The Republican Mafia

Paul Ryan was in my state the other day, saying that a Romney administration will be bipartisan. The statement is preposterous on the face of it, given how inflexibly partisan and doctrinaire most of the Republicans in Congress have been for the last four years. Most of those who actually did have bipartisan tendencies have been summarily executed by Tea Party hacks during the 2012 primaries.


Congressional Republicans' only goal, stated by Jim DeMint, was to make sure that Obama was a one-term president. Under his leadership Republicans sabotaged nearly all action in the Senate by threatening filibusters on nearly every piece of legislation and appointment except for a brief seven-week period between the time that Al Franken was seated on July 7, 2009, and Ted Kennedy died on August 25.

The health care bill, which Obama compromised on in order to get Republican support, was passed in that brief window. It was based on Romney's Massachusetts health care plan, a plan the Republican Heritage Foundation put forth. Yet most Republicans obstinately refused even to negotiate and have been trying to destroy it ever since in order to peevishly deny Obama a victory. After vowing to party faithful for years to dismantle Obamacare in its entirety, "more-moderate-just-in-time-for-the-election" Romney is now saying that he would keep all the good stuff, but get rid of the mechanism that pays for it. Which Romney knows would gut it, leaving millions without health insurance.

Obama spent months and months trying to elicit Republican compromise. He was rejected on almost every point by Republicans like Ryan who insisted not only on keeping the Bush tax cuts--cuts that were intentionally made temporary to obscure their true long-term cost--but demanded even greater tax cuts for the wealthy. This despite a mammoth deficit caused by fighting in two wars on credit. The tax cuts and wars alone gave us the biggest deficit ever, and was made even worse when the economy collapsed after the banks screwed us over and Bush bailed them out. Obama compromised with the Republicans on the bailout while still a senator.

But when it came time to compromise with Obama over the debt ceiling, House Republicans instead chose to behave like Mexican and Colombian drug gangs who kidnap innocent victims for ransom, and held the country hostage with their demands for huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Their refusal resulted in a sequester agreement that was supposed to be too terrible for anyone to contemplate, yet Republicans continue to this day to demand more budget-busting tax cuts for their wealthy donors.

Obama wants to extend tax cuts everyone except those who make more than a quarter million bucks, which is compromise with the Republican position. Romney's and Ryan's no-compromises plan calls for cutting taxes by 20% for the richest and getting rid of some capital gains taxes, which will only make the deficit that much worse. Plus they want to drastically increase defense spending, which of course goes to giant defense companies whose lobbyists sit on Romney's campaign committee.

The fact is, the only sense in which a Romney administration would be "bipartisan" is that he would be able to count on some Democratic support on key issues. And that's only because Democrats are not madmen willing to bankrupt the entire country to get what they want.

With Romney in the White House, and the status quo of a Republican-controlled House and only a slight majority of Democrats in the Senate, House Republicans would never compromise on anything. Because all money bills must originate in the House, House Republicans would continue to hold the country hostage to their special interest groups, cutting taxes for the wealthy, gutting the health care law, eliminating insurance coverage for birth control and access to abortion, destroying unions and dramatically expanding the income gap.

If Obama wins and House Republicans continue their sabotage and let the country fall off the fiscal cliff, it will become obvious to all who's working for compromise and who's in the pockets of the special interests. It'll be a rough two years, but maybe some Republican representatives will change their tune before the 2014 election.

The Republican Party has stopped being a political party and has become a mafia, complete with offshore tax havens and money laundering, secret operatives scaring up money from billionaires for their PACs, dirty trick squads throwing out Democrats' voter registrations and calling people in hurricane ravaged areas and telling them the election has been delayed until Wednesday.

Ryan's claim of "bipartisanship" is actually an implicit threat, like a mafia protection racket. If Obama is reelected Ryan and the House Republicans are threatening to continue their economic sabotage, using extortion, kidnapping and blackmail to hold the country hostage for Sheldon Adelson's tax cuts.