Here is an excellent article describing how the GOP has pursued a policy of legislative terrorism. During Obama's administration as the Democrats tried mightily to repair the damage done by the Republican's Deregulation Disaster the Republicans have been committed to sabotaging everything the democrats have proposed. We can see now how good it has worked. The Republicans are campaigning saying that Obama screwed up the repair of the economy - a process they have played a big part in weakening by filibustering every stimulus bill, every unemployment extension bill and even the Small Business Aid bill - which was revenue neutral (did anybody on NBC, CBS, ABC or PBS ask McConnell why they would oppose a bill to help small businesses get loans and hire more people when it offered no threat to the deficit the Republicans cite as their big concern???).
Of course, corporate M$M have helped immeasurably in the GOP's program of domestic terrorism by barely breathing a word of this to their viewers. How many times have you heard M$M talking heads bring up or discuss the GOP's strategy of filibustering just about everything the Dems try to do in the Senate? Republicans filibustered 80% of major legislation proposed by the Democrats in Obama's first year in office.
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(all emphases are my own)
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1964778,00.html
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All that changed when Bill Clinton took office. With the GOP no longer controlling the White House, a new breed of aggressive (and irresponsble __JW) Republicans — men like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott — hit on a strategy for discrediting Clinton: discredit government. Rhetorically, they derided Washington as ineffective and conflict-ridden, and through their actions they guaranteed it. Their greatest weapon was the filibuster, which forced Democrats to muster 60 votes to get legislation through the Senate. Historically, filibustering had been rare. From the birth of the Republic until the Civil War, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster per decade. As late as the 1960s, Senators filibustered less than 10% of major legislation. But in the '70s, the filibuster rule changed: Senators no longer needed to camp out on the Senate floor all night, reading from Grandma's recipe book. Merely declaring their intention to filibuster derailed any bill that lacked 60 votes.
In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. "Whereas the filibusters of the past were mainly the weapon of last resort," scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in 1997, "now filibusters are a part of daily life." For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of "stabbing us in the back." Their pictures were taken off the wall at the offices of the Republican Senate campaign committee. "What do these so-called moderates have in common?" conservative bigwig Grover Norquist would later declare. "They're 70 years old. They're not running again. They're gonna be dead soon. So while they're annoying, within the Republican Party our problems are dying." (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)
In Clinton's first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned that the vicious circle works. While filibusters were occasionally broken, they also brought much of Clinton's agenda to a halt, and they made Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied employment laws to members of Congress — a reform they had loudly demanded.
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In 2009, Senate Republicans filibustered a stunning 80% of major legislation, even more than during the Clinton years. GOP leader Mitch McConnell led a filibuster of a deficit-reduction commission that he himself had demanded. The Obama White House spent months trying to lure the Finance Committee's ranking Republican, Chuck Grassley, into supporting a deal on health care reform and gave his staff a major role in crafting the bill. But GOP officials back home began threatening to run a primary challenger against the Iowa Senator. By late summer, Grassley wasn't just inching away from reform; he was implying that Obamacare would euthanize Grandma.
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