GOP Majority, RIP
From the Washington Post, GOP Laments Mixed Results As Control of Congress Ends:
Compared with the liberal ascendancy, which ran from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and arguably Ronald Reagan’s election, the conservative era has been brief and relatively inconsequential, said Julian Zelizer, a Boston University congressional historian. Nothing in the past 12 years compares with the creation of Social Security or Medicare, the voting rights and civil rights acts, the Marshall Plan or Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. Nor were any of those big-government achievements fundamentally altered.
Far from ending an imperial Congress, Republicans centralized power in their leadership to an unprecedented level.
Even some successes — such as a balanced budget and the diminution of farm subsidies — proved short-lived, GOP lawmakers and former leaders conceded.
*sigh*
In other news, I got through part of Bruce Reed and Rahm Emanuel’s book, The Plan, and I actually like their part about civil service. Know thy enemy is my excuse for reading it. It’s also good to steal your political enemies’ best ideas.
Well, the GOP revolution failed precisely because they forgot what it was they were trying to change. The article said:
“While GOP leaders touted their handiwork, it was a far cry from 12 years ago when the Republicans swept to power with the zeal of self-described revolutionaries and a mission to shrink the size of government, limit its reach, strengthen the nation’s security and end an era of a privileged, imperial Congress”
…and it seems to me that what the GOP did the last dozen years was the exact opposite: grew government (in real size, in budgetary terms, in deficit spending terms); reached into people’s private business with a Christian values strategy; destroyed our security by invading Iraq on false premises, using torture, gutting habeas corpus; and became utterly privileged and imperial. The list can go on and on.
It doesn’t come as a surprise to me at all. If the original vision of 1994 was held to, there would no doubt be a different dispensation in Congress today, and the continuation and deepening of a genuinely conservative governance.