After reading the political news this past week, I got to thinking about just how narrow the thinking of our House and Senate representatives has become. This was demonstrated clearly in two unrelated topics – the healthcare debate and the Judge Gorsuch nomination proceedings.
Healthcare Debate – Republican sub-groups impressively stuck to their various positions regarding the government’s role in healthcare. Those positions included repealing and replacing in two steps, repealing and replacing simultaneously, repealing only, larger subsidies, no subsidies, etc. Then in the end, they completely lost sight of the larger goal of actually repealing the failing Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). It’s certainly admirable to show consistency and allegiance to an ideal. But if you are so inflexibly wedded to that ideal that the end result of your party’s effort is no outcome at all, you have utterly failed. Republican voters in this past election overwhelmingly wanted Obamacare repealed and replaced. With the GOP now controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency, the Republican members of Congress had but two simple tasks for healthcare in the eyes of their voters – 1) create a repeal and/or replace bill, 2) make sure that bill passes. They did the first, but became so stuck in their own heads they completely abdicated the second task. To the simple observer, the outcome indicated that as a group, the Republicans in Congress preferred Obamacare instead of their own plan. The end result was the exact opposite of what their voters wanted.
Supreme Court Nomination Hearings – By most accounts, Judge Gorsuch did quite well and made few if any mistakes in his three days of Senate hearings this past week. Given the amount of divisiveness in today’s politics, it would be expected that even with his excellent performance, a few Democrats would still vote against him. However, the Senate majority leader stated at the end of the week that all Democrat Senators are now in opposition to the Judge, and his party will be filibustering the vote. Here we have the complete opposite group behavior from the Republican members in the House. The Democrat Senators are all well-educated, and listened to the same exact testimony as everyone else this past week, including a great many of the world’s best legal scholars who praised Judge Gorsuch. Yet, as a group, they reliably responded as vacuous automatons to their leadership, not unlike “Storm Troopers” in all the Star Wars movies. Their allegiance to the group, regardless of the depth of their own convictions, is an exceptionally powerful weapon for party leaders to wield. Its use in this case however is not only unwarranted, but a sign of total Democrat intransigence. Think about this – Antonin Scalia, an arguably more conservatively-leaning judge than Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed by the Senate in 1986 with a vote of 98-0. Every single Democrat voted for him. What would happen if a young Judge Scalia were up for a confirmation vote today by the 2017 Senate? What is so fundamentally different about Judge Gorsuch (compared to Scalia) that the Senate majority leader promises he will not receive a single Democrat vote? In 1986, Democrat Senators voted based on the qualities of the person to be nominated. Today, the qualities of the person being nominated are inconsequential to the desired outcome of the Democrat Party whose members blindly subjugate themselves to the desires of their leadership.
The House Republicans could not discipline their individual convictions and unify as a group to achieve the end goal they supposedly were all seeking for healthcare. The Senate Democrats jettisoned any individual convictions they might have had without a second thought when commanded by the leadership to present a unified front on Judge Gorsuch. We simultaneously witnessed individualism taken to a paralyzing extreme (Republicans), and slavish obedience to party leadership in the opposite extreme (Democrats). Sadly, both of these feeble-minded behaviors are an obvious devolution from reasoned, outcome-oriented political debate and compromise exemplified by our forefathers. During the Constitutional convention in 1787, the participants were deadlocked for weeks on the question of equitable representation of each state in the operations of a new Federal government. Despite very strongly held personal positions, they collectively realized that creating a new government (their whole reason for being there) was paramount, and in the grand scheme of things, the end goal superseded their individual hard line positions. They had no elected leader to tell them what to do, and yet lived up to their individual responsibility to achieve a well-reasoned outcome on their own. Their strong individual convictions were balanced with a clear and broad view of the real end goal. What a far cry from the very poor performances and weak minds on display on both sides of the isle last week.