It has now been over six years since President Obama took office and nearly four years since the House of Representatives became a Republican majority. During those intervening years we have witnessed a steady decline in productivity out of our Legislature and I don’t think our founding fathers had anything to do with it. Let’s take a look.
Whether we agree or disagree the Republican Party has often been called the “party of no” in recent years. We may not like it, but the mere fact that Democrats and Republicans disagree on pretty much everything should come as no surprise to anyone. What is new, however, is the inability of our elected officials to put American interests before Partisan interests and that is the topic I want to explore here.
Our political history is filled with chronicles of disagreement and, once in a while, records of great achievement. Many of those so-called great achievements would fit into the category of social programs and include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). I have come to the notion that these social programs have generally tested our governmental processes with conservative interests on one side and progressive interests on the other.
Until the Affordable Care Act, however, there was always some evidence of bipartisanship in the outcome of the legislative matter at hand. For me, the Affordable Care Act was different in that the political atmosphere was more polarized by rigid idealism on the conservative side of the aisle. President Obama wasn’t the first President to address the notion of basic health care for every American as a right of citizenship. Other efforts, some successful and some not, occurred as early as the mid-1800s and involved Presidents from both sides of the aisle. Sure there was opposition, but in the end the American solution was the chosen solution. The Affordable Care Act was different.
I have written about the change to a more idealistic, more partisan approach to government in other places. For me, the mid-1990s seems to have been a threshold period when the animosity between Speaker Gingrich and President Clinton took us to a brief period of government shutdown. The period is marked in my memory with a new and more heightened level of vitriol in our political dialogue. It was sort of like the participants took the gloves off and started to say what would have been improper in earlier times.
Don’t misunderstand me here because I am not trying to suggest that the behavior didn’t occur on both sides of the aisle. Both the Republicans and the Democrats participated in the growing dysfunction and are both complicit in ratcheting that dysfunction even higher, as time has passed, until we arrive where we are today.
So here we are with the Affordable Care Act in the middle of our political conflagration. Republicans want it gone completely and Democrats want it to offer a single-payer option and neither side is willing to compromise towards an American result. Also, we have our first President with roots in the African-American community and everything we observe is filtered through the race lens whether we like it or not.
I recently wrote a blog post about Racism and the many forms it takes from overt to covert to systemic or institutional racism. I tried to make the point that racism, or more generally prejudice of any kind isn’t about intent as much as it is about perception and this is especially true in the case of institutional racism.
I wrote, “Systemic racism is usually evidenced by some form of analysis which indicates that a particular racial group is not represented equitably within a population. Regulations which are supposed to be administered fairly and equally can be shown to have produced a result that is racially disparate. In other words, regulations that were supposed to treat all persons equally somehow produced an unequal result.
“I don’t think that systemic racism necessarily requires a racist administrator to achieve a racist outcome, but racist behavior within any administration will certainly produce a racist outcome. Instead, I believe that systemic racism can take place when all the administrators were acting fairly and equally as they did their work.”
So here is my question and let me say, right up front, that I believe only history will provide the answer. Are the current obstructionist political tactics being used by our politicians simply obstructionist or is there a component of racism present as well? And, just so we’re clear, the behavior I am talking about is on both sides of the aisle.
As Americans we owe it to ourselves to look within and search for the answer.
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