Wondering what your favorite elected representatives are up to these days? Ask no more:
For public consumption, Democrats and Republicans are engaging in an increasingly elaborate show of political theater. Mr. Obama on Thursday went to the home of a middle-income family in the Virginia suburbs of Washington to press for an extension of expiring tax cuts for the middle class — and for the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts on incomes over $250,000.
“Just to be clear, I’m not going to sign any package that somehow prevents the top rate from going up for folks at the top 2 percent,” Mr. Obama said. “But I do remain optimistic that we can get something done.”
On Capitol Hill, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, moved Thursday to vote on Mr. Obama’s proposal, in his broader deficit package, to permanently diminish Congress’s control over the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit, assuming that Democrats would break ranks and embarrass the president. Instead, Democratic leaders did a count, found they had 51 solid votes, and took Mr. McConnell up on what Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, called “a positive development.”
Mr. McConnell then filibustered his own bill, objecting to a simple-majority vote and saying a change of such magnitude requires the assent of 60 senators.
“I do believe we made history on the Senate floor today,” Mr. Durbin said.
Yes, Mr. Durbin, you did make history. But not just today: your current session of Congress conducted the most useless, unproductive, and inefficient use of time in our national legislature since at least 1947.
And no, I’m not just picking on Durbin. Most of the ongoing stalemate in both the House and Senate since 2009 has been the result of Republican obstinacy and intransigence — in other words, their complete denial of the reality that continues to hit them in the face regularly at four-year intervals. (In fact, of the last six presidential elections, Republicans have lost the popular vote five times.) So this is hardly a balanced phenomenon.
But there’s just something about being a senator or representative — from either party — that turns otherwise competent, reasonably intelligent human beings into overgrown children in suits and ties. No, Mr. Durbin, nothing you did today amounts to anything more than a slow, inexorable advancement of the news cycle. Your sole accomplishment in this regard is to fill the airtime on the cable news networks so they don’t have to spend those few hours discussing something even more frivolous than a predestined-to-fail bill proposed in the Senate. (And you probably didn’t even realize that was possible.)
As for Mr. McConnell, there are almost no words to describe his ongoing disastrous behavior. The resident senatorial turkey was too clever for his own good, bluffing that he’d like to go ahead with a vote on ending Congress’ power over the debt ceiling, then filibustering his own bill when it turned out the Democrats had a solid majority.
“Political theater” is right. But it’s a damn ugly performance, and one all Americans are paying for, whether or not we even realized we were attending the show.