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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRepublican minority can cheat to win elections. But they can't govern?
Last edited Mon Jan 22, 2018, 12:29 PM - Edit history (1)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-can-win-elections-but-they-cant-govern/2018/01/20/79beba98-fd42-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?utm_term=.29a58eb90dfaBy Editorial Board January 20
The impasse centers on two issues that Congress should have solved months ago. First is the fate of the dreamers immigrants brought to the country illegally when they were children who know the United States as their only home and have integrated into American society. The second is the funding-starved Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which ensures that low-income families can get care for their children. Providing legal protections to the dreamers and re-upping CHIP both command overwhelming support from the public and their representatives in Congress. If congressional leaders had allowed simple up-or-down votes on these questions, lawmakers would have passed mainstream solutions, easily. But they practically ignored CHIPs funding crisis for months. They also declined to bring a dreamers bill to a vote. This reflected GOP congressional leaders spineless practice of suppressing legislation that a majority of Congress supports, in counterproductive deference to their right wing.
After months of inaction, Democrats were understandably incensed. President Trump could have brokered a deal. In fact, he appeared ready to do so earlier this month, when he promised to sign a bipartisan compromise bill on the dreamers, if one were negotiated, and to take the heat for doing so. A bipartisan group presented a plan that would have given immigration hard-liners several concessions in return for a dreamers fix. Yet, Mr. Trump betrayed his promise, suddenly siding with the hard-liners who demanded a long list of policy changes in return for extending dreamer protections. .........................
Link to tweet
Orsino
(37,428 posts)...they are governing quite effectively. Just according to a different Constitution.
L. Coyote
(51,129 posts)gratuitous
(82,849 posts)Cheat to win elections, then paralyze the government they were elected to serve. It's all of a piece.
dlk
(11,555 posts)beachbum bob
(10,437 posts)that we are paying the price. Don't like voter suppression tactics? Go out and fucking vote democrats into state office
Irish_Dem
(46,924 posts)procon
(15,805 posts)They've passed only one significant bill, and even that one was criticized by most Americans. Look back at the flurry eye popping executive orders and partisan agency rule breaking the president has launched over his first year. That not governing, that's a king issues decrees from his tower.
Congress, of course, has been complicit in all of Trump's grandiosity, either allowing him sweeping powers, or refusing to lift a finger to do any measure of constitutionally mandated oversight to check the executive branch, out of political fear of retaliation. That's not governing either, that's capitulating.
We tend to forget that our government was designed with numerous checks and balances to ensure the separation of powers was a tremendously important bulwark against government tyranny. Republicans don't want to govern, they want an imperial presidency.
Hayduke Bomgarte
(1,965 posts)They just need to win elections, to put them in place to receive bribes. Money is all they "need".