The Washington Post has an interesting story on how Democrats, now in the minority in both houses of Congress, have so far fulfilled their intent to clog the legislative pipeline. There are many words in the story, about 1,200 or so. But you understand why the story needed that many words once you complete it and notice the one word the author had to get creative to avoid using, thus necessitating the prolixity of the piece. Never mentioned once is any form of the word “obstruction.”
Now, ordinarily that would be just fine. After all, what the Democrats are doing by using the filibuster and other procedures to prevent even popular legislation from getting through is entirely within their constitutional rights. But of course, we don’t live in ordinary times; we live in the Dark Age of Republican Obstructionist Terror, and therefore the Post should be appalled at what they would normally consider a blatant attempt to burn American democracy to the ground. If, that is, Republicans were doing it.
Last month, Democrats attempted to shut down the Department of Homeland Security unless and until Republicans removed part of the funding bill that Democrats opposed. Republicans blinked, and rather than allow the shutdown that Democrats threatened, pulled the contested part of the bill. Were the two sides reversed, Republicans would be accused of rank economic terrorism. Instead, here’s how the Post describes Democrats’ actions:
Nancy Pelosi had a plan. Democrats were outnumbered, obviously, and she no longer had the power to impose her will the way she did when she was Speaker of the House. But neither did the current speaker, John A. Boehner (R-Ohio.).
With a partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown looming, Pelosi saw a way to torpedo Boehner, and get exactly what she and other Democrats wanted for President Obama. The plan was simple: when Boehner needed her the most, she would not be there for him.
She encouraged her caucus to reject the Speaker’s proposal on a stopgap DHS funding bill, knowing that Boehner could not sufficiently rally his own caucus to pass the bill without Democratic help.
Five days later, Pelosi and Obama got exactly what they wanted: DHS was fully funded without any rollback of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
The Post goes on to explain how Democrats did something similar–though no shutdown was involved–with regard to a bill approving the Keystone pipeline. The pipeline is popular, but opposed by Democratic money man Tom Steyer and fringe environmental extremists (of whom the president is one, thus explaining the White House’s opposition to an energy and jobs bill).
But more importantly, the bill had the votes to pass, which it eventually did on a later re-vote. At the time though, Democratic leadership wanted to take a shot at the GOP leadership to make a point, and Democrats fell in line, even on a bill that had enough of their support to pass. So they blocked that too.
Again: fully within their rights as the minority party. And yet, the Post seems to agree–when conducted by Democrats. When it came to the GOP in the minority, not only did the Post throw the term “obstructionism” around, but the paper’s reporters used it without any qualifiers.
Of course the Post’s opinion writers are going to be hypocrites about this; that’s not of interest here. No one’s expecting intellectual honesty from liberal columnists. In October 2013, a supposedly straight news story carried this headline: “Obama says he feels ‘enormous frustration’ with GOP obstruction.” Not only was “obstruction” the word provided by the Post, not the president, but the whole article was merely reporting on Obama’s complaints. It was a press release disguised as a news story.
For opinion pieces, the Post reveled in hysteria; see this Jonathan Capehart piece titled–seriously–“The GOP is out to destroy the country.” But reporters on the news side of the office shouldn’t also lose their minds. The word “obstruction” shows up in other places it shouldn’t.
I don’t mean to pick on the Post. It’s not as though they invented this obsession over Republican “obstruction” or created the bias in which they participate. But their reporting is in desperate need of a tune-up. Instead of angry accusations of gumming up the works of democracy, the Post tells us Pelosi and Harry Reid are “deftly navigating the big legislative debates to maximum advantage, thwarting the new majorities early ambitions and protecting Obama from the GOP assaults on his agenda.”
The metaphorical violence is always been committed by the GOP, as far as the media is concerned.
The problem with the piece on Pelosi isn’t only that the word “obstruction” doesn’t get thrown around. It’s that the whole structure of the piece is borderline admiration. “Democrats say they are optimistic about holding members together in the next big legislative debates,” we learn. “But they could encounter difficulties in areas where they do not have a rallying cry that resonates as powerfully as immigration and a shutdown.”
This is how a shutdown goes from economic terrorism to powerful rallying cry for a plucky minority party. And it’s also one more reminder to Republicans: the left may make GOP tactics the issue, but they aren’t. It’s never about the means, but the ends. When the left approves of the ends, anything goes.
The post The End of “Economic Terrorism”: Dems and the Obstruction Double Standard appeared first on Commentary Magazine.
