Our political system is broken beyond repair

   The government shutdown is now entering its third week with no end in sight. And as it continues to drag on, one thing has become abundantly clear: Our current political system is broken beyond repair.
   Polls continue to show that the Republican Party is taking the brunt of the blame for this mess. And frankly, that's the way it should be. But the Democrats, despite their efforts to portray themselves as the adults in the room, are hardly blameless. The truth is, both parties share the blame for the gridlock in Congress because both parties have gotten away from what made them viable parties to begin with.
   The Republican Party of today is NOT the same Republican Party I grew up with. When I was a child, the Republicans were the party of smaller government and lower taxes. They spoke for the wealthy and for big business. And they were in favor of personal responsibility and less government in our personal lives. In short, they represented traditional conservative values.
   Somewhere along the way, though, that all changed. In the 1980s, the Republican Party hitched its wagon and its future fortunes to the ascendant Moral Majority led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. They forged an alliance, for better or worse, with the Religious Right and everything changed. Instead of talking about cutting taxes and reducing the size of government, we began to hear more about the evils of abortion and gay marriage. Instead of trying to keep government out of our personal lives, the new Republican Party began to try and legislate morality by passing laws that, among other things, made it harder for women to obtain birth control if dispensing it conflicted with the pharmacist's personal religious beliefs. The new Republicans -- the neocons, if you will -- even invaded our classrooms by trying to legalize the teaching of creationism as science under the guise of "intelligent design."
   These neocons are xenophobic. They want to round up every illegal immigrant and send them home, and they blame them for the problems with our economy. They are radical theocrats who believe fervently that America was founded as a Christian nation, even though many of our founders were Deists who believed only in a higher power, but not a specific one. They would like nothing better than to turn our nation into a Christian theocracy, totally ignoring the concept of religious liberty that our founders prized highly enough to put in the First Amendment to the Constitution. For them, it's religious freedom for Christians and no one else.
    Today's Republicans like to invoke the name of Ronald Reagan. Since leaving office a quarter century ago, he has become almost a patron saint for today's GOP. And it's no wonder. Reagan was the last great Republican president we've had. He was the last one to espouse purely traditional conservative values. I have wondered from time to time what he would think of what has become of his party. I don't think he would be happy.
   Before this turns into a "Let's bash the Republicans" piece though, let me say that the Democratic Party has itself undergone a seismic shift in recent decades. The Democratic Party of my youth was "the people's party." They were the party that represented the working people and the middle class. They were the party that created and served as protectors of Medicare and Social Security and other aspects of our social safety net. They were the party that was pushed to make sure the minimum wage kept up with inflation.
   To be fair, you still hear strains of some of these themes from today's Democrats. But in large part, they have abandoned their principles in the name of power -- both gaining it and keeping it. Sure, the Republicans are taking it on the chin for wasting time trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act instead of passing a budget. But let's be truthful. We haven't had a real budget in this country since 1997, and despite Republican dominance of government for large swaths of that time, Democrats controlled Congress for at least part of it, and still they failed to get a budget passed. And when's the last time the Democrats did anything that truly helped the working poor in this country?
   The truth is, both parties have abandoned their principles to the point where there is little, if any difference between the two of them anymore. Yes, the Republicans have become hopelessly paranoid, believing that President Barack Obama is a "closet Muslim" who is leading this country down the path to socialism (and presumably Communism, eventually). But neither party is what it once was, and I see no hope that either will reclaim its principles anytime soon. Both parties are broken beyond repair.

GOP will pay ultimate price for shutdown

   The partial government shutdown is now entering its second week, and if you listen to the political pundits, there's plenty of blame to go around for the mess we find ourselves in. I agree. Both parties share the blame for this mess. But in the long run, I believe it is the GOP that will pay the ultimate price.
  To be fair, this budget fight is nothing new. In fact, according to the American Prospect, the last time this nation had a real budget passed by Congress and signed by the president was in 1997, at the beginning of former President Bill Clinton's second term. Since then, our government has been surviving on a series of "continuing budget resolutions." They have become the new normal. The closest thing we've managed to passing a real budget in recent years was a gargantuan "omnibus" spending bill in 2009. So a budget impasse is nothing new. What IS new this time around is the GOP's decision to hold government hostage by forcing a shutdown until they can wring some concessions from the Democrats -- principally the defunding or complete dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. This is where the GOP is making a huge strategic blunder.
   If today's GOP leaders in the House had bothered to study their recent history -- especially in the past 20 years -- they would know that government shutdowns almost never work well for the GOP. The last time the government shut down, 17 years ago, the GOP was blamed. The end result was a strong reelection victory for Clinton in the November election. And it looks like the same thing is beginning to happen now. According to a CNN/ORC poll released today (Monday), 63 percent of respondents are angry at Republicans for the way they are handling the shutdown. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd say we could safely predict that the GOP will lose control of the House in the 2014 midterms and likely see the Democratic majority in the Senate grow, possibly to a filibuster-proof 60-plus seats. The sad part is, this didn't have to happen.
   Republicans can try to pin this shutdown on President Obama and the Democrats as much as they want. They can point out until they're blue in the face that they sent numerous budget proposals over to the Senate in the days preceding the shutdown. But each of those proposals included language that would have permanently defunded or otherwise dismantled Obamacare. They knew those proposals stood no chance of passing the Senate. The Affordable Care Act stands as Obama's singular and most significant achievement. It was unrealistic to think that either the  president or his party would do anything to undermine that accomplishment, especially since it had been upheld by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. Nor should they have had to.
   Imagine if the roles were reversed. Imagine that a Democratic House had sent the Senate a budget that defunded or dismantled No Child Left Behind, or refused to fund the War on Terror. Does anyone think Republicans would have agreed to those terms? Of course not. And the same principle applies here. The truth is, Congress has had months to pass a budget. Instead of acknowledging defeat on the Obamacare front and actually doing their jobs, House Republicans, led mainly by the Tea Party fringe, have dug in their heels and tried more than 40 times to repeal Obamacare. To make matters worse, the dim bulbs in the House made sure that when the government shut down, THEY would still receive THEIR paychecks. Way to share the suffering with your constituents, fellas.
   Maybe the Democrats in the Senate should have been more willing to compromise. Maybe they should have stood above the gamesmanship being played in the House and not engaged in the back and forth with the GOP in an effort to score political points. But when it comes right down to it, it is the GOP that will bear the brunt of the public's wrath for the latest government shutdown and the damage it is doing to our economy, and it is hard to see how it should be any other way. They brought it on themselves.