President Chemo

I must applaud President Trump for his deal with the Democrats on Harvey aid and the three-month delay of the fiscal cliffs before us.  The most interesting thing about the deal is that Republicans fell in line behind it.  Why didn't McConnell and Ryan say "Sorry, Don, but we're not going to bring that bill to the floor"?  My guess - they don't want to say that.  My guess - they do want to return to regular order.  My guess - they don't want an approval rating of 19% or whatever it is.  All they needed was political cover, and the President, nominally of their own party, has given it to them  This is how the fever breaks in American politics.  If it breaks.

The Republican party has destroyed itself, and race remains at the heart of the problem.  When Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the GOP became the party of the unreconstructed South.  The votes were there, and, having no scruples, Richard Nixon and his pals went for them.  A voting (but not philosophical) coalition arose among white voters, even those who hated what the Yankee business interests in the party actually stood for.  From Nixon onward, the GOP has been on the wrong side of domestic history, bailed out in the 1980's by being on the right side of world history.   Now, the party is on the wrong side of everything, all because it has put "winning" over deserving to win.

No doubt, the Democrats lowered the bar, and they get no praise for becoming the party of the disenfranchised and no one else.  The Democrats abandoned Big Labor and its members in favor of victims of "oppression."  Oppression is a bad thing, but a party devoted to its remediation is a makeweight, a group whose support one seeks - like the Greens, or the Libertarians - not one of two "major" parties.  Yet here we were, with one party representing racists and plutocrats and the other representing victims and moralists, and nobody representing Joe Sixpack, except to the extent he was also a racist or a moralist.

Without big strategies, the parties descended into color war - winning and losing as institutions and not as ideologies.  The Red side - our right wing, ironically - won via Operation Red Map.  Now, our local and Congressional elections can be won by the biggest wack job on the right, because the winner of the Republican Primary doesn't need swing voters. That sends Tea Party morons to Congress and makes Congress dysfunctional.  Which gives the very same voters who elected the Tea Party morons the idea that "Congress" is broken, but not because their bozos are breaking it.

And so the stage is set.  Everyone hates Congress, but no one blames his or her representative.  Someone has to come along and tell the idiots who elected the Tea Party that they have elected morons without telling them that they are idiots for doing so.  Trump pitched his candidacy perfectly for that purpose - racist enough to get the white vote but also anti-establishment enough to peel off the unorganized mass of opponents, several of whom are more competent and deserving of high office, but none of whom would have had the balls to do what Trump didn't need any balls to do last week.

Trump is chemotherapy for the cancer of intransigence that afflicted the Congress.  He is going to make Congress work by freeing non-Tea-Party Republicans to compromise without being primaried.  The toxic side effects include denigration of just about everything that makes America great - free speech, checks and balances, the truth - but that's how sick we have become.  Trouble is, the side effects won't be felt for years, so we may get eight years of what we only needed for one week: someone who says it's ok to compromise.  Because, make no mistake, by going along with the Trump/Schumer plan, the GOP is compromising, and the voters are going to like the result.  Especially if the next step is elimination of the GOP's annual hostage-taking when it comes time to raise the debt ceiling.  (Sad to see Ben Sasse lament the loss of his party's ability to threaten to kill our credit rating in order to get its way.  And he calls himself a patriot.  Yikes.)

So, score one for President Chemo.  Perhaps Congress will figure out that he will sign anything he can take credit for, and praise everyone who participates in getting it for him, including "compromising" Republicans.  That shifts the game away from satsifying the GOP base to satisfying the electorate.  At least, it would, if Operation Red Map had not been so successful.  It remains to be seen whether the GOP majorities in gerrymandered districts are ok with compromise once "their" President has blessed it.  One hopes so, but only time will tell.