Practical politics in Connecticut – that is, a politics of political action – is reserved only for in-office Democrat politicians. All others, including marginalized Republican political actors, are spectators of the sport, not participants. The entire Connecticut state Republican Party has been effectively benched for decades.
Democrats know that permitting Republicans in the state
General Assembly to ventilate is harmless because, in a state in which a
massive Democrat Party caucus determines political action, words alone do not
give rise to political action.
Is this state of things a problem for our democracy?
The answer to that question is an unqualified “Yes!”
Partisan caucus politics is the opposite of democratic or
republican politics. In a vibrant two-party
system, words that lead to political action are politically convincing because
political action produces public consequences that cannot be distorted by
otherwise convincing partisan political actors, rhetoricians practiced in the
fine art of fooling, in Abe Lincoln’s words, “most of the people most of the
time.”
In mature partisan caucus states – the Soviet Union under
Stalin, Nazi Germany under Hitler, China under Mao – political action is
decided by small party affiliated groups and then imposed by force on the body
politic. In a one-party state, politics is shaped not by the consent of the
governed but by masterful politicians who rely on a captured media to convince
the general public that force in service of the state is the only
form of permissible consent.
The entire 20th century in free Western republics
has been a bloody struggle against rule by such tyrants. There is something in
the soul of a free people that will not consent to a politics of force or the
dissimulation that precedes it.
Orwell has told us that every corrupt practice on earth
begins with a successful corruption of the language, and we know that a
contrarian media, a non-partisan probing and questioning media, is the best
guarantor of honest politics. You cannot nip in the bud a corruption of
language that will lead ineluctably to a corruption of culture and politics if
those in the media watchtower have fallen asleep or, worse, have become parti pris to the corruption of
political speech.
The Hill reported on November 12,
“The House on Wednesday passed a sweeping spending package to reopen the
government, setting the stage to end a marathon shutdown — the longest in U.S.
history — that churned economic turmoil around the country and sparked an
internal battle among Democrats over the future of the party and how best to
take on President Trump… Democrats had demanded an extension of (Obamacare)
subsidies as a condition of ending the shutdown. Republicans had demanded an
end to the shutdown before any health care talks would begin. And the deadlock
dragged on for weeks with neither side budging — a 43-day standoff that shattered
the record for the longest shutdown, which occurred under Trump’s first term in
2018 and 2019, by more than a week… In the end, it was a surprise deal struck
by a group of bipartisan senators last Sunday that broke the stalemate. But the
compromise did nothing to address the expiring Obamacare subsidies, prompting a
fierce backlash from liberal Democrats against not only the eight Democratic
senators who endorsed the agreement, but also Senate Minority Leader Charles
Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has been under fire from the Democrats’ base since he
supported a similar Republican spending bill in March.”
Obamacare was from the outset a disastrous – not to mention
expensive – failure. From its inception, the plan was oversold and underpriced.
Because it had been underpriced – so that it might more easily be passed – the
Obamacare patient was in constant need of cash transfusions. The latest price
upgrade demanded by Democrats was $1.5 trillion, not pocket change.
Called upon to pass a clean Continuing Resolutions Bill
(CRB), Democrats “filibustered” the bill we were told – for 43 days. A filibuster
is a parliamentary procedure in the U.S. Senate that allows a minority of
senators to delay or block a vote on proposed legislation by prolonging debate.
There were no debates and no filibuster. One cannot imagine the most gifted Democrat
orator in the US Senate commanding the floor by talking continuously for 43
days.
The Democrat bid was a classic example of government by
caucus, an undemocratic attempt by congressional Democrats to subvert an
open-government process that would have required an open debate in the greatest
deliberative body on earth to appropriate an additional $1.5 trillion to save a
dying patient.
No, the shutdown of the entire US government by neo-progressive
Democrats was a bid to undo a national election. Its failure was preordained
and may cost at least one prominent U.S. Senator, Chuck Schumer, his position as
Minority Leader in the Senate. Most commentators expect he will be challenged
in a Democrat primary for reelection by some socialists with knives in their
brains. Socialist Mayor H Mamdani of New
York City, the financial capital of the United States, will not be available for
the position, but other fierce neo-progressives are patiently waiting in the
wings.
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