gut health care for millions of our fellow citizens for no other reason than a Black president had established it.
It must be hard to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say that the people who just tried to invalidate your vote are somehow worth your “understanding.” It’s hard to see pictures of violent white supremacists trashing our national heritage and think, “well, yes, those folks have a right to their point of view.”
It’s hard to sympathize with people who think it was okay to tear those children away from their mothers and fathers (no matter what "color" they were). It’s hard to be okay with the people who gleefully supported Trump's policies, laughed at his malignant tweets, and blithely called his two impeachments—for obstruction of justice and outright sedition—merely “witch hunts” and “fake news.” It’s hard to empathize with those who cheered while Trump called journalists reporting the truth about him an “enemy of the people.”
It’s hard to watch people claim an election was “stolen” and then produce no evidence to back up their bogus claim. It’s hard to ignore the fact that these are mostly the same people who refused to do the simple courtesy of wearing masks to keep others from being infected by their spitting and drooling, while they bloviated endlessly about their “personal responsibility” and “freedoms.”
It’s hard, when you make the time and effort to protest the fact that bad, violent cops seem to think they have a right to beat up and kill people because of their skin color, to learn those folks would rather ignore you, support those same violent cops, and call you derogatory names instead. Or that they’d blame the trashing of the U.S. capitol on liberals, while at the same time posting videos of themselves bragging about their own actions.
It’s hard to feel any sympathy for people who supported a guy who lied about and minimized the worst public health crisis in over a century, unnecessarily killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in the process, and then see those same people turn around and vote for the same guy again. Plus it’s gobsmackingly hard to feel any camaraderie with those who would prefer to see Americans stricken by this crisis left out in the cold, with no relief.
And it’s absolutely impossible to want to associate with people who did all these things, not for any good, legitimate reason, but for the most part, to spite us—out of their sheer malice and resentment.
So when it comes to that illusion of bipartisanship? Thank God it’s dead. As Hulse acknowledges, Democrats will, in the coming weeks, introduce several additional pieces of legislation that will highlight just how far removed Democrats are from the Republican worldview (such that it is); he also notes that “Democrats fully recognize the measures will run into a Republican stone wall, but that is the point.”
Democratic House Majority leader Steny Hoyer, quoted by Hulse, probably puts it best.
“The people are overwhelmingly for the agenda we are passing, and democracy works, so if the people want these bills to pass, they will either demand that we do away with the filibuster or demand that some Republican senators who refuse to do what the people want leave office.”
Sometimes simplicity of expression has its virtues.