The political
blackmail that the GOP is using, that of threatening a government shutdown in
order to render the new healthcare legislation toothless by defunding it, has
been the headline grabbing news over the last couple of weeks and has only
intensified over the last few days. But there is more to the shenanigans that
the Grand Old Party is up to.
The
Republicans are now using the mechanism of raising the debt ceiling as a way to
give away a wish list to big oil, King Coal, and other industries. According to the New York Times, GOP leaders sent to their rank and file a laundry list of provisions they want
attached to the bill to raise the debt ceiling. Besides delaying Obamacare and
limits on malpractice, the wish list includes such anti-environmental provisions as
giving a green light to the construction of the Keystone pipeline, more
offshore oil and gas drilling, more permitting of oil and gas exploration on
federal lands, rolling back regulation on coal ash, and blocking the EPA’s new
regulations on greenhouse gas production.
Wow.
Politically,
the GOP controls the House, but that is only due to some ingenious
Gerrymandering that some of the states were recently able to pull off. The
party of Lincoln has failed to gain the popular vote for the presidency in five
of the last six elections, and the one win for the GOP was for a sitting
president, George W. Bush, who barely won. This isn’t the only time that the
Republican Party has become a loser. Things were so bad for them in the
seventies after Nixon’s disgrace and resignation that they considered changing
the name of the party.
All
these latest giveaways to business and industry that the GOP is trying to work
into the debt ceiling deal are, of course, all about campaign donations and
money. But what they are proposing is so extreme that I sense a crazed sort of
nihilism that wants to pull in and destroy what is good and great about this
country while this political party experiences what may be a death spiral.
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