It appears the Republicans ARE the problem after all...
From Alternet-
The last time things got this bad was about 150 years ago -- and we needed a Civil War to resolve it.
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein recently wrote a column for the Washington Post with a provocative headline: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” Their thesis was that they had never, in 40 years of observing Congress, seen the institution behave in such a dysfunctional manner. They wrote that while they had long found reasons to be critical of both Democrats and Republicans, things have changed and our current crisis is solely the fault of a Republican Party that "has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
The article went on to present extensive evidence to back their case. Nothing has signified these extreme tendencies more clearly than last summer's debt ceiling fiasco, where the Republicans acted so irresponsibly that Standard & Poor's felt compelled to downgrade America's hitherto gold-plated credit rating. In their press release, the ratings agency implicitly accused the Republicans of "brinksmanship" and said they had caused American governance and policymaking to become "less stable, less effective, and less predictable that we previously believed." They were particularly alarmed that the statutory debt ceiling had become a bargaining chip over fiscal policy.
Looking back at that debacle, Steve Benen recently wrote, "It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War."
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What'll have to happen instead is an organized migration of populations in America that will establish firmly blue states - either severally, or in groups - that will pass laws and adopt standards by overwhelming voter margins and effectively create special federal districts that would be largely autonomous from the national government. (A hybrid of the way Scotland relates to the rest of the UK, where it is still part of the UK but has it's own parliament and executive.)
I know we're already supposed to have this (in the form of "states" with their "legislatures" and "governors"
. But, we need a system where districts are even more independent, or "devolved", from the federal government and are allowed to interpret the federal constitution in their own way without the messiness of secession.
The way the conservative movement is going (and winning) I can't see any hope that national laws will stay moderate and not trample on the rights of states. I know that "states rights" is the mating call of the conservative and is code for all kinds of nasty, segregationist bullshit. But now that the conservative movement is re-engineering federal law to threaten states' abilities to regulate their own air and water quality, impose rules on financial institutions, protect civil rights, guarantee reproductive rights, address gun problems, etc., I'm afraid it might be time for some hyper-federalism so we can still have a place in America for modern, progressive Americans to go and live happy, productive lives.
For a start, I'd like to see the whole California-Oregon-Washington sub-nation come into play. A program could be implemented where conservatives would be incentivized to move east to Arizona, Utah and Texas and progressives come to the west coast (some kind of property swap deal). We'd get it so that every elected official in the three Pacific states - congressional reps, senators, legislators, governors, mayors, city councils, everything - is Democratic or progressive leaning. They'd represent a solid block - geographically and otherwise - in Washington to implement and preserve this devolution. We can move forward and have a civilized, enlightened and compassionate society.
The cons can have the South and turn it back into the American west of the 1850's where there was weak law, and big business (i.e., railroad baron types) ran everything and all of the wealth was in the hands of a fraction of the people while the rest toiled in poverty and near-slavery. They can ban gays and abortion and civil rights and environmental protection and dissolve church-state separation and totally neutralize workers rights. They can implement the full-on police state and quash dissent all they want. They can call themselves "confederates" while we progressives will still be called Americans.
