I'll let the beginning of this sobering CNN article explain:The defining theme of the waning days of Republican congressional rule is a GOP leadership hawking an abortion restriction that has no chance of becoming law, loading up tax breaks with unrelated matters and dumping an unfinished budget on Democrats.And it's all with the blessing of the White House.
Focusing on polarizing social issues rather than the hard work of governing - sounds like the last congressional decade in a nutshell, doesn't it? The WSJ has an interesting analogy, plus more details (via TPM):
Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.Of course, they're targeting the governing and agenda that Americans voted for by sweeping the Republicans out of Congress. The GOP's pre-election efforts to subvert the will of the people continues.Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.
The unstated goal is to disrupt the Democratic agenda and make it harder for the new majority to meet its promise to reinstitute "pay-as-you-go" budget rules, under which new costs or tax cuts must be offset to protect the deficit from growing.
What does Virginia's GOP House delegation think about this?
As pointed out, this tactic is deliberately designed to sabotage the Democrats' First 100 Days agenda. The meat and potatoes can be untangled from the Republican legislative mess, and it will be interesting to see how Pelosi and Hoyer deal with it. Here is a first test of the legislative acumen and leadership of the incoming Democratic top dogs. And here, too, is a test for the progressive blogosphere and progressive grassroots organisations. Will they pile on Pelosi, howling for attention to their particular proposals and policies? Or, will they support Pelosi and help her to govern?
The First 100 Hours is a good start but it's only a start. Steny Hoyer's announcement of a Monday to Friday work week for the House is a very good way to begin. And if the Republicans try to sabotage this forthcoming legislative session with obstructionist tactics, let's call them on it, call them long and loud, on the blogs, in LTEs, on the talk shows. Let's get back to being a participatory Democracy and RK and others can give us an extra and much louder voice. We've got critical problems as a nation and as a world. We'd better get in gear and start to find solutions because it is painfully clear that in the main the Republicans not only deny there is a problem, but actively obstruct any attempt to find solutions. We can't afford them anymore. The stakes are much too high and the cost, if we fail, is one I'm not sure our nation and our world can pay.
I used to call globalisation "corporate feudalism" and maybe that is what the Big Business Republicans intend to be the future style of government across the world. One wonders: did the farm workers on the Roman latifundia realize, when they signed up for security in their jobs with the noble owners of the Roman version of agribusiness, that what they were really agreeing to was to become serfs, tying their descendants into the developing feudal system of the Dark Ages? Are we now looking at the beginnings of a future system of government somehow analogous in a globalized world that is corporate-based--- the new elite?