Jim McGovern Quotes

On that day, the Republican Majority in the House adopted a strategy to attach conditions to the normal budget process that they knew was unacceptable to the Senate and the President. The United States Government, the greatest nation on Earth, literally shut down all but the most essential services. What was worse is that the majority of the House of Representatives would pass a clean budget if they could vote on it. But the Tea Party Republicans blackmailed the Republican speaker that he would lose his speakership if he did not follow their strategy which was ironically controlled by a Republican Senator who had already lost on the issues they wanted in the Senate and in a Presidential election.

At the time, the Republicans held the House of Representatives, but not the Senate or the Presidency. By popular vote, even the House elections had the majority voting for the Democrats, but the gerrymandering gave the Republicans more seats. A minority of the minority Republicans were Tea Party Republicans—ultra conservatives who would not compromise but who intimidated other Republicans by threatening to run candidates against them in primary elections. The result was that the Tea Party Republicans—a minority of the minority could block almost any legislation and did. That Congress passed less legislation than any in American history including the “Do Nothing Congress” of the Truman era.

The Republicans had, in the view of most Americans at the time, refused to pass the legislation to provide money for the government to function unless President Obama would cancel the Health Care Reform that was his major legislative achievement of his first term, and passed over the objections of most Republicans who claimed it was unconstitutional. Then the Supreme Court upheld the Constitutionality of Obamacare, and the Tea Party Republicans pressured the regular republicans to shut down the entire government until the President relented and cancelled his own legislation. The American people resented this unprecedented of interfering with the Constitutional methods by which laws are passed, and after over a week of taxpayer additional costs for less service, the regular Republicans made a deal with the Democrats and produced a majority to reopen the Government.

The Republicans who had control of the House of Representatives were reaching the end of the fiscal year and had not yet passed a budget nor expanded the debt ceiling so the government would have to shut down in a few days and a little later America could not pay any of its bills. They had a very strong position if they willing to blackmail the Democratically controlled Senate and the Democratic President. But the last time the Republicans had ever tried this before was the Republican House when Gingrich was speaker and they shut down the government for almost 3 weeks. It cost the Republicans the next election’s majority in the House. President Obama decided that he would not set a precedent of negotiating with a house of Congress that was threatening to shut down the government or threatening not to pay the nation’s bills which Congress had already authorized the purchase of.

As the Majority Leader of the House, Eric Cantor had to resolve conflicts and for coalitions that will compromise to get anything done. However, the Tea Party movement didn’t want any compromises even if it meant shutting down the government and defaulting on the national debt. They ran against conservative Republicans in the Republican primary elections campaigning that the incumbent made and facilitated compromises with Democrats. In some districts like Eric Cantor’s there were enough primary voters who agreed. Terry was explaining the message that the other conservative politicians received.

The statement was made in the midst of the Cold War. There was a political battle ongoing over a national park in Wyoming. In the 1930s & 1940s John D. Rockefeller Jr. had tried to give his 33,000 acres of land adjacent to the Grand Teton National Park to the Federal Government as a park expansion. Residents of Wyoming at the time did not want the land to go to park use but wanted it available for commercial development & in a paranoid concern about the Federal Government controlling “their land,” Wyoming politicians blocked transfer. Finally Rockefeller wrote FDR telling him to take the land or he would sell it. The President did not have power to accept land to form a national park without Congressional action. So FDR did what his cousin TR had done and declared the land a national monument which transferred ownership to the government. Then Albright
tried to incorporate it into the park system & fought for years with the special interests and politicians of Wyoming.

In 2012 the Republicans controlled the House but not the Senate or the White House. As the nation grows, the Congressionally voted budgets have implications and the budget ceiling has to be raised to balance the two. That had always been a bipartisan process over the life of the nation. However, the Republicans in the House decided that they would hold the debt ceiling legislation hostage to pressure the Senate and the White House to pass legislation that the majority of the Senate and the President thought was bad for the country. Krugman advised the President and the Senate to resist giving in to this blackmail even if the debt ceiling was hostage to their demands.

Under his leadership the conservative Republicans had attempted and failed dozens of times to repeal Obamacare which many Republicans campaigned against in the 2012 Presidential election which they also lost. The irony was that even if a repeal were to possibly pass both housed of Congress, President Obama announced that he would veto the repeal. This futile and repetitive wast of time took place where the House was so extreme that it originated almost no legislation that every became law. The conservative Republicans had opposed every attempt to provide a national health system since they blocked President Truman from it. Yet Medicare was passed and became one of America’s most popular programs. Conservatives blocked all efforts to expand Medicare to cover all Americans until President Obama in his first term passed Obamacare. Since then they made all these attempts to repeal it.

A minority of newly elected ultra conservative Tea Party Republicans intimidated most of the main line Republicans by threatening to run against them in their primary elections. The result was that almost no legislation was passed and there was a constant drumbeat of attacks against anything the government was doing or might do in the future. Public confidence in government was driven very low, with only the public confidence in Congress lower. The Democrats who could accomplish very little in that circumstance became very unpopular while the Republicans were even more so. However, many Tea Party Republicans viewed that as a victory as their major objective is to enfeeble government—especially the Federal government.

The 2014 House of Representatives was probably the worst in American History. The Republican Speaker of the House did not have any control over the Tea Party wing of his caucus, but they controlled him in most instances. Even when he made bargains with the President and the Democrats, he could not get his caucus to go along. Almost no legislation was passed and the few bills that were passed were symbolic, were never considered by the Senate and the President did not even have to exercise his power of veto during that Congress.