"The Chutzpah of “Compromise”"

[applegrove]

The Chutzpah of “Compromise”

at Slate

The GOP’s shutdown game plan: Create a fake middle ground and blame Democrats for refusing to negotiate.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/09/obamacare_shutdown_compromise_how_republicans_invented_a_fake_middle_ground.html

"SNIP...........................



The fundamental trick in any kind of social manipulation—magic shows, con artistry, business negotiation—is to plant a false premise in the mind of your audience before they’re alert to the risk of deception. By the time the performance begins, the coin is already in your other hand.


That’s what Republicans are doing in the shutdown fight. They’re planting the assumption that the reasonable, moderate, even-handed thing to do is to “negotiate” a “compromise” between the Democratic and Republican positions on the Affordable Care Act. What they’re hiding is the absurdity of the Republican position: that a law passed by both houses of Congress, fully debated in a subsequent presidential election, and unsuccessfully challenged in more than 40 legislative votes by the losing side should be subject to repeal, defunding or delay because a single party, narrowly controlling a single chamber of Congress, otherwise refuses to fund the rest of the government.


Republicans pretend there’s lots of precedent for this sort of “compromise.” They point to 17 previous shutdowns (helpfully outlined by Dylan Matthews in the Washington Post), most of which were resolved by concessions. But when you examine these cases, the claims of resemblance evaporate.

The era of shutdowns ran from 1976 to 1996. In this century, until now, no one has tried to revive that chaos. The shutdowns of that time were about unilateral executive branch decisions, last-minute legislative disputes, or general fiscal restraint, not about overturning policies that had been legislatively enacted. Almost none of them were driven by a single house of Congress defying the other house and the president.



...........................SNIP"