When Time Stood Still
by digby
I’ve noticed something interesting among the family rightwingers lately: they have simply disappeared Bush and the Republican congress from their minds. It’s the weirdest thing. You talk politics with them and they are already going on about how the Democrats are ruining the country with their big spending and high taxes. You ask about Bush and they look at you blankly and start talking about the Clintons.
They are fully back in minority victimhood mode without missing a beat. And there is a sense of gleeful excitement about the whole thing — “heh, heh, I just hope I live long enough to see what that horrible woman is going to do to this country.”* If you mention Iraq, they shrug their shoulders and start babbling about John Kerry and the draft dodging Clinton. Some lament that the Democrats wouldn’t let us win it (we should have “glassed ’em.”) For the most part, they seem absolutely thrilled to be in the minority and they are already doing the only thing they have ever really been good at — carping about Democrats from the sidelines.
Apparently, it isn’t just my family and their bizarro word friends. Take a look at this for sheer, unadulterated chutzpah from TPM Muckraker:
Republicans aren’t yet an official minority in the House, but they’re already beginning a campaign to portray themselves as victims of a heartless Democratic majority.
In a “Dear Colleague” letter circulated to fellow Republicans, three House GOPers are trying to push a “Minority Bill of Rights” — based on a two-year-old proposal by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Here’s the prime quote:
“Unfortunately, as you are well aware, the Democrats’ forty-year reign over the House was plagued by consistent, systematic efforts to usurp the rights and privileges of the Republican minority,” write Reps. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Tom Price (R-GA).
TPM references this WaPo article in 2004 when Pelosi introduced the bill:
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A23
House Democrats’ anger at heavy-handed Republican tactics reached a new level yesterday, with the chamber’s top Democrat asking the House speaker to embrace a “Bill of Rights” for the minority, regardless which party it is.
In keeping with the general atmosphere of the House these days, aides to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said he will not respond to the two-page proposal from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
For decades, the party in power has used House parliamentary rules to limit the minority party’s ability to amend bills and shape debates. But Democrats — in the minority for 10 years after four decades of control — say Republicans have gone to unreasonable lengths in recent years. GOP leaders dispute this, but congressional scholars and even some rank-and-file Republicans agree in whole or in part.
[…]
Pelosi and Reps. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and John M. Spratt Jr. (D-S.C.) cited several examples of what they consider abusive treatment by Republicans, who control the House 228 to 206 (there is one independent). A proposed $9.6 billion tobacco buyout program went not to the Agriculture Committee but to the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, they noted, where Democrats’ questions and proposed amendments were ruled out of order because they did not deal directly with taxes.
“It’s the all-time Catch-22,” said Spratt, the assistant minority leader.
[…]
Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) said in an interview that Democrats are crying about the process because they are losing policy debates over job creation and progress in Iraq. His mission as chairman, he said, is “to move our [Republican] agenda, and to do it in the fairest and most responsible way possible. And I do it in that order.”
Dreier, who spent 14 years in the minority before his party’s 1995 House takeover, said: “Yes, we have done, as we have had the responsibility of governing, some of the things we criticized when we were in the minority.” But he said he feels the Hastert leadership team has struck a fair balance.
Hastert dismissed the Democrats’ complaints in an interview yesterday. “I have looked at our record over the years,” he said, and compared it with Republicans’ ability to offer meaningful amendments during the 40 years of Democratic House rule. “I will hold up our record any day.”
Some independent analysts say Democrats’ complaints have merit.
Republicans “have taken every one of the techniques that Democrats employed when they were in the majority, and ratcheted them up to another level,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the moderate-to-conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Republicans are now at a point where, reveling in the power they have, they are using techniques to jam bills through even when they don’t have to . . . simply because they can.”
Pelosi had vowed to uphold the minority bill of rights even if the Democrats became a majority so it is poarticularly churlish of these Republican fucks to be whining already about how terrible the Dems are.
The Republicans are where they love to be — pissing and moaning, even after what they’ve done and before the Democrats have even taken office. Shame or humility is not in their vocabulary. Now that the mantle of governance has been removed from their shoulders (after they proved without doubt that they are completely inept) they can revert to backbench caviling and complaining.
Snivelling Republican whiners, happy at last.
*That is a real quote.