How Democrats Got a Spine

[DonViejo]

The Republican Party taught them how to be uncompromising.

By David Weigel

It’s easy to forget, but this year began with a nick-of-time congressional compromise. At the 11th hour, with Washington’s supply of clichés nearly depleted, the House and Senate approved a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff. The Bush tax cuts were extended for households making less than $400,000, a minor disappointment for both parties. The payroll tax holiday ended, also pleasing no one.

But the system worked, sort of, in its doddering way. It worked when 172 House Democrats voted with 85 Republicans, bailing out House Speaker John Boehner, whose “Plan B” Republicans-only plan had been torn apart by House conservatives. It had worked in 2011, when Democrats helped put the Budget Control Act over the top. It worked a few more times this year—for example, when every Democrat joined with a rump of 89 House Republicans to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Democrats would bend when the GOP refused to.

Not anymore. House Democrats, powerless as they are, provided the GOP almost no cover in the early stages of the shutdown fight. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy declared a “bipartisan vote” for the defunding of Obamacare and asked reporters to “write that down.” Reporters judiciously decided not to pretend that two Democratic votes from deep-red districts meant that the GOP had bipartisan support. Few Democrats backed the next round of Republican-proposed continuing resolutions. Only at the end of this week, when the GOP retreated to a plan of poll-tested “mini-CRs” to fund veterans’ pensions and treatment for kids with cancer, did dozens of Democrats start to vote with them. Right after they did so, they endorsed their leadership’s demand for a “clean CR” to be brought to the floor by force.

The intransigence of Democrats, from Obama on down to red-state senators, has surprised the GOP. They honestly expected a few of the Democrats to crack—after all, four of them are running for re-election in states that voted for Mitt Romney. “If you’re a Mark Pryor,” said Ted Cruz last week, “if you’re a Mary Landrieu, running for re-election in Arkansas and Louisiana, and you start to get 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, calls from your constituents, suddenly, it changes the calculus entirely.”

Landrieu and Pryor never buckled. They voted with the rest of the party to amend or table every House bill. So did Alaska Sen. Mark Begich and North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan. So did West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate who’s not on the ballot again until 2018 but who’s on the record willing to delay the health insurance mandate. “This is about funding the government,” Manchin told me after one of his votes this week. “This isn’t about social issues.”

full article
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/the_intransigence_of_democrats_from_obama_on_down_to_red_state_senators.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content