Not All Charters! A Solution to a Problem that Itself is a Problem that Doesn’t Solve the Original Problem

This is the sister school to my hometown high school. I went to Parsippany Hills High School. PHHS rules! Go Vikings! Oh, and these were public schools (in the ‘burbs, admittedly) and a lot of us went through the system and somehow graduated able to do math, read and write, and know a little about science. By Keylife12 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In theory, charter schools could work and “disrupt” the system and goad public schools into doing better and everyone wins. In practice, they take resources away from fully public schools and waste that money, then management runs away and the whole movement is basically a con job.

We know what works in education. Alright so the US is not Finland but it’s fairly intuitive that healthy kids who aren’t going hungry and receive psychological counseling if needed and go to schools with enough teachers that can meet their individual learning needs will probably turn out okay and employable. Of course it helps if the teachers are motivated, which probably means compensating them well and not demonizing them (*see below for a tangential rant). After all, most have had to invest in BA or BS degrees followed by master’s in education degrees. Not cheap prerequisites to entering the profession!

The US is indeed a special snowflake but not in a good way when it comes to education policy. Our insistence on localized funding for schools results in wide funding disparities district to district and state to state. We’ve nurtured a widespread charter school movement that in general is so unaccountable to the taxpayers that fund it that the supreme court in the state of Washington recently declared charter schools unconstitutional. Finland barely has any privately run schools at all. And make no mistake, most charters are privately run schools innocently masquerading as nothing more than different versions of public schools.

We have many problems in the US that preclude a Finnish-style solution, many argue. The problems are indeed daunting and it’s difficult to know where to start when some of the problems are essentially outside of any given school’s control. Kids going hungry or not seeing doctors when sick, kids traumatized by home situations or lacking resources and support from home: these are all situations that make learning difficult if not impossible and happen before a kid even sets a foot in school.

Also, if you read or listen to the news you wouldn’t be crazy to think there’s an epidemic of horrible teachers in the US. The charter school movement is fond of blaming bad and unaccountable (tenure!) teachers. Please. Find me a teacher who spent between five and seven years and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars training for the profession by getting two degrees and makes $55,000 a year mid-career who says he or she doesn’t care about the kids or is in it for the money and I’ll give you a year’s free subscription to this blog.

Sure, bad teachers exist, just like bad bus drivers, bad bankers and bad everyone elses exist. Judging a teacher’s performance is notoriously difficult and different systems developed so far have found as few as 1.5% of teachers in a district unsatisfactory to as many as 18% in another district “ineffective.” Eighteen percent is a little higher than anyone would like to see, admittedly, but that number is from a pilot program looking at 20 New York City schools, one of the most challenging districts in the country.

(Here, I want to make it clear that I am not questioning the motives or integrity of teachers or even many administrators working for charter schools. The whole point of this piece, which I’m afraid I haven’t made very clear yet, is that charter schools as established in most of the country have nothing new to offer and instead take resources away from avenues that we already know can get results.)

What’s clear from what we know about how kids learn and what Finland has shown is that we don’t need charter schools in order to re-invent the wheel. We know what the wheel looks like and we have the design plans; we can make it. It’s hard, giving all American kids equal opportunities to receive good educations in schools with enough resources and competent and motivated teachers, but it’s not impossible. It’s a matter of priorities.

*Tangential rant: When did Americans collectively decide that working ought to be a miserable experience we endure in order to not starve or sleep on the street and maybe get to own a flat screen TV? And why is there so much outrage aimed at people in a profession that often requires 9 to 10 or even more hour days for 180 days during which they have to lead large groups of children or prepubescents or teenagers all day? Do we really think the people we entrust to handle so much of our children’s formative years deserve such mediocre pay or ridicule for demanding pensions so they can live decently in retirement? What is wrong with us?

More Food; Canada

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Don’t have a food processor? Smash your pesto ingredients together using the end of a rolling pin. Takes about 10 minutes.
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Finished product.
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Spaghetti with pesto, chopped tomatoes and grated parmesan cheese.

I’ve been babbling for years about making pesto. For some reason tonight was the night. Here’s Steve’s Artisanal Reduced Carbon Footprint Spinach Pesto:

  • two cups finely chopped spinach
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped almonds
  • 6 cloves garlic, finely chopped (though I’d heed my wife’s advice and use half that amount next time!)
  • X amount grated parmesan cheese
  • 4 tablespoons olive oil

Directions: Dump the spinach, almonds, and garlic in a bowl. Grate X amount of parmesan cheese into the bowl (for me, X = shit ton because parmesan cheese smells like the feet of God). Mix it all together. Start smashing it with your rolling pin as you drizzle in the olive oil. Smash for 10 minutes or until your arm gets tired. Then go buy a food processor already, you cheapskate!

It turned out well, though a little strong on the garlic. I like that, actually, but don’t trust me. If I have a superpower it’s probably being able to eat something heavy on garlic without really being able to tell that it’s heavy on garlic.

Can Democrats learn anything from Justin Trudeau’s impressive victory in Canada? I think so. Of course our cultures and systems of government are different (very different in the latter case) but it never hurts to see what works elsewhere and wonder if it could work here. Like, explaining your proposed policies and their probable beneficial outcomes for most of the public in simple-to-understand ways could work in the States too, maybe.

Morning Coffee in China Links

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Taken from my back porch, around 8:30 am.

Working for an English training school in China means teaching on Saturday and Sunday, so my weekend is actually Wednesday and Thursday. It’s a gorgeous day here, as you can see, but I’ve come down with a cold. Better take it easy and catch up on my internets.

  • Like Josh Marshall, I really like Vice President Joe Biden. I also agree that his running for the presidency would only make sense if Hillary Clinton’s campaign somehow implodes, most likely due to scandal, and now it’s looking less and less likely that will happen.
  • Paul Ryan may walk the plank yet. It looks like he’s got enough support now (math explained here in a previous post) to become Speaker with only Republican votes. But the Freedom Caucus won’t go quietly, and I really don’t see how Ryan becomes anything other than Boehner 2.0 as Speaker. If the Freedom Caucus continues to demand government shutdowns and default on US debt in order to achieve its goals, then we’re right back where we started: the Speaker needs Democratic votes to pass clean budgets and clean authorization to pay US debts, will look weak for it, and conservatives will call him a RINO (Republican-in-name-only, i.e. no better than a Democrat) and kill his career… And now I see some conservative groups are already calling Ryan a RINO.
  • A writer I don’t like, David Brooks, is caught yet again peddling his “Oh, where have all the reasonable conservatives gone” bullshit. Corey Robin lets this tired lament hang from its own rope. But if you really want to understand what Robin is getting at, read his lengthy post, or better yet, his book. Conservatism, going all the way back to one of its revered founders, Edmund Burke, has always been about resistance to democratic government and its potential to change the status quo.
  • When will these tragedies ever end? I look forward to the NRA explaining that this 4-year-old would still be alive today if only she had been packing as well.
  • The fight against our country’s sick fascination with firearms and the consequences of said fascination is going to be long and uphill, but Erik Loomis finds some interesting strategies that could make a difference. One interesting idea already introduced in the House is to make all gun owners carry insurance. If done well, this could make the kind of guns most likely to result in harm or death prohibitively expensive for the average gun nut. The prospect of confiscating guns newly made illegal by such a law, however, is fraught with danger.
  • Erik Loomis again, this time about the idea of relative poverty. Here he is previously on the backlash – weirdly enough in some otherwise progressive spheres – against reporting that reveals, shockingly, that poor Americans are poor.
  • Ok, it’s my “Sunday” so I’m going to make some comfort food for brunch. Here are some good recipes I’ve used many times before for biscuits and bacon gravy.

Later.

Morning Coffee in China Links

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A gray morning, but no rain.

Here are some of the things I’ve read this morning before I go into work:

Have a good day, or night!

The House Leadership Crisis, Explained

Republicans in national politics all basically agree on the same agenda: keep taxes as low as possible, raise the eligibility ages for Medicare and Social Security and decrease their benefits, destroy Obamacare, gut the Environmental Protection Agency, force all women to bring their pregnancies to term regardless of circumstances, allow fundamentalist Christians to impose their beliefs on others, round up and deport all illegal immigrants, allow people to openly carry basically any firearm they want with as little hassle as possible, etc. Where they might disagree is on tactics that can achieve these goals. Current House Speaker John Boehner, probably because he has read the actual US Constitution rather than the imaginary one inside many conservative brains, understands that Republicans cannot ram through a radical conservative agenda while a Democrat is president.

The Freedom Caucus, a group of more than 40 far-right House Republicans (and perhaps there are dozens more House members who sympathize with its strategy), disagrees with Boehner. Its members literally believe that Obama will eventually sign the extremely reactionary bills they want to send him if only they shut down the government long enough or default on US debt long enough to show Obama that they are serious about holding the country and the world economy hostage to their demands. No joking here – shutting down the government and defaulting on US debt obligations are exactly the tactics they want the next Speaker to promise to use.

This time, the Freedom Caucus is up in arms over Planned Parenthood and want to cut its funding. This is the great cause, which the American people are overwhelmingly against, over which they want to see the world burn. Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is demanding cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Boehner shares all of these goals. What he doesn’t share is the Freedom Caucus’ apocalyptic vision that the chaos surrounding government shutdowns and US debt defaults will cause Obama to capitulate to all of their demands. That’s why Boehner wants to step down. Which brings us, finally, to explaining the House leadership crisis.

The House has 435 voting members. A Speaker must be chosen by an outright majority of members, making 218 votes the minimum threshold. Republicans currently enjoy a majority of 247 members to the Democrats’ 188. The Freedom Caucus contains at minimum 40 members. The math shows that if the Freedom Caucus refuses to vote for a candidate for Speaker, Republicans have at best 207 votes, not enough to elect a new Speaker. This is why Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker went down in flames. The Freedom Caucus refused to endorse him, leaving him without the necessary 218 votes.

Now, most Republicans would strongly prefer to elect a Speaker with votes only from their party. Majority parties are loathe to beg for votes from the opposition party in order to elect a Speaker. Why? Well, the minority party would most likely demand some real influence as the price for their votes. Democrats have been shut out of influential roles in the House since 2011 even though they have repeatedly covered Boehner and “moderate” (non Freedom Caucus) Republicans by giving them enough votes to pass routine spending legislation and authorization to pay US debts. As Martin Longman explains, the only meaningful House majority is the majority of members willing to keep the government operating and to pay US debts. At the moment, that is essentially a coalition of Republicans who understand the actual US system of government as laid out in the US Constitution and Democrats. Longman argues that this arrangement ought to be formalized by Republicans allowing Democrats to chair some House committees in exchange for votes for the next Speaker, thus freezing out the Freedom Caucus and relegating it to the sidelines.

Sounds easy, right? But it’s not! “Sane” Republicans who understand the limits of power in our constitutional system are always at risk of facing a primary opponent who undoubtedly will make them pay for any compromise with Democrats. Want to keep the government open? Congratulations, you win a Tea Party primary opponent! Want to pay US debts? Congratulations, you win a Tea Party primary opponent! House Republicans who don’t want to destroy the country are genuinely between a rock and a hard place. Lose your job and avoid global catastrophe, or keep your job and facilitate global catastrophe?

Obama has already made clear that Freedom Caucus and Senate Republican budget demands are non-starters. But isn’t Obama just as responsible for avoiding disaster? This is where the whole thing gets a little difficult to explain. Our system of government is predicated on deliberate compromise. We have seen all kinds of difficult or noxious compromises in order to preserve the Union in our history, beginning with the country’s original sin of allowing slavery in a republic supposedly founded on the ideals in the Declaration of Independence, on through the Missouri Compromise, and on and on.

Such compromises came about because usually a majority or plurality in power has never been willing to burn the country down in order to achieve all of its goals, instead settling for the proverbial three-fifths of a loaf. The one major exception to our long history of making compromises no one was fully happy with is the Civil War, and if anyone wants to criticize Lincoln’s decision to go to war against people committing treason in order to protect slavery, be my guest.

I don’t want to overstate things, but that’s essentially where we are now. Obama does not want to set a new precedent in which a small minority – and from his point of view, a small minority that is an extremist faction – is allowed to hold the government hostage to its maximalist demands. If the 40-plus member Freedom Caucus is allowed to dictate deeply unpopular terms to the rest of the country then our form of representative government is again in a crisis different in degree but not in kind from that which precipitated the Civil War. What’s the point of a president if less than 10% of House Representatives, mostly hailing from the country’s backwaters, are able to tell that president – one from the opposite party, no less – what to sign, no negotiation?

This probably sounds like an exaggeration of the actual situation, but it’s not. The Freedom Caucus is that recalcitrant, and Boehner and McCarthy and everyone else have not been able to reason with it. The last hope for a Republican unity candidate for Speaker would seem to be Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mitt Romney’s pick for Vice President in 2012, darling of the mainstream media, and unapologetic con man. Some Freedom Caucus members have said nice things about Paul Ryan, but why would he possibly want the job? To become Speaker with only Republican votes, Ryan would have to promise the Freedom Caucus he would hold the government and US debt commitments hostage to their demands until Obama agrees to pay the ransom. Then, once Speaker, Ryan would be faced with two impossible choices. Either he’d have to follow through and shut down the government and default on our debts, causing pain at home and perhaps worldwide catastrophe, or he could screw over the Freedom Caucus, pass budgets and authorization to pay US debt with the help of Democrats, and suffer the same fate as Boehner and McCarthy. Either way lies ruin and humiliation and an end to any ambitions Ryan has to one day run for president.

So, it all comes back to an intra-Republican Party argument over tactics. Many Republicans who disagree with most everything Obama and Democrats stand for understand that, at the end of the day, Obama cannot allow a conservative rump to demand 100% satisfaction of their demands and 0% concessions in order to avoid a government shutdown and default on US debts. These “reasonable” Republicans agree with Obama and Democrats on at least one thing – burning the whole thing down is not an option. They understand that, in our system of government, they have to take their case to the American people and go out and win congressional majorities and the presidency. If they can’t do that, then they have to live with divided government and negotiate.

Freedom Caucus members insist on trampling the conventions of our political system, which have generally worked out for 200-plus years, and want to see what happens after they set the whole thing on fire.

It’s really not clear how this plays out. The best thing for everyone – except, one supposes, for the Freedom Caucus – might be for Boehner to stay on in a kind of caretaker role, as Josh Marshall explains. He would answer to no one and could use whatever coalition he pleases to pass whatever he wants. Enough Democrats would be willing to help him pass budgets and a US debt payment authorization that don’t monkey around too much with Democratic spending priorities. If he was really feeling emboldened, Boehner could even try to revive things like comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship that Democrats can accept.

The latter is extremely far-fetched and Boehner staying on in lieu of Republicans electing a new Speaker is unlikely. But it’s one unlikely alternative among several unlikely alternatives. Does Boehner stay on and see the country through the 2016 elections that will hopefully change the status quo? Do enough Republicans pressure Paul Ryan to run for Speaker, elect him, and can he survive in that role AND keep the government running AND pay US debts? Do 218-plus Republicans and Democrats join together in an unprecedented coalition government, elect a Speaker and share power in the House, thus officially recognizing the current de facto ruling coalition? Does some other Republican emerge who can bring the Freedom Caucus to heel without fearing for his or her job?

I don’t even know how to begin handicapping these possibilities. Let’s just hope that two additional unlikely alternatives, a government shutdown and/or default on US debt, don’t happen.

Weekend Links

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Taken from the roof of our school/office in Dali, Yunnan Province.

I’ve been back from vacation a week and a half and am only now re-establishing my routine. I’m teaching all weekend so longer posts will have to wait. In the meantime here are some links that show what I’ve been thinking and reading about recently.

  • Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote a series of posts about the shooting in Oregon that are tough, but important. Here he is on why not naming shooters is a dodge that abets gun rights absolutists, on the public opinion shifts that have helped turn the Republican Party into the political arm of the NRA, on the different and often reprehensible ways that gun rights absolutists excuse mass shootings, and finally, on how the debate surrounding guns is restricted to proposals tinkering on the margins of policy when many of us would like to see a debate over sweeping changes that could drastically reduce the number of firearms held privately in the US.
  • Josh Marshall again on how crazy it is that it took Kevin McCarthy’s comments about the ‘Benghazi Committee’ and the subsequent crashing and burning of his campaign for Speaker of the House for mainstream journalists to start discussing what a sham the whole investigation has been for years.
  • Maybe Charlie Pierce is right that no American president could have avoided going into Afghanistan in 2001. Unfortunately, he’s almost certainly right that, 14 years later, we don’t seem close to leaving.
  • There aren’t many things that drive me crazier than hearing someone say some version of “Yeah, but at least George Bush kept us safe.” His administration’s negligence in the lead up to the attacks on September 11, 2001 is well-documented and irrefutable. Then, even if you grant Bush and his administration what Charlie Pierce derisively calls The Great Mulligan, and agree that we shouldn’t count the 2,977 victims of 9-11, in what sane world do we call more than 2,000 dead and 20,000 wounded in Afghanistan and more than 4,000 dead and 30,000 wounded in Iraq keeping us safe? I guess if you buy the we-have-to-fight-them-over-there-so-they-don’t-kill-us-here nonsense, and you grant The Great Mulligan, and you don’t believe staffing important government agencies with incompetents makes you at least partially responsible for avoidable deaths during natural disasters, then yeah, sure, Bush kept us safe.
  • Relatedly, Duncan Black at Eschaton has a pithy take on how difficult it is to explain the madness of those key Bush years from 2001 to 2006.
  • Like Matthew Yglesias at Vox, the 2000 election was a huge influence on how I think about politics. There are disturbing parallels in the way Bush dishonestly sold his budget ideas in 2000 to how his brother JEB! is doing so today. Jeb Bush may not even make it to the general election, but the larger point is that the media’s focus on personality, trivia, and pseudo-scandal instead of policy in 2000 certainly hurt Gore if not cost him the election, and the mainstream media seems poised to repeat the same mistakes this time around.
  • I started to write about the leadership crisis in the House here but that needs to be a longer post. I plan to write my own version, but here are the basics from Martin Longman, a writer I really like. Here and here.

Enjoy the weekend!

Back From Vacation (or, Angkor Wat Is Awesome)

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South Entrance to the Angkor Thom complex in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

This latest break from blogging was due to a trip my wife and I took to see the Angkor temple complexes in Siem Reap, Cambodia. October 1st is China’s National Day and many workers, including me, got a week off starting that date. I’d been to Cambodia once, back in 2006, but since we’re planning to leave this part of the world soon and return to the States, Angkor Wat and the other complexes were something I wanted my wife to see before we left.

Memories distort and fade, but our visit validated my recollections of the Angkor temples being the most amazing man-made things – from the pre-industrialized world, at least – that I have ever seen. I hope to see the pyramids in Egypt one day, and I know they likely rival or even surpass the Angkor temples in sheer how-the-fuck-did-they-think-to-do-that-let-alone-actually-do-that-ness, but, yeah, the Angkor temples are pretty sweet. If you ever have a chance to go see them, go. Don’t think twice about it. Just go, and thank me and Suryavarman II later.

Here are some more photos.

How Not to Govern in America, A Continuing Series

Does your family look like this? Sorry, the Republican Party doesn’t approve. By Jim Bob Duggar (Email from Jim Bob Duggar) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
The most recent Republican push to shut down the government is about Planned Parenthood, the reproductive health and family planning provider that was recently the victim of sting videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells fetal tissue for profit. Planned Parenthood has consistently denied this, and the groups and lawmakers going after Planned Parenthood have so far failed to prove their claims. That is why the congressional hearing yesterday became a stunt in which Republicans harassed Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards about her salary, the organization’s travel expenses, and made false claims about Planned Parenthood services.

This hearing is not about governing. House Speaker John Boehner, for example, knows full well that President Obama would veto any legislation taking federal support away from Planned Parenthood, and that the American public overwhelmingly supports Obama and Planned Parenthood in this fight.

Instead, I think Amanda Marcotte gets this right in a piece over at Talking Points Memo. This is a play to the Republican anti-choice base, which is obsessed with abortion and policing the sex lives of women. Marcotte explains how the hearing demonstrated that Republicans either do not understand the true nature of the services Planned Parenthood provides, or, more likely, they do understand and it’s precisely the family planning to which they object.

Either way, this is yet another bad reason to shut down the government, and again shows lack of seriousness on the part of the modern Republican Party.

How Not to Govern in America

Yes, John, I’m still the president. No, John, I won’t sign a bill repealing all of the Democratic Party’s achievements. (Pete Souza [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
John Boehner’s decision to resign as Speaker later next month can help explain why the Republican Party in its current state is incapable of governing. As Jonathan Chait points out, Boehner resigned/was ousted because of extremely unrealistic expectations that he would, or could, force Obama to cave to conservative demands.

The story here is quite simple. Obama won a decisive election in 2008 and enjoyed unified Democratic control of Congress when sworn in as President in January 2009. Obama and Democrats in the Senate and the House managed to pass several important laws, including the momentous Affordable Care Act, without any meaningful cooperation from the Republican minority. The Republican minority managed to stifle several other important bills by abusing the filibuster.

The midterm election of 2010 featured a much whiter and older electorate than that of 2008, and Republicans managed to take over the House. The 2010 election ushered in the era in which we currently live, where no meaningful legislation gets passed, and Republicans repeatedly threaten to shut down the government over whatever is their pet issue of the day.

What’s the point here? Republicans accept election results when they win, and ignore them when they lose. They refuse to compromise in any way whether they’ve won or lost an election. If they’ve won, they insist that their opponents accede to all of their demands. If they’ve lost, they refuse to negotiate, then whine like hell when Democrats actually manage to pass something without their help. This is no way to approach governance, especially in a country with our particular system of government.

The modern Republican Party, or at least its conservative base, does not seem to understand the structure of the American political system. There is a deliberate separation of powers when it comes to lawmaking. No bill becomes law without being passed by both houses of Congress and without receiving the president’s signature, unless, of course, both houses of Congress pass the law and can override the president’s veto with two-thirds majorities in both houses. So, a party that refuses to compromise with the other but wants to enact laws must either a) hold majorities in both houses of Congress and the presidency, or b) hold two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress that are willing to override a president’s veto. There is no other way to enact laws in our system of government other than the two just mentioned.

At no point since Obama’s inauguration in 2009 has the Republican Party met either condition. Yet its members refuse to compromise. This is why Boehner repeatedly had to go to House Democrats, hat in hand, begging for the votes needed to pass routine spending legislation. Boehner, because he’s human, is tired of these repeated humiliations.

Well, what’s so crazy about a party winning a significant congressional majority in an election and then demanding a say in legislation? Nothing’s wrong with that, as long as the party is willing to compromise. Here’s what has happened instead.

The 2010 election-winning Republicans triumphantly declared themselves to have a mandate, because the people had spoken, and they claimed the people had said loudly and clearly that they wanted the Affordable Care Act (aka the ACA or Obamacare) repealed and the deficit reduced via spending cuts. Regarding the ACA, obviously, this was a maximal position. Republicans didn’t want to tweak the ACA, and they didn’t want to repeal it and replace it with a different version. They wanted to repeal it, period.

Imagine you are the president and your name is Obama and you are presented with a bill that repeals the law that has become known as Obamacare and you believe that this bill has helped a lot of people (full disclosure: my wife and I now have health insurance thanks to Obamacare). Would you ask, “Where do I sign?” Of course not. And to make matters worse, Democrats still controlled the Senate, and they sure as hell were not going to pass a bill repealing Obamacare.

The 2011 budget negotiations aimed at reducing the deficit is an even better example of Republican intransigence. Boehner had negotiated with Obama a budget leaning heavily on spending cuts to cherished Democratic programs. Obama insisted on including some measures that would raise revenue. Obama knew he couldn’t get the Senate, still under Democratic control, to pass this budget without at least some new revenue. But Republican hardliners refused to accept even this small compromise to their anti-tax agenda, essentially telling Obama that he would either have to accept the Republican budget agenda in its entirety (and in this fantasy land scenario somehow the Senate would accept this as well) or nothing would pass.

Obama said no thanks, and Boehner had to pass a very different budget with the help of Democratic votes. To be fair, this budget was still terrible from a Democrat’s point of view (as evidenced by only half of Democratic House members being willing to vote for it). In the end, though, conservative Republicans’ refusal to compromise backfired and robbed them of their one real opportunity to get a Democratic president to cover their asses and sign a bill cutting spending from Social Security and other important programs.

Now, back to the idea of a mandate. The Republicans did indeed win a landslide election in 2010 and took over the House. This was all the evidence they needed to claim the American people had spoken and that the Republican Party’s agenda should be adopted in its entirety. Again, though, imagine you were Obama or a Senate Democrat. Wait a minute, you would’ve thought, I’m still president and my party still controls the Senate. And wait another minute. Sure, Republicans just scored an impressive victory, but the America that came out to vote in 2010 looked a lot different from the one that swept us to power in 2008. (This is a long-standing phenomenon in which presidential election year electorates skew younger and towards more minority participation, while off presidential election years skew whiter and older). So if you were Obama or a Senate Democrat at this time, you would’ve been wondering why, exactly, you need to dismantle your own programs.

Of course, Obama won reelection overwhelmingly in 2012, giving the lie to Republican mandate claims. Actually, mandate claims by either party are always nonsense. Obama could’ve won every single state in 2012, claimed a mandate, and then still he would’ve confronted a Republican-controlled House with no intentions whatsoever of cooperating on his agenda.

This is why the Republican Party needs to change, or go the way of the Whigs. It is no longer a party interested in governing. Governing in the American political system means making compromises. Today’s Republican Party thinks compromise means “give us everything we want and you get nothing or we will shut down the government.” That’s not compromise. That’s this.

Boehner’s Out and the Crazy Is In

Time to work on that tan. By Keith Allison from Baltimore, USA (John Boehner) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsS
Wow, this is a big deal. Republican U.S. Representative from the 8th district of Ohio and Speaker of the House since 2011 John Boehner will resign from Congress in late October. The man was one of the most useless Speakers in history and will not be missed. He presided over a Republican majority that repeatedly caused the country to lurch from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis, inflicting unnecessary damage upon the country as a whole and its most vulnerable citizens in particular along the way.

The only thing Boehner ever did that resembled success was his almost total victory over President Obama in 2011 budget negotiations, only to have his own caucus snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Consequently, Obama realized that the Republican Party would never negotiate with him in good faith. If there is an accomplishment to be found anywhere in his tenure, it’s that Boehner was so weak and pathetic that Obama and the Democrats finally got it through their thick skulls that they no longer had to play Charlie Brown to the Republicans’ Lucy:

I’m inclined to think that Congress will become even more dysfunctional without the relatively moderate Boehner in charge of the House. Say what I will about the guy, at least his heart never seemed to be in the stunts he constantly felt he needed to pull in order to placate the Republican base and keep his role as Speaker. If I’m feeling extremely charitable, I’ll point out that Boehner violated the “Hastert Rule” several times in order to pass routine spending measures with the help of Democratic votes over the objections of his right wing. But if the best thing you can say about one of the most powerful people in the country is that he occasionally prevented disasters engineered by his own party, well, I think that speaks for itself.

Some will probably argue that Boehner did the best he could with the hand he was dealt. That a Tea Party-type will now take his place and if we thought we saw gridlock in Washington before, just wait until a true Unicornstitutionist is in charge. That we will regret not having Boehner to kick around anymore. I don’t know. Many people do not understand the true nature of the beast Boehner’s been trying to ride for the last five years, and if his departure opens more eyes to what his party has become, good.