Blueprint for disaster: The Republicans’ “Pledge to America”
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Trying to exorcise their reputation as the “party of no,” Congressional Republicans last week released a set of proposals they plan to offer should they regain control of Congress in the November 2010 elections. Taking a page from Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” GOP leaders hope to use their “Pledge to America” to repeat their 1994 success when they won both houses of Congress for the first time in more than a generation.
On many levels, the “Pledge to America” is an exercise in wishful thinking. For one, even if they win a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate — by no means a foregone conclusion — it is impossible for the Republicans to win 60 votes in the Senate. That’s the standard that the Republican abuse of the filibuster rule has established as the minimum necessary to pass any legislation in Congress. Moreover, should the GOP manage somehow to sneak through the Congress any significant item in their agenda, President Obama is sure to exercise his veto power, and there is no way the Republicans can muster the two-thirds of the members of both houses needed in order to override a presidential veto.
On another level, the GOP pledge is an exercise in wishful thinking because it makes mutually incompatible promises, such as tax cuts for everybody (including the very rich), continuing the enormous levels of spending on the military, protecting entitlement programs for the elderly and military veterans — while at the same time seriously reducing the budget deficit. As New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote about the Republicans: “Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic.” Indeed, as several independent, non-partisan experts and think tanks have concluded, if the Republican wish list were to be enacted in its entirety, the effect would be to vastly increase the deficit.
Looked at as a text, the pledge is full of vague promises, misleading premises, and worn-out clichés. Ideologically, in comparison with other Republican pronouncements, the pledge pays comparably little attention to the party’s traditional “moral” issues agenda, such as abortion and homosexuality. Instead, the focus is relentlessly pro-business: “…We offer a plan to get people working again. We will end the attack on free enterprise by repealing job-killing policies and taking steps to assure current businesses and future entrepreneurs that the government will not stifle their ability to compete in the global marketplace.” What attack on the free enterprise system, what job-killing promises?
Could they be talking about Obama’s policies that rescued the most iconic firms of U.S. capitalism, from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants to General Motors? No less a paragon of the U.S. capitalism establishment than former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker has said about Obama: “He is not a wild-eyed leftist radical. It’s ridiculous. Since he has been in office he has been a defender of open markets.”
Beyond its illusory and deceptive nature, the pledge is nothing but a nearly verbatim rehash of the same Republican ideas that have been around for decades: less government expenditures (except for the military), less taxes (especially for the wealthy), and less regulation (of corporate misdeeds). It is a political formula that saw its application, in almost pristine form, during the presidency of George W. Bush. That was the recipe that, during eight years, produced few jobs, unprecedented levels of economic inequality, and record deficits, among many other disasters. And, finally, that was the program that culminated in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, which shook the foundations of global capitalism and triggered the Great Recession that we are still living through and for which, ironically, the American electorate will punish the Democrats at the ballot box in November. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then one could question the sanity of the American electorate if it should return the Republicans to power to repeat the catastrophic policies of George W. Bush.
The “Pledge to America” is available at:
http://www.gop.gov/resources/library/documents/solutions/a-pledge-to-america.pdf
