Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Republican Party

I am pretty used to the insanity of our politics at this point, yet every once in a while, a benign news article manages to get under my skin. This AP article-- about the hard lessons Democrats are learning from the GOP's successful attempts to water down and delay the minimum wage increase-- is one of those articles.

AP: House, Senate Dems realize power limited

At first, legislation to raise the minimum wage loomed as a clean, quick triumph for Democrats eager to celebrate their new majority in Congress. Two months later, it stands as an early lesson in the limits of their power.

A cohesive Republican minority backed by the White House, the Senate's complex rules and internal divisions among Democrats have combined to slow the measure's progress since it cleared its first hurdle in mid-January.

While final passage is highly probable, Democrats and their allies in organized labor long ago capitulated to GOP demands, agreeing to accept business-friendly tax cuts as the price for the first minimum wage increase in a decade.

"The minimum wage-tax relief package was a good early lesson for them as to how things will work," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said with a chuckle in a recent interview...

Bold added by me... those Republicans sure have a great sense of humor, no? Proving to the Democrats that they still have power trumps the economic concerns of countless Americans. Your modern Republican party in a nutshell.

The Republicans intend to go out of their way to create gridlock for gridlock's sake over the next two years, so that come election time, they can simultaneously brag to their base about defeating the Democrats and lament to the general public how the Democrats failed to lead. The consequences of their actions to the people whose votes they hope to scam away be damned.

The GOP had six years complete control of the government (not even counting the six additional years they held Congress in the Clinton years) and in that time they passed countless tax cuts and pay raises for themselves and other pro-corporate bills, but no wage increases for average Americans or anything similar. And now that their greed and legislative failings have cost them their majority, they intend to undermine the people trying to right this ship.

There will be NO compromise. It's war to them. Keep in mind that a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll a month after the midterm elections found that "By 59% to 21%, Americans say Congress rather than Mr. Bush should take the lead in setting policy for the nation." It further found that "items on the Democrats' opening agenda for Congress enjoy strong initial backing. More than seven in 10 Americans support raising the minimum wage — on which Mr. Bush has indicated flexibility — and forcing the federal government to negotiate lower Medicare drug prices with pharmaceuticals companies — which Mr. Bush opposes."

And yet with this noteworthingly broad support, the Republicans will either squash or water-down everything on this agenda. Why? Just to prove it can. Just to give themselves a chuckle.

(I won't even get into conservatives who simply oppose the very idea of a minimum wage.)

Their intention here is to demoralize the Democratic base which had such high hopes in November and to show the GOP base that they've still got it. Yet rather than demoralizing liberals and Democrats, I post this in hopes that our anger will strengthen our resolve and our determination to see to it that as many Republicans as can be voted out in 2008 will be. It is not hyperbolic to say that this party has contempt for the average American. I hope voters still see it, I hope 2008 is a repeat of 2006. Because beyond the satisfaction of seeing this strategy fail, the less Republicans there are in power (particularly in the Senate), the less gridlock these important issues will face.

2006 was the beginning, not the end. America won't be fixed in one day.