Category: Congress

CLUELESS GOP FRESHMEN RAKE IN THE CASH BY SAYING DUMB STUFF

Based on media attention and fundraising prowess, many of today’s Republican congressional “stars” are knucklehead neophytes who make up for a lack of public policy chops by mastering the dark arts of outrage and chicanery. 

Think Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s the QAnon alum from Georgia who, during her first few months in office, managed to insult more than a quorum of the House and Senate. She was elected in 2020 after endorsing a call for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s execution.

Although MTG, as headline writers call her, is clearly driving the clown car, she is not alone in the vehicle.  Riding shotgun is Colorado’s latest gift to Congress, Lauren Boebert who created all sorts of pandemonium when she tried to smuggle a loaded handgun onto the House floor. Then there is North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, the House’s youngest member at 25. He insists Dr. Anthony Fauci is a “pawn in the Chinese Communist Party,” and that Sen. Cory Booker is working to “ruin white males.” 

Although these fumbling fledgling freshmen have yet to perform a substantive legislative act, their ability to monetize the preposterous placed them in the House’s top five percent of campaign fundraisers. In the first quarter of 2021, MTG raised $3.2 million, mostly from small dollar donors. The only House member to outraise her was the person she wanted killed; Speaker Pelosi at $4 million. 

In another era, very few of us would have even been aware of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Why is that? Well, once upon a time, members of Congress were ordained to venerate their high offices by working hard, speaking less, and generally earning respect through a persona of thoughtfulness and integrity.  All that has gone the way of rotary phones and floppy disks.

Sam Rayburn, the legendary House speaker during the Franklin Roosevelt era, crafted his own orientation session for newly elected members. According to his biographers, Rayburn listened to their plans for changing the world overnight. Then, he offered them a glass of bourbon and this advice: “You know here in Congress there are 435 prima donnas and they all can’t be lead horses. If you want to get along, you have to go along.” 

For decades, new senators were given information packets that explained the norms of Congress.  Following Rayburn’s equestrian theme, the briefing quoted the advice an unnamed senator offered new members back in the 1950s. He said Congress was composed of two kinds of people, “show horses and work horses. If you want to get your name in the papers, be a show horse. If you want to gain the respect of your colleagues, keep quiet and be a work horse.”

The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy waited 17 months after he was first elected to speak on the floor of that chamber. And he began his primordial speech by apologizing for not waiting longer.  “. . .It is with some hesitation that I rise to speak on the pending legislation before the Senate. A freshman Senator should be seen, not heard; should learn, and not teach.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene is no Ted Kennedy.  She filed articles of impeachment against President Biden on his first full day in office, much to the embarrassment of House GOP leaders.  She publicly ridiculed the transgender daughter of a congressional colleague. She compared the House’s mandatory mask mandate to the Holocaust. Just last week, she tweeted that COVID-19 won’t hurt you unless you are obese or over 65, provoking Twitter to suspend her account for 12 hours. As discipline for her incorrigible outrageousness, the House voted in February to remove Greene from all committees.

That meant MTG suddenly had more time to convert that outrageousness into campaign donations.  Two weeks after the House voted to banish her from all committees, Greene’s popularity among Republicans went up 11 percentage points, and her national recognition gained 14 points.  That in turn led to more than 100,000 donors sending her an average of $32.

As Vox’s Gregory Svirnovskiy noted, MTG’s fundraising haul is “a reminder that gaining notoriety on conservative media – rather than making efforts to pass meaningful legislation – is what holds real value in the modern Republican Party.  

That’s why Rep. Cawthorn, the 25-year-old from North Carolina, decided to forgo the hiring of legislative analysts in favor of a staff focused only on communication. He, like Greene and Boebert, make no pretense of passing laws. To them, it’s all about marketing themselves by doing crazy stuff.  As their mentor, Donald Trump, taught them, there is a rabid, hateful, antivaxxer base out there that won’t hesitate to share their credit card numbers with anyone promising to blow the system up. 

Another key player in the Trumpian school of outrage over substance is, of course, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.   Although under federal investigation involving sex trafficking allegations, he raised $1.8 million in the first quarter, mostly by preaching the Gospel According to Trump and mouthing whatever other silly narratives struck his fancy.  In his recently released book, Firebrand, Gaetz spells out his formula for political success: “Why raise money to advertise on the news channels when I can make the news? And if you aren’t making the news, you aren’t governing.”

Take one more look at that last sentence to fully grasp the political philosophy of this young crowd of Republican influencers: “And if you aren’t making the news, you aren’t governing.” Back in the 18th Century, our founders struggled to create a new system of governance. They turned to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They talked about “natural rights”, about a “social contract”, and “popular sovereignty”. They believed that the best form of governance is when elected leaders represent the interests of the people, a notion known then as republicanism. After intense thought and debate, they put it all together, this new concept of governing. That was the beginning of the United States of America.

Then, 245 years later, comes a clarion call for a totally new concept of government. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? “If you aren’t making the news, you aren’t governing.”

God help us all if these new Republican firebrands ever take over.    

CONGRESSIONAL ABDICATION NEEDS TO END, AND SO DOES THE FILIBUSTER

With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden made many of us smile again.  The Muslim ban is gone. The Paris climate accord is back. The DREAMers are saved from deportation. Transgender Americans are welcomed back into the military. What a euphoric breath of fresh air after a four-year bout of Trump derangement syndrome! 

The trouble with euphoria, of course, is that it’s a temporary condition. As the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, “. . .even in heaven they don’t sing all the time.”  Although some of Biden’s sweet songs will keep playing for at least the next three years and nine months, at some point the music will stop, and the magic pen will be in the hands of a new president. 

Therein lies our problem. The structure of our government has become so flawed and broken that we have come to accept these massive bi-polar waves of transformation every four years. A Republican senate stonewalled Barak Obama, so he turned to executive orders to deal with immigration, climate change and human rights.  Donald Trump molded his presidency around undoing everything Obama did.  Then along comes Joe to undo what Trump did. 

The last thing the authors of our Constitution wanted was a government run by executive edict.  They’d had enough of the monarchy stuff. They saw Congress as the strongest of the three branches, and vested it with the power to enact laws through deliberation.  The president would then execute those laws.  It was the founders’ way of eliminating policy limbo, of protecting us from the vertigo of a revolving door of presidential fiat. 

And presidential fiat is precisely what we have now.  Congress, particularly the Senate, has abdicated it’s role of lawmaking. One study, for example, found that Congress has spent only a few days over the past five years even talking about the pressing issue of immigration, with no resolution.  The record is similar on other critical issues.  As a result, the president has become a one-person legislature.

The United States Senate was once touted as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Sadly, it has morphed into a dysfunctional morass. Gone are the days of scintillating debate and creative problem-solving. In their place is a dreary, vacuous rhetoric on an intellectual par with a dismissive schoolyard taunt.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will do whatever they have to in order to pass legislation on gun control, voting rights and infrastructure, even if it means eliminating the filibuster. That’s the rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to pass most measures.

Comes now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who needs to gain only one GOP senate seat in the next election to retake the majority. After hissing at Schumer’s quest to pass a liberal agenda on the heels of blowing up the filibuster, McConnell went into full toxic na-na-na-na-boo-boo mode.  If Democrats kill the filibuster, McConnell said his party, once it regains majority status, will “ram through” sweeping abortion restrictions, a hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border, nation-wide anti-union laws, defunding of Planned Parenthood and expansion of gun rights. Some of us are old enough to remember when Republican leaders designed legislative agendas based on well thought out policy concepts, rather than their value as weaponry.

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised to hear McConnell trot out the cold war trope of mutual assured destruction. In his mind, the Democrats passing voting rights protections by a one-vote majority, is a nuclear bomb, and must be met with a commensurate warhead of, say,  draconian abortion restrictions.  The strategy, of course, is to leave both sides so afraid of their opponent’s agenda that neither push the nuclear button. (See the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

At least so far, mutual assured destruction has protected us from the apocalypse by creating an absence of nuclear war.  The problem with transporting that strategy into the legislative arena, however, is that we end up with an absence of legislation.  And that is precisely the dysfunctional mess we have been in for some time.  The filibuster rule has so paralyzed the Senate that it no longer even attempts to deal with the pressing issues of the day.  

The Democrats need to call McConnell’s bluff. Drop the damn nuclear bomb already. Blow up the filibuster, pass strong voting rights protections, along with gun safety, immigration reform and a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage.   Let the legislative process play out the way the founders intended and the Constitution provides. 

Lawmaking was placed in the hands of Congress principally because legislators are ultimately accountable to the people in their districts or states. By sizeable majorities, those people support Row v. Wade, union rights and sensible gun laws, and oppose anti-immigration policies and defunding Planned Parenthood. If Republicans regain control of the Senate, they would be quickly throwing it away by enacting McConnell’s punitive agenda. Call his bluff. Even if he carries out his threat, voters will have an opportunity to respond in the next election.  Either way is better than a paralyzed Congress and the revolving door of executive orders.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison described the Senate as a “necessary fence” to protect “the people against their rulers.”  In this aspirational vision, deliberation, shared thoughts and healthy give-and-take before a simple majority vote would serve democracy far better than the king-like whims of a president.   Unfortunately, the Senate subsequently stumbled its way into paralysis, first through the filibuster rule, and more recently by a hyper partisanship centered on playing to the party base. 

Madison’s fence is sorely needed today, more than ever. It will not be easy to get there. But all journeys begin with a single step. 

It’s time to take that first step by killing the filibuster, and returning the Senate to majority rule.  

EPILOGUE:  Out of total disrespect for the timing of this post, Senator Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, just announced that he will never vote to kill or weaken the filibuster. To quote a former president: “Sad.”   In politics, however, “never” can have a fairly short life. (See “Read my lips: No new taxes.”) 

AS THE WHISTLE BLOWS, DEMOCRACY FADES

The ultimate outcome of the Ukraine/whistleblower ordeal is less important than the broader message it portends. In other words, welcome to the tipping point in the unraveling of our democracy.   This is no longer about an unhinged president doctoring a weather map with his Sharpie.  This is about a concerted and rapidly escalating assault on the very democratic values that made America great.

In many ways, Trump’s flagrant flaunting of a whistle-blower statute to keep a report documenting his alleged misdeeds from a congressional committee is neither new nor surprising behavior. This is a guy who has never shown the slightest inclination to let a law, covenant or moral code interfere with his singular motivational force of self-interest.  

Yet, this aberrant behavior pattern is rapidly escalating, from the amusing to the abhorrent.  Back during the 2016 campaign, reporters profiling this unlikely candidate almost uniformly described him as someone who “defied conventions” (here, here and here).  How benign and understated that seems now. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer’s epicurean tastes as defying convention.

As diabolical as Trump has been, there was once room for reasoned optimism regarding the long-term impact of his malignancy on the future of American governance.  After all, our democracy has survived brutal assaults over the past 200+ years.  Surely our system of checks and balances, along with the commitment and integrity of dedicated public servants, would help mitigate against serious damage inflicted by the Donald’s defying of conventions.  Well, that worked for a while. But most of the White House folks with even a modicum of integrity have been fired or quit.  And the checks and balances we learned about in grade school grind at a snail’s pace.

For all practical purposes, our democracy has ceased to function.  This isn’t just Trump’s fault, although he is clearly the triggerman, the guy who took a dysfunctional system and reduced it to the kind of shambles that would warm the heart of a narcissistic authoritarian.  The problem began more than a decade ago when politics became so divisive and polarized that Republican congressional leaders would rather pass no legislation than work with a black Democratic president.  That’s why the biggest problems facing the country – immigration, gun control, health care, climate change – have seen insufficient or no action in the past 20 years.

That opened the door for Donald J. Trump to get elected on the solemn assertion that “I alone” can fix America.  And it’s been downhill ever since.

Remember all that stuff about three “co-equal” branches of government serving as the cauldron of our democracy?  Well, what many of us didn’t learn back in those civics classes was that the system was predicated on at least a modicum of good faith.  It’s common for Congress and a president to be on different pages. What the founders didn’t contemplate was a Trumpian presidency insisting that, it alone, controls the entire book.

So now we have, yet again, an impasse crisis between the president and Congress.  The Trump-appointed inspector general for the intelligence community reviewed a whistleblower complaint supposedly involving, among other matters, a phone conversation Trump had with the new president of Ukraine. The IG found it to be credible and of “urgent concern,” terms of art in the law that requires such matters to be referred to the Intelligence committees of the House and Senate.  The Trump administration is refusing to comply with the statute.  

At the same time, the Donald, out of a mixture of arrogance and invincibility, has been somewhat transparent when it comes to corruption.  That leaves us with the ironic duality of a president openly defying the whistleblower law while tweeting out much of the content likely involved in the matter.  Trump has acknowledged asking the Ukrainian president to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s son, and has also admitted sending his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to push Ukraine officials to dig up dirt on Biden for use in the 2020 presidential election.  

Meanwhile, House Democrats continue to spar with each other over potential moves on the impeachment chess board, largely over Trump’s obstruction of justice during the investigation into Russia’s interference in 2016 election.  Their opponent, however, has moved on to get another country to interfere in the upcoming election.  None of those chess pieces are moving right now because Donald Trump has pulled the rug out on the very democratic processes they rely upon.

Despite the constitutional impeachment and oversight responsibilities assigned to Congress, Trump has thumbed his nose at every turn, denying information and testimony that the House and Senate are clearly entitled to.  From the president’s tax returns to Don McGahn’s testimony, to information about immigration policy, bank loans and scores of other subjects, the White House has refused to produce any of it.  The intransigence is totally without precedent.  The result has been litigation and appeals, that may well continue beyond the 2020 election.

But Trump’s ruination of democracy goes much further.  With help from the Supreme Court, he has taken money Congress appropriated for various military projects and deferred it to building part of his wall at the Mexican border, a project specifically rejected by Congress.  The Pentagon now wants more money appropriated to replace the funds diverted to the wall.  According to reporting by the New York Times, White House sources say the president has his eye on diverting any such new appropriation toward additional sections of his wall.  

Freedom House is an independent agency that, for the past 50 years, has ranked countries around the world on how democratic their governments are.  The United States had always been near the top of the chart. Since 2017, however, our ranking has steadily deteriorated due to Trump’s frequent attacks on norms and institutions and the wearing down of democratic checks and balances.  Freedom House now places the U.S. well below other large and long-standing democracies such as France, Germany and Brittan.

Standing alone, the Ukraine/whistleblower episode would be tragic enough.  But on the heels of effectively usurping Congress’s oversight and funding responsibilities, this emboldened, in-broad-daylight rush to get yet another country to interfere in our elections moves this crisis into a whole different realm. Donald Trump is not just a terrible president.  He is not just a threat to our democratic way of life.  He has already dismantled huge parts of our democracy.  With a second term, it is hard to see how we would ever get it back.

AN ELECTION THAT BROUGHT MORE RELIEF THAN JOY IS A GOOD STEP IN A LONGER JOURNEY

Sometimes getting what you wished for falls far short of the anticipated euphoria. For many of us still suffering from the cataclysm of the 2016 presidential election, the midterms were our coping mechanism. They nursed us through tough times, through travel bans and “shithole countries”, through assaults on healthcare and tax cuts for the rich, through migrant children in cages and “very nice” Nazis in Charlottesville. Through all of the darkness, we looked forward to November 6 of 2018. Surely, in an election this critical, voters would send an unequivocal message repudiating Donald Trump’s racism, hatred and dishonesty. On a purely visceral level, I wanted this president to be publicly scorned, humiliated and rejected by the electorate.

Then I woke up Wednesday morning and realized how naïve I had been. A disaster as horrific as the Trump presidency, with its massive tentacles of anger and division, is not going to be cleaned up in a single election cycle. Yes, the Democrats’ seizure of the House was a genuinely feel-good moment for all of us bleeding heart liberals. Yet, it was an outcome that provoked more relief than elation. After all, in this same election we lost crucial Senate and governor races to conservatives, some of whom trotted out the most disgusting racist tropes since Jim Crow days. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly black and brown, were denied a ballot in blatantly cynical acts of voter suppression. And, as if we needed a reminder of the times we are in, within hours of the polls closing, Trump was right back at work, shaking up the Justice Department in order to gain control over the Mueller investigation, and curtailing asylum for Central American migrants fleeing persecution.

Sometimes, in a desperate desire to vote away our anguish, we ascribe far more power to the ballot than is warranted. In a year as politically demented and tortured as this one, no single election is capable of instantly turning darkness into light. That level of change comes only through a sustained movement, one whose trajectory is anything but a straight line. Here’s how a former community organizer named Barack Obama once described a social change movement: “It’s full of frustrations and setbacks and for every step forward that you take, sometimes it feels like there will be two steps back.” Only by continuing to move, can we make a difference.

And this election, more than most, was all about maximizing those forward steps. The movement started the day after Trump was inaugurated. An estimated 4.5 million American women, in nearly every corner of this country, took to the streets to express their disdain for the policies and behavior of the new president, a man elected after boasting about forcing himself on women. Tens of thousands of them were new to politics, and many became activists, even candidates, all in search of a path out of the abyss that was the 2016 presidential election.

From those steps – and they went both forward and backward, just as Obama described – these women, together with other social justice seekers, led the way Tuesday to begin our climb from that abyss. Wresting control of the House from the Republicans was a giant step, and essential to empowering the resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism. And based on post-election demographics, women – as voters, campaign workers and candidates – led the march to make it happen.

As a result, there will be at least 100 women in the House for the first time in this country’s history. Of the those elected to Congress this week, 42 are women of color. Two are Muslim. Two are Native American. At least three are LGBTQ. Together, they are far more representative of America than the hateful white nationalism espoused by our president.

There were other encouraging results Tuesday. A huge segment of suburban women who voted for Trump two years ago, passionately abandoned that camp and went blue this week. More Latinos voted than ever before, the vast majority for Democrats. The millennial vote was way up, and also largely Democratic. That outcome is something to feel good about, a moment to savor and build upon.

And build we must, for Trump’s movement – in the opposite direction – shows no sign of slowing. His hard core base will be with him until the end. The sole source of gratification fueling this president has nothing to do with accomplishments and everything to do with garnering love and affection from those who long for the days of white privilege. Trump will keep them in the palm of his hand by spinning one fictional crisis after another, nonexistent problems that can be solved only by the Donald. Like sending the military to stop an “invasion of violent criminals and gang members,” which has zero basis in reality.

Although his base of true believers is, according to conservative pollsters, less than 25 percent of the electorate, Trump’s complete disregard for truth and decency has spread into the mainstream of Republican politicians. If the president says it, they will repeat it. They jumped on the “invasion” bandwagon, and even kept a straight face while lying about their deep desire to maintain health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. Their new ethical standard is that if abandoning truth works for Trump then it should work for them.

In other words, to paraphrase Obama, we should anticipate that the ugliness will get worse before it gets better. We also need to remember that the movement born on January 21, 2016, is alive and well, with many steps to go before we sleep.

ENDING THE SHUTDOWN MAY HAVE AVERTED A DREAMER NIGHTMARE

Senate Democrats didn’t mess up by ending an embryonic government shutdown. Their mistake was using the tactic in the first place. Quickly retreating from a bad decision, a foreign concept to the current president and his Republican sycophants, is smart and effective leadership.

Linking immigration rights for the Dreamers with the GOP spending bill made sense earlier this month – an eternity ago in this bizarre political climate. Senate Republicans needed Democratic votes to pass a resolution keeping the government open. Democrats needed to find a way to keep undocumented young people brought into the country as children from being deported. Donald Trump told the world that he wanted to save the Dreamers through a “bill of love” and would sign any bipartisan immigration measure the Senate came up with.

The Capitol was hardly ensconced in a spirit of peace and love, but – for one brief, shining moment – there was real anticipation of at least a little give-and-take, the likes of which have not been seen here in more than a generation. Then Trump offered his “shithole countries” soliloquy, and Kumbaya morphed into a war chant.

The Donald’s boasts about his stellar negotiating skills have all the credibility of his claim to the be the world’s least racist person. There isn’t a rule of effective negotiating that he doesn’t regularly violate, including the one about not going back on your word. Days after telling a bipartisan Senate delegation that he would accept whatever immigration plan they came up with, and two hours after signaling his agreement with their proposal, Trump did a complete reversal and embraced the entire draconian screed of the anti-immigration hawks.

Although the rug had been pulled out from under them, Democrats stayed the tactical course of making immigration the quid-pro-quo for producing the needed votes to avoid a shutdown. The narrative quickly changed. It was no longer about Democrats helping Republicans pass a budget bill in exchange for protecting the Dreamers. It had become, through optics pushed by right wing messaging, a matter of Democrats forcing a shutdown to protect illegal immigrants. Besides, the leverage had no juice. The Trumpian gang got where they are by promising to drain the swamp. They abhor government. It’s the Democrats who believe in government and what it can do to make people’s lives better. Although the Dreamers have had strong public support, most polls showed substantial public anxiety over a prolonged government shutdown on their behalf.

That left Democrats in a weakened strategic position. Closing the government was hardly an effective club to use on a party that dislikes government. Yes, the talking point here was that Republicans would suffer from a shutdown since they control Congress and the White House. But the reality was that government closed because Democrats insisted to impasse on an immigration deal in exchange for the spending measure. That had the potential, particularly for the long haul, of weakening public support for the Dreamers.

I get the angst and disappointment of my friends on the left, and particularly on the part of those young people who grew up as Americans and see the clock ticking on possible deportation to countries they view as foreign. The pre-shutdown rhetoric of Democratic leaders about there being no spending bill without taking care of the Dreamers was powerful, passionate and hopeful. But, despite the message of many self-help books, a determination to win doesn’t guaranty victory. A prolonged government shutdown was simply not the instrument to induce surrender by a majority party that cares nothing about the fate of young immigrants, government workers or the people they serve. It would be like kidnapping Hillary Clinton and asking Donald Trump to pay the ransom.

By agreeing to fund government for another three weeks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not only bought time, he also brought the narrative back where it belonged, namely on how to keep the Dreamers from being deported. No longer is Trump’s campaign machine cranking out ads about Democrats shutting down government in order to help “illegal aliens.” Instead, late this week, the president put the White House on record for the first time in support of a bill that would not only give work permits to about 1.8 million young immigrants but would also grant them a path to citizenship.

Yes, Trump’s blink on the Dreamers, was in the context of an overall immigration proposal that would also include $25 billion in funding for his wall, along with severe reductions in the number of immigrants allowed into the country. It now seems more likely than ever that a bipartisan group in the Senate will produce a bill that follows the president’s position on the Dreamers but pushes back in some other areas.

To be sure, we are not yet at the end of the road on all of this. It remains very much an uphill battle for Democrats. They are, after all, Washington’s minority party right now. But hard, fruitful negotiations are still ongoing. And that would not be happening if the government remained shut down. The chatter would never have risen above the finger pointing.

Instead, the endgame offers two broad scenarios . One is a deal that overcomes the worst of right wing ideology and paves the way for nearly two million young people to become citizens. The other is, at the hands of Republicans, a defeat for any Dreamer protection legislation. That would be one more clarion call for a congressional realignment in this fall’s midterm elections. Either outcome is better than a protracted government shutdown with both sides accusing the other of causing it.

TRUMP’S SECOND YEAR IS ALREADY IN THE SHITTER

As dawn breaks on a second year of Republican control, our federal government dangles from this binary precipice of indelicate nuance: shitholes or shithouses? Which term did the president of the United States use to characterize third world countries of black and brown people? If this were a movie, now would be a good time to locate the nearest exit and use it. Who wants to watch such garbage? Alas, this is no celluloid fiction. It’s our life, our new reality, a bizarre sideshow of existence that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

For those fortunate enough to have spent the past few days in a deep coma, here’s a quick recap: Donald Trump met with a few senators in an attempt to reach a bipartisan agreement on immigration. The meeting went badly. According to some participants, Trump kept complaining about having to take immigrants from Haiti and impoverished African countries he called “shitholes.” Instead of opening our borders to, say, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, Trump pushed for a “merit-based” system in which we would take only good, lutefisk-eating white folks from places like Norway.

Well, the shithole hit the fan, causing a cascade of impassioned statements of repudiation from leaders throughout the world, Norway included. Initially, there was no denial from the White House. That’s because Trump surveyed his friends who told him not to worry since his base will love the comment. After a few days of constant heat, however, Trump and a couple Republican senators who were at the meeting said the president’s exact words were not “shithole countries.” That created a narrative that Trump had been misquoted, that he never uttered the word “shithole”. It turns out, according to the Washington Post, that what the Republican senators heard Trump say was that he didn’t want to take in people from “shithouse countries.” A quick review of etymological research shows no measurable differences between “shithole” and “shithouse”.

Yet, this unique linguistic dialectic, together with Trump’s incendiary message that non-whites from troubled countries should be kept out of the U.S., is now threating to shut down the federal government. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid such closure, and part of that package was supposed to include immigration reform. Some sort of deal may yet emerge, but for the moment the shithole/shithouse conundrum seems to have brought what’s left of governance to a standstill.

Despite headlines decrying the president’s “vulgarity,” his use of a four-letter word for excrement – “s***”, as many news outlets coded it – was not the offense here. What really offended, stung and hurt was his raw, brazen racism and xenophobia driving his position that our borders should be closed to dark-skinned people from poor countries.

No, this is nothing new. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans racists. He suggested fighting terrorism by executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig blood. He has called black people “lazy” and insisted that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS. His complete list of racist credentials takes up far more real estate than is available here. The most astute and best researched analyses of the 2016 election points to racism as the most important factor driving the Trump victory (here, here and here). So why all the shock over Trump calling impoverished black countries shitholes?

Because Trumpism, in all of its vile and despicable manifestations, remains a relatively new phenomena. We still remember and cling to the real spirit and essence of the American ideal: equality, justice, liberty and opportunity for all. There is precious little on the national scene to feel good about today. But, for now at least, we have this: wide spread disgust with a president who vulgarizes those core values that make it possible for America to be great. Let us hope we never reach the point of NOT being shocked, outraged and saddened by the racist words, actions and policies of this president. Trumpism must never be normalized.

There is another reason why many are shocked by what we’ve come to expect and anticipate from our president. It is difficult to process a constant stream of horror in daily White House utterances and tweets. While we struggle to wrap our heads around Trump’s taunt that he has a bigger nuclear button than North Korea’s, we are hit with the news that the President believes himself to be a “stable genius.” Before we can figure that one out, the shithole story breaks. We are so busy processing all this really weird shit, as George W. Bush might call it, we all have different a-ha moments.

Except, that is, for the Republican establishment. It appears that nothing, not even self-preservation, will dislodge the GOP’s shameful and embarrassing enablement of a pathetic, solipsistic, racist president who continues to degrade the party’s brand on a daily basis. Congressional Republican leaders have had a year of way too many opportunities to cut their losses and distance themselves from a maniacal autocrat who never cared a whit about them or their party. Playing word games, and ignoring the broader racist message, won’t save them now. He’s their president. They own him. Let them all be buried in the same shithole.

IT’S NOT JUST TRUMP – OUR WHOLE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

Our body politic is totally messed up. If a family member was as out of control and dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress, we would have staged an intervention long ago. Could it be that we are so sidetracked by the aberrant, maniacal antics of an unhinged president that we can’t bring ourselves to focus on the much broader problem of a broken system?

It is, after all, difficult to have a serious conversation about realigning the architecture of governance over the constant din of presidential tantrums, tweeted threats of nuclear annihilation and never-ending Russia investigations. Yet, if we step back from the chaos of the moment and examine how we got there, this glaring truth emerges: Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of our problem. It may be hard to remember, but our democracy was pretty out of whack before the Donald landed in the White House. In fact, that’s how he got there.

The heart of our systemic problem is a deep toxicity of tribalism that has coagulated in the veins of our politics, blocking the free flow of creative, constructive, problem-solving solutions. For most of this country’s history, elected representatives from both parties were able to tackle major issues through a rugged-but-productive give-and-take. It wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. All that slowed to a crawl, then to a virtual stop, over the past decade.

A 2014 study examined the productivity of Congress over the years by measuring the number of major issues that body failed to address. It found that the volume of gridlock had doubled since 1950, with 75% of key legislation dying by deadlock. Things have only gotten worse. Despite single-party control of the House, Senate and the presidency, not a single salient issue has been resolved this year. Small wonder that 80% of Americans disapprove of Congress. Even before last year’s election, 70% of Democratic activists said they were afraid of Republicans, while 62% of the GOP said they were afraid of Democrats. That’s a level of hyper partisanship never before recorded or experienced.

Analysts offer a multiplicity of causes for this congressional quagmire. Among them: growing income disparity, free-flow of corporate money in campaigns, racism, and an expanding right flank in the Republican Party, exacerbated by gerrymandered reapportionment and primary battles between the GOP mainstream and the right. On top of those factors, the relative parity between the two parties creates an intense competition. The result is that making the other side look bad is more important than passing productive legislation.

Although this strategic dysfunction set in well over a decade ago, it was not openly acknowledged. That all changed in 2010 when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell came out of the closet and announced that his top legislative goal was to make sure then-president Obama did not get a second term. It’s been downhill ever since. A new breed of hardline conservatives, ranging from the Senate’s Ted Cruz to the House’s Freedom Caucus, got elected by bucking the Republican establishment. As the Wall Street Journal noted, these folks think nothing of closing the government over the debt ceiling or Planned Parenthood without the slightest expectation of success. Such “unbending opposition,” says the Journal, “is not a means. It is an end in itself.”

It was in that kind of atmosphere, that the Democrats, enjoying a rare bicameral majority in 2010, did something that had never been done in modern congressional history. It passed a major bill, the Affordable Care Act, without a single vote from the opposition party. The Republicans seized the moment, coined the term “Obamacare” and have been staging exorcisms ever since. Obama became the source of all evil for those on the right. Trump didn’t write that script. He just picked it up and went with it. Meanwhile, particularly in the last two years of his presidency, Obama gave up on an intransigent Congress and used executive orders to put as much of his program into place as possible. He sealed a deal with Iran on his own, created a legal status for the dreamers, issued numerous rules and regulations on the environment, and negotiated the Paris climate change pact.

“We have a president,” Trump said during his campaign, “that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.” Last week, Trump signed his 49th executive order, the most of any president (at this point of his term) in more than 50 years. He has managed to reverse the bulk of Obama’s executive actions. At this moment, Obamacare continues to breathe only through the ineptitude of its would-be executioners.

This schizophrenic approach to governance is not what the founders had in mind. Yes, power needs to change hands at the direction of the electorate, but the entirety of our domestic programs and commitments to other countries has never been discarded en masse. Until 2010, every major legislative package (Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, etc.) was passed with votes from both parties. None of those laws were repealed when control of Congress changed.

Partisanship is an inherent component of our democratic process, but partisanship on steroids, divorced from cooperation and constructive engagement, is a lethal anathema to good governance.

An amazingly prophetic George Washington, in his final address as president, warned that extreme partisanship would lead not just to a revenge-seeking loop between the parties, but ultimately to authoritarianism. Said our first president: “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to see security and repose in the absolute power of an individual (who) . . .turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As if he had the vision of 2017 in front of him, Washington then suggested that this evil of hyper-partisanship will open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Before it’s too late, we need to return to a political system where the needs of the people outweigh the needs of the politicians.