The
Post-2012 Election Republican Response
For
the purposes of this prediction, I assume that the 2012 election results in a
divided government: Obama has been reelected, the Democrats control the Senate,
and the Republicans control the House. For details on the justifications behind
these predictions, please refer to the “2012 Predictions” section above this
one.
In the face of a major election, people tend to get
tunnel vision and fail to look at what will happen after the election is over. Ultimately,
while every election is important, the negotiations and interactions of elected
officials and parties after the elections are decided are vitally important. If
government becomes dysfunctional, then a small minority of politicians is often
able to stall progress and prevent an elected majority from pursuing their
agenda. Unfortunately, modern politics have become so polarized, and those on
the right so extreme, that an Obama reelection will likely result significant
conflict in Washington.
When Obama is reelected, the Republicans will utilize
every possible opportunity to prevent his second term from being successful—this
includes blocking legislation as well as ensuring that blame for the pain of
the American people is placed squarely upon Obama. They will attempt to prevent
any meaningful legislation from passing into law and will take every chance
that they can to undermine the Obama agenda.
The primary goal of the Republican Party’s
obstruction of the Obama agenda is to prevent any liberal, or even moderate,
policies from being signed into law. The conservative movement has swung so far
right that moderate policies, even those that they created in previous decades,
have become intolerable (ex. the individual mandate). The modern Republican
Party isn’t just extreme, but it has also become captured by wealthy/corporate
interests. As these interests don’t want their taxes increased, nor do they
want any sort of regulations which would cut into their profits (ex.
worker/environmental/consumer protections), the Republican Party will do
everything within its power to stop Democrats from enacting these policies. Because
any significant deviance from the conservative movement’s extreme-right wing
agenda is politically fatal to a Republican politician (due to primary
challenges), it is unlikely that many Republicans will reach across the picket
line and deal with Democrats.
In addition to stalling the passage of a Democratic
agenda for the sake of policy, Republicans will attempt to set up a favorable
playing field for the 2014 midterm elections as well as the 2016 presidential
election. If they can prevent Democrats from being seen as successful and
exacerbate the pain of the American people, it will create a situation where
the Republicans have the ability to sweep into power during the next electoral
cycles; massive voter dissatisfaction creates a climate where the party which
is not in power has the Just as the
terrible failures and low approval ratings of the Bush presidency brought a
wave of Democrats into power during 2008, the Republicans hope to create a
similar situation which will benefit them.
The Republican Party will utilize four main tactics
in order to achieve their agenda—Obstruct, Extort, Impugn, and Blame:
Obstruct
During Obama’s first term, particularly in the
post-2010 election years, the Republicans have utilized every obstructionist
tactic that they have access to. Obstructionist stalling tactics are aimed at
slowing down the government’s decision-making process to the point where it
stops functioning; these tactics may not allow a party to pass its agenda, but
they are often extremely effective in preventing opposing parties from enacting
their agenda. While there are a wide
variety of ways that partisans can obstruct policymaking, here are a few of the
more common examples:
- Stalling legislation in committee (as was done to the ACA)
- Declining to bring legislation up for a vote (as has happened in the House with Democratic legislation from the Senate)
- Maintaining a perpetual filibuster
- Stalling bills through the addition of numerous amendments (each amendment must be voted upon, thus this can take up huge amounts of time)
- Manipulating vote scheduling on order to increase the time it takes to pass legislation (ex. postponing votes until after vacations)
In the American legislature, a majority isn’t needed
for many of these types of obstructionism—a committed and highly partisan minority
block of politicians can easily disrupt the legislative process. Unfortunately,
it appears that the modern Republican Party is both willing and able to
obstruct governmental processes in service to their agenda.
By leveraging their control over the House, the
Republicans will continue to block every piece of legislation that the Democrats
bring forth. We will see the Republican majority in the House utilize parliamentary
rules and scheduling in order to prevent any Democratic legislation from
passing or, in many cases, even being voted upon. Even when Democratic legislation
from the Senate is brought to a vote, it is unlikely that it will pass the
unified front of Republican opposition.
In the Senate, the Republican minority will continue
its overuse of the filibuster, thus preventing the Democratic majority from
passing significant legislation. While it will be possible for the Democratic
majority to pass legislation using reconciliation (a process to pass certain
legislation with a simple majority), or through heavy compromising with the
Republican majority, it is unlikely that any liberal legislation will pass this
roadblock.
Extort
In the past several years, the Republican Party has
utilized a strategy of extorting policy concessions from the Democrats in
exchange for fixing crises which they cause. While they are in the minority,
the Republicans have enough power to prevent vital legislation from passing and
are able to cause significant disruption to the operation of government. Through
utilizing this power to disrupt the government, the Republicans have forced the
Democrats to make concessions just to pass things that, in normal years, would
be bipartisan and uncontroversial.
Here are two examples of this tactic from 2011 and
2012:
- During the fight over the extension of the Bush tax cuts in December of 2011, the Republicans refused to extend unemployment benefits unless the Bush taxes were extended for those making over $250,000. In this situation, the Republicans literally held the economic welfare of the poor hostage (and risked putting the country into recession), in order to preserve tax cuts on the rich.
- During the 2011 fight over the debt ceiling increase, the Republican Party attempted to force draconian cuts on entitlements/social programs in exchange for allowing the debt ceiling to be increased. A failure to increase the debt ceiling is economically irresponsible and would lead to a government default, thus it is wholly inappropriate to use it as a political lever.
By creating a situation where the country, or at
least a significant portion of the population, will be harmed unless action is
taken, a minority party is able to compel the majority to act. If the majority
ignores the crisis created by the minority and it harms the country, the
minority can blame the majority (they are in power) and get a PR win. If the
majority decides to deal with the minority in order to fix the engineered crisis,
then the minority is able to extract policy concessions from the majority that
would otherwise be impossible.
After Obama is reelected, there is no reason to
assume that the Republicans will stop utilizing their hostage-taking tactics.
As they will still control the House and enough of the Senate to filibuster, the
Republicans will be able to disrupt the government enough that their
hostage-taking will remain effective. Throughout Obama’s second term, we will see
the Republicans engineer a string of crises in order to compel the Democrats in
the Senate and executive branch to acquiesce to Republican demands.
Unfortunately, there is no effective way to combat
political hostage-taking by a political party other than to make sure that the
guilty party receives most of the blame—the separation of powers and the
protections of the partisan minority built into our legislative structure allow
an irresponsible party to abuse their power in this way. The primary reasons
that this tactic hasn’t been more common are that it is irresponsible and only
utilizable by a party which cares more about installing its policy than the
welfare of the country.
Impugn
During Obama’s second term, the Republicans will make
every effort to attack his character, as well as that of everybody associated
with him. These attacks will not be based in reality and are extensions of the
right wing frustration that they lost and will be unable to rid themselves of
Obama for four more years.
These are a few attacks that Obama and the Democrats
will face the most during the 2012-2016 presidential term:
- Being labeled as a socialist: The accusation of supporting socialism is a common right wing attack on people who are to their left. Unfortunately, the lack of public understanding of what actually constitutes socialism has led for this attack to be somewhat effective and has resulted in many people thinking that the current Democrats are far farther left than they really are.
- Being labeled as an extremist: Because the right wing has pulled the political spectrum so far to the right, most leftist policies to be suggested will be considered radical and extreme policies. I predict that the rightward trend will continue and that the right wing will label everything that Obama suggests as radical, even if they recently supported it (such as what happened with the individual mandate).
- Challenges to individuals’ “Americanism”: A common attack by the right wing is that their opponents aren't “real Americans”, “patriots”, or “possessing “American values”. These accusations are really coded attacks on opponents that actually mean: “not white”, “not blindly nationalistic” and “not Christian conservative”. Due to the longstanding use of these attacks by conservatives, it is virtually certain that they will continue to be a significant line of attack during Obama’s second term.
- Accusations that Obama is apologizing for the USA: Throughout his first term, Obama has been besieged with accusations that he is apologizing for the USA when he speaks abroad; these accusations are simply false and exist as a straw-man argument to attack the president with in the absence of any major foreign relations blunders. Barring a significant foreign relations blunder that is actually based in reality, I see no reason why the right wing will do anything but intensify this line of attack on the president into his second term.
By feeding the public a steady dose of accusations
against Democrats, coded attacks on Obama, and misinformation against
Democratic policies, the Republicans will attempt to poison the American people
against the Democratic Party. The blind hatred that most conservatives have for
Obama, combined with their frustrated helplessness over losing the election,
will exacerbate the frequency and extremity of these attacks far beyond what we
have seen directed at past politicians.
In addition to making every effort impugn Obama in
the public, I predict that House Republicans will attempt to open numerous investigations
and begin a campaign to impeach Obama within a year of Obama’s reelection. I
don’t know what the attempt to impeach Obama will be based upon, but I predict
that it will originate from a Tea Party congressman and will result in nothing
more than several weeks of controversy.
Throughout the next few years, we will see numerous
political witch-hunts started by right wing partisans in an attempt to bring
down Obama and anybody allied with him. While I predict that these with-hunts
will become more common in Obama’s second term, we have already seen several examples
of this type of persecution during Obama’s first term. The “fast and furious”
scandal—a completely manufactured and specious attack on Eric Holder for a DOJ
program gone wrong—is the best example of such a witch-hunt and it is
indicative of the types of “scandal” that we will see in the future. It is
likely that none of these scandals will actually amount to anything, but they
will result in a lot of bad press for the Obama administration and will dog him
for the duration of his second term.
Blame
During the next four years, the Republicans are
going to spend a great deal of time attempting to shift public opinion away
from the Democrats. They will blame everything that they can on Obama and the
Democratic Party so that by 2016, (the next major election cycle), the
Democrats are as unpopular as the Republicans were in 2008. Through convincing
the public that the Democrats are to blame for everything wrong with the
country, the Republicans will try to gloss over the failure of their policies
while simultaneously positioning themselves for significant wins during the
next presidential election. If they manage to drive Obama’s poll numbers down
to the mid-twenties (like Bush was in 2008), the next Democrat to be running for
president will likely be at a significant disadvantage against their Republican
challenger.
As the media has largely neglected fact-checking of modern
political attacks, the Republican blame machine will completely disregard
reality in order to achieve its goal. Republicans will automatically label anything
that goes wrong as a Democratic failure and everything that goes correctly as a
Republican success, regardless of the facts.
Put plainly: the Republicans will attempt to link
literally every hardship, policy failure, and international incident that
affects the United States during the next four years to the Democrats and to
Obama’s presidency.
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