Dean Krebs, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD anticipated May 2018
Unified obstruction has been the sole Republican strategy since President Obama took office. According to David Frum, speech writer for former President George W. Bush, there was going to be “[n]o negotiations, no compromise, nothing” with the Democrats. All that mattered, former Ohio Senator George Voinovich stated, was that “[i]f [Obama] was for it, we had to be against it.” A couple years after Obama took office, Mike Lofgren, former Republican Congressional staffer, described the GOP’s envisioned end-game of grinding the government to a halt.
Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
Armed with this game plan, the GOP wasted no time to spurn Obama’s first bi-partisan effort, the 2009 emergency economic stimulus bill, by ordering Republicans to unanimously vote it down. It would be the first of many. David Aexlrod, Obama’s political aide, would later comment that “[o]ur feeling was, we were dealing with a potential disaster of epic proportions that demanded cooperation. If anything was a signal of what the next two years would be like, it was that.”
The GOP’s obstruction game, however, was not entirely unexpected. Indeed, renown political scientist Barbara Sinclair found that “extended debate-related problems,” such as threatened or actual filibusters, in the Senate increased from 8 percent of major legislature in the 1960s to 70 percent when Democrats retook Congress in 2006. However, total obstructionism was unprecedented.
Obama expressed his frustrations at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee event in 2014, after nearly 6 years of GOP’s hindrance.
Their willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress — has actually led to an increase in cynicism and discouragement among the people who were counting on us to fight for them.
To put Obama’s comments into perspective, Jon Perr commented that, in 2013, the GOP “had filibustered 27 of Obama’s executive branch nominees, compared to just seven during Dubya’s eight years in office.” They also blocked legislation at twice the rate than the previous Congress and filed twice as many clotures motions. Furthermore, the GOP held the country’s credit hostage with a debt-ceiling crisis in 2011 and 2013 that threatened a possible default on the national debt.
Despite these hampering actions, Republicans took it one step further in 2016 by blocking the nomination of a new Supreme Court Justice. The failure to consider Judge Merrick Garland should have come to no surprise considering the Republican-controlled Senate in 2015 only managed to confirm 11 federal judges, the lowest since 1969; a single appeals court judge, the lowest since 1953; and “judicial emergencies” had risen 160%, to 31. Indeed, in a report released earlier this year regarding the GOP’s failure to appoint Obama’s nominees, Senator Elizabeth Warren articulated that “[t]he idea that Senate Republicans are willing to leave our highest court short-handed for nearly a year seems shocking. But the fact is that, for more than seven years, they have waged an unrelenting campaign to keep key positions throughout government empty.” Warren’s report highlighted a Congressional Research Service report that found judicial confirmation times had doubled under the Obama administration and a report from the Alliance for Justice that concluded, “In sum, Republicans have a sustained record of using [S]enate procedure to block even uncontroversial nominees throughout the Obama presidency.”
The Republicans’ concerted efforts were not only directed at the judicial branch. They also worked to stall or halt nominations for agency appointments, which left more than a 100 vital, senior positions empty in agencies critical to properly run the government. Warren commented that “there were more cloture attempts on non-judicial nominees during President Obama’s first six years in office than in the 28 years proceeding the Obama administration.” Agencies and positions affected by these impediments have included, in part, the EPA, CFPB, FHFA, USAID, NLRB, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Labor, and Attorney General.
Suffice to say, the GOP perfected the art of obstruction over the past 8 years. Saying “No” to the Affordable Car Act by attempting to repeal it, at least, 63 times, surely gave them plenty of practice, as well as their multiple attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and the countless delays of judicial and agency nominees. In so doing, they managed to accomplish their goal, but they also greatly damaged the reputation of Congress, which has a current approval rating of just 11 percent.
What still remains to be seen is whether a party that is “programmatically against government,” has intentionally sabotaged the legislative branch by failing to compromise, and sabotaged the executive and judicial branch by failing to nominate appointed judges and officials, will have the capacity, or even desire, to effectively run the government when given control of the very branches they sought to undermine. Or, even if they do, will the opposing party let them.
America will soon find out with the Trump administration. An administration that had 16 Republican Senators withdraw support; an administration whose policy positions, if they exist at all, are in constant flux; an administration that has belittled women, minorities, and military personnel; an administration where the future President may want to “brand his administration — but not actually run it”; an Administration that, unlike previous Republican Presidential nominees, is run by someone the Democrats do not believe is competent. It is this Administration, with control of the other branches, that the GOP has, against all odds, been given free rein to interpret what exactly making American great again will mean. With this privilege, the GOP, President-elect Trump, and whoever will actually be running the Administration, can no longer hide behind obstructing the Democrats at every turn; they no longer have an excuse to not do their jobs.
Yet, government obstruction can come in many forms, not simply through interacting with the opposing party. The Greeks believed that the purpose of government was to improve the lives of citizens, a definition that both Democrats and Republicans can get behind, although their interpretation would widely vary. While the GOP will push for smaller government with the good faith belief that this will improve American lives, it bears remembering that our nation is built on laws and precedent that demands respect, even in the face of fervor that desires to upheave the established order. Not only would abruptly reversing, destroying, or fundamentally altering existing laws, treaties, regulations, or duties of agencies or institutions cast a shadow of instability across the nation and to our allies and adversaries, doing so threatens to disenfranchise countless Americans who depend on them to protect their livelihood, integrity, and constitutional rights. In its grandiose pursuit to Make America Great Again, the Trump Administration and the GOP must be cautious to not marginally improve the lives of a few at the significant detriment of many. Doing so would surely still represent an obstruction of government.