The undying myth of GOP ‘obstructionism’

NY Post ^ | 6-21-21 | David Harsanyi

[DeweyCA]

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What he fails to mention is that under President Bill Clinton, the GOP...voted for a slew of policy reforms: 16 Senate Republicans voted for the Family and Medical Leave Act; a telecommunications reform passed 81-18; the welfare-reform compromise passed 78-21; the Brady Act gun-control bill only passed because of Republican support; the North American Free Trade Agreement passed 73-26; Biden’s crime bill passed 95-4.

It was the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 that frayed the political order in ways from which we haven’t recovered. For the first time in contemporary history, a political party unilaterally crammed through a national reform without any buy-in from half the nation.

Harwood is also right that Biden’s 2021 COVID-relief plan garnered zero GOP votes. Yet he again seems to have forgotten that Democrats filibustered and blocked Republican coronavirus-relief bills dozens of times. You know how many Democrats voted for President Donald Trump’s tax-reform bill? Zero. Democrats filibustered Sen. Tim Scott’s criminal-justice reform. They used the filibuster to block funding of Trump’s border wall.

Perhaps Harwood is unaware that Trump faced more procedural delays in his four years in office than any president in history — more than all other presidents in history combined, in fact. According to a Politico analysis, Clinton faced 15 filibusters by the Senate in his two terms. Obama faced 175 in eight years. Trump faced more than 300 in only four.

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... Only three Democrats voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch. Only one Democrat — Sen. Joe Manchin — voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh after Democrats smeared him with their unsubstantiated charges. And not one Democrat voted for Amy Coney Barrett. By contrast, five Republicans voted to confirm Elena Kagan, and nine voted to confirm ­Sonia Sotomayor.

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[DeweyCA]

The author, David Harsanyi, mentions several other times when Dems were obstructionists against Republicans. He shows how CNN's John Harwood tells only about times when Reps blocked Dem proposals, but not when Dems repeatedly blocked Rep initiatives. Harsanyi displays that CNN's John Harwood is nothing but a biased political hack.

[Alberta's Child]

It was the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 that frayed the political order in ways from which we haven’t recovered. For the first time in contemporary history, a political party unilaterally crammed through a national reform without any buy-in from half the nation.

I saw it the other way around. I said at the time that most Republicans in Congress supported ObamaCare. They just didn’t want to publicly say so by voting for it. So they let the Democrats do all the dirty work, then spent the next seven years conning voters into believing that the GOP would repeal ObamaCare if they ever got control of Congress and the White House.

[sauropod]

We’ve known that Harwood is a dishonest partisan hack for years.