Matters of Church and State

             HAS THE HOUSE GOP FINALLY 
                            SNAPPED?

         Watching the Tea Party led House of Representatives defeat one bill after another in its effort to roll back the New Deal, the Fair Deal, or block any Obama Deal brings to mind the oft-quoted comment an unnamed U.S. major reportedly made during the Vietnam War.  The major reportedly told correspondence Peter Arnett of a Vietnam provincial capital that had been bombed: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

         If that’s not its aim, it’s hard to figure out what the House Republican caucus is up to.  From the outside, it appears they are trying to dismantle the current framework of economic and social policies that date back to the 1930s and which have been supported by Democratic and Republican Presidents alike since then.  Examples include programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other programs that provide a basic hunger safety net for the poor and disadvantaged, to cite just one category.  To Tea Party advocates, it appears that any government programs to help the poor are considered “socialist” programs that have no place in our (their) society.

         Yet, SNAP has been an integral part of any Farm Bill passed by the Congress for the past 80 years, and by general consensus it has been highly successful, as columnist Melinda Henneberger points out in the July 12^th Washington Post.   Basically, she reports experts as saying it has kept the bottom from falling out from underneath the people living on the margins of our society.  Yet, the House recently passed a Farm Bill without the SNAP provisions.  Go figure.

         In the process of targeting the “socialist” programs that many Tea Party supporters and other right-wing Republicans believe create a country of dependency, they are also destroying the traditional GOP as we know it: A GOP that actually worked with Democrats to get the people’s business done.

         On immigration, for example, conservative columnist David Brooks writes in the July 12^th New York Times that if the House fails to pass the Senate’s immigration bill:  “This could be a tragedy for the country and political suicide for Republicans, especially because the conservative arguments against the comprehensive approach are not compelling.  After all, the Senate bill fulfills the four biggest conservative objectives.”  These include economic growth, reducing the debt, reducing illegal immigration, and avoiding a European-style demographic collapse.

   

         Another conservative New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, writes in his column titled “The Farm Bill and the Common Good:  “… (W)ithout a vision of the common good, a party is basically just a faction, seeking only the interests of its constituents, with no sense of its responsibilities to the country as a whole. And the Obama-era Republican Party’s worst tendency has been toward just this sort of factionalism: Not an ideological extremism, exactly, but rather a vision of government that you might call “small government for thee, but not for me,” in which conservatism is just constituent services for the most reliable Republican groups and voters.”

         With conservative columnists writing such columns, I as a liberal Democrat should be gleeful watching the opposition party implode, but history provides ample evidence that it never serves the greater good when one party, in a two party system, loses its way.

Jerry