Those who follow Capitol Hill closely inevitably confront an unfortunate truth: The legislative process can be incredibly frustrating. It’s slow and complicated. It’s meandering and counterintuitive. It’s filled with choke points, false starts, pitfalls, and hurdles. Sometimes, it seems miraculous when anything passes Congress at all.
But our Madisonian system of government has served as a pillar of the American experiment for more than two centuries, and it’s produced some landmark laws that helped make the United States the world’s preeminent global superpower.
It’s also a system congressional Republicans hope to undermine by way of their debt ceiling crisis.
We’ve all had a chance to review the GOP’s ransom note — the so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act — which identifies many of the party’s priorities. More specifically, as we’ve discussed in recent weeks, Republicans hope to gut all kinds of critically necessary public investments, affecting everything from veterans care to education, border security to food security, law enforcement to medical research, Head Start to rail inspections, agriculture to air traffic control, infrastructure to national parks. It also takes a crowbar to efforts to combat climate change for reasons that have nothing to do with deficit reduction.
Many in the party would argue, and have argued, that these are worthwhile goals, and that’s an argument well worth having. But among the underappreciated problems with the Republicans’ approach is the degree to which GOP lawmakers intend to effectively replace the nation’s existing legislative process with something … different.
The party’s goals are obviously regressive and unpopular, but stepping back, a bigger picture emerges: If congressional Republicans want to pursue regressive and unpopular priorities, that’s certainly their right, but as elected federal lawmakers in the United States, they’re supposed to work within their own country’s legislative…
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