Republicans have gleefully pointed out that the bill contains a grab bag of longtime liberal aims from nationwide same-day voter registration to climate change initiatives. This helpfully gives them a shield against the charge that they don’t care about our economic suffering. “We’re not opposed to help,” they will intone. “We just can’t support this awful, big government power grab.” This will be more than enough to satisfy Republican-leaning voters and keep almost every House Republican in line.
So all of this sound and fury will go nowhere and mean nothing. Democrats will get up on their righteous hind legs and bray at naysaying Republicans. Republicans will growl back, comfortably ensconced in the familiar position of playing Horatius at the bridge and holding back the invaders. Democrats will likely pass the bill on to the Republican-controlled Senate. There it will die, with House Democrats conveniently in recess and able to miss the funeral.
This is not how a healthy democracy behaves in a crisis. There will always be partisan differences over how to address a crisis. But a healthy democracy would debate those differences directly and openly. Voters would know what each party’s values are, and legislators could decide whether there’s enough common ground to forge a compromise. With unemployment skyrocketing and state and local governments losing tax revenue by the bushel each day, one would think that something could be worked out that satisfies both sides even as neither is ecstatic. Instead, we have a partisan game that merely entrenches both sides in increasingly hardened silos.
This political trench warfare is exactly what makes so many Americans angry about Congress and Washington. It’s notable that we aren’t seeing much of this type of gamesmanship in the states. Democrats are not waging scorched-earth warfare against most Republican governors and Republicans are not busy investigating Democratic governors’ relief efforts. That could be one reason many governors have seen a significant increase in their job approval ratings whereas both President Trump and Congress generally remain just as unpopular as they were before the crisis struck.
A few weeks ago, pundits and the media were outraged when Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) forced the House to convene in person by withholding unanimous consent from the second coronavirus relief bill. He was putting members and staff’s lives at risk, we were told, for a completely useless gesture. How is the House’s vote today any different from Massie’s act of self-gratification?
We hear a lot these days about saving our democracy. Many partisans tell voters that the other side will end America as we know it. They convince themselves that democracy can be secure only if it wields absolute and total power.
Alexis de Tocqueville would recognize these days. He wrote in his masterpiece, “Democracy in America,” about the difference between great and small political parties. Small parties, he wrote, are consumed with private interests and arise when the foundations of the state seem secure. Great parties “are those which cling to principles more than to their consequences; to general, and not to especial cases; to ideas, and not to men." While that seems loftier and more noble, Tocqueville notes that the times when great parties arise are “epochs of misery and of confusion.” In such times, each party believes that the other must die so that it can live. The times end only when one side triumphs, often through armed conflict but always to the utter destruction of their foe.
One would hope that a plague and a depression could awaken our great parties from their lurid dreams and make them see what we hold in common. Instead, we seem trapped in our dreams, intent on making them a communal nightmare.
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