Republicans have spent years obstructing and opposing and being the party of no as then-President Obama and congressional Democrats tried to get the nation out of economic crisis and implement a generally popular agenda. But now that Democrats are an opposition ready to fight Republican efforts to strip tens of millions of people of health coverage and install a Cabinet of ethically compromised billionaires, suddenly it’s shocking that we can’t all just get along. Politico offers up the shocking details:
Senate Democrats — the last line of Democratic defense — are slow-walking the installation of Trump’s Cabinet to a historic degree, so much so that Republicans haven’t even started yet on Trump’s legislative agenda. Republicans will eventually win all these confirmation battles, but it will be time-consuming and ugly.
Oh, my. (Good for them.)
How ugly has it gotten? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) voted against the nomination of Elaine Chao for secretary of transportation. Chao happens to be the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Pardon me while I grab for my smelling salts. (Good for Schumer.)
"I don’t see how they sustain their anger and their lack of participation in the governing process very long and still come back in 2018. I just don’t think it’s an agenda for success," said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). “So my hope is that once they sort of get over the fact that Donald Trump won … they’ll try to be more productive.”
Umm … excuse me? Barack Obama won a landslide victory in 2008—Electoral College and popular vote, too!—and Republicans opposed every damn thing he did for eight years. So it rings a little false to see Republicans being all pious about how very angry and unproductive Democrats are being as they face a president who lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, appointed a white supremacist chief adviser, and started ramming an extremist agenda through in the face of record unpopularity.
You know how Democrats will sustain this anger? Republicans will keep doing terrible things. And how will Democrats come back in 2018? It’ll be a tough year in the Senate because the map is terrible for Democrats, but elsewhere … Democrats will be the party who’ve been fighting the terrible things Republicans have been doing. They’ll be the party of Not Donald Trump. They’ll be the party of Not Taking Your Health Insurance. The party of Not Privatizing Your Social Security.