While so much Beltway-related attention has been focused on the incoming Democratic majority and its apparent divisions under the leadership of Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, what has been neglected is just how poorly the Republicans are taking to their new role as the minority party in Congress.
In the House, Republicans have chosen to retain their leadership intact (minus Denny Hastert, the outgoing speaker). That means John Boehner and Roy Blunt and the rest of the team that has been so much of the problem for the party. This has frustrated insiders like Bob Novak and independent-minded conservatives like popular blogger Ed Morrissey, and for good reason. The Republicans seem to have learned nothing in defeat.
What’s more, the House Republicans have indicated that they will be a party of obstruction. Minority Whip Roy Blunt has even put together a strategy memo entitled “24 Months to a New Republican Majority — A Plan for Victory”. The Hill calls it “a detailed roadmap,” which seems like excessive credit for what is really just the same old vicious partisanship from a party that has been reduced to rubber stamping President Bush’s executive power grab on issues like torture and domestic wiretapping, pushing plutocratic tax cuts, and latching on to non-starters like Social Security privatization. And so we are told, for example, that the memo “outlines amendments [Blunt] would offer to projected votes implementing pay-go rules in the budget process, raising the minimum wage and allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies”.
House Democrats have a wide-ranging and popular agenda that works for the American people on on issues like national security, health care, the minimum wage, stem-cell research, and lobbying reform, but for the Republicans politics is about power and they’ll do anything and everything in their power to thwart the Democrats. (But just let them run on that in ’08. It’s a losing strategy, in my view.)
Meanwhile, in the Senate, the Republicans have selected partisan extremist Mitch McConnell as minority leader (who, by the way, has promised to use the filibuster in support of Bush’s judicial nominees, just the sort of hypocrisy you’d expect from a party that while in the majority threatened to do away with the filibuster on judicial nominations) and, of course, Trent Lott, former majority leader, as minority whip (another move opposed by Morrissey).
Lott is something of a pragmatist who may work with the Democratic majority on such issues as a minimum-wage increase, but he’s a major producer of legislative pork, and, well, there’s that not-so-little matter that got him into trouble a few years ago, forcing him to step down as majority leaders. You know: Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat, segregation. Whether Lott is a racist or just racially insensitive, he has been tarnished for good.
For more on Lott’s victory over Lamar Alexander, including a round-up of reaction from around the blogosphere, see here.