{"id":398,"date":"2014-02-14T12:43:19","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T17:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/?p=398"},"modified":"2014-02-14T12:43:19","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T17:43:19","slug":"fareed-zakaria-the-party-of-gridlock-the-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/?p=398","title":{"rendered":"Fareed Zakaria: The party of gridlock – The Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>

It’s just false to equivocate Democratic and Republican roles in the gridlock that has gripped Washington. The Republican Party can’t even get anything done in their own caucus because of the Tea Party and their extreme political agenda. I hope independents and Democrats are paying attention and getting out to vote to get rid of these neanderthals in November 2014.\u00a0<\/span>#voteblue2014<\/a><\/p>\n

Fareed Zakaria: The party of gridlock – The Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have been described as a centrist. And I freely admit to believing that neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on wisdom or virtue. But sometimes, reality points firmly in one direction. Watching the machinations in Washington over the last two weeks, it is now impossible to talk about how both political parties are to blame for the country\u2019s gridlock.<\/p>\n

Consider what just happened on immigration, an issue ripe for resolution. A majority of Americans support granting citizenship to illegal immigrants \u2014 by\u00a081 percent in the most recent CNN poll<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 as well as enhanced border controls. The leadership of the Republican Party in Congress talked about a comprehensive reform package that would create a lengthy waiting time for citizenship \u2014 13 years \u2014 and couple this with tougher enforcement. Most Democrats were willing to accept this compromise.<\/p>\n

But it became clear to the Republican leadership that even this would be unacceptable for many tea party Republicans. So, on Jan. 30, party leaders\u00a0circulated a new proposal<\/a>\u00a0that took away any prospect of a special path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, no matter how long they waited. Instead, these people would merely be given legal documents allowing them to work and pay taxes. This was a huge concession to tea party activists and seemed unlikely to go anywhere. Democrats had been firmly against the concept of permanent second-class status for illegal immigrants. A majority of the public opposes it as well.<\/p>\n

But within a few days, President Obama took the opportunity of an\u00a0interview with CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper<\/a>\u00a0to say\u00a0he was \u201cencouraged\u201d by the proposal<\/a>. \u201cI genuinely believe that Speaker Boehner and a number of House Republicans, folks like Paul Ryan, really do want to get a serious immigration reform bill done,\u201d he explained. \u201cI\u2019m not going to pre-judge what gets to my desk,\u201d he added, to make clear he was not ruling out the proposal.<\/p>\n

Every Democrat I spoke with hated the idea, for moral and political reasons. Most were surprised by Obama\u2019s concession. So what happened? A few days later, House Speaker John Boehner stood in front of the media and explained that even his new plan was a nonstarter and immigration reform was dead.<\/p>\n

His explanation was that no\u00a0one trusted Obama to enforce the laws<\/a>. But in fact, the Obama administration has\u00a0enforced immigration laws ferociously<\/a>. It\u00a0deported more than 400,000 people in 2012<\/a>,\u00a0two and a half times<\/em>\u00a0the number in 2002. In 2002, for every two people removed from the country, 13 became legal residents. In 2012, for every two removed, just five became residents. For these reasons, as well as the recession, the number of illegal immigrants has\u00a0not increased in several years<\/a>. (On the more general point,\u00a0Dan Amira of New York magazine has compiled data<\/a>\u00a0that show that Barack Obama has issued fewer executive orders than any president in 100 years.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that the latest debt-ceiling circus will change things. Yet,\u00a0Harvard University\u2019s Theda Skocpol points out in an essay in the journal Democracy<\/a>\u00a0that commentators have been proclaiming the decline of the tea party for several years now. Still, it continues to exert a powerful influence on the Republican Party. It has two things going for it \u2014 immense grass-roots energy and the breakdown of authority within Congress in general and the Republican Party in particular.<\/p>\n

Skocpol writes that in the hundreds of interviews she conducted when writing a book on the tea party (with Vanessa Williamson), she found that \u201c[f]iscal conservatism is often said to be the top grassroots Tea Party priority, but Williamson and I did not find this to be true. Crackdowns on immigrants, fierce opposition to Democrats, and cuts in spending for the young were the overriding priorities we heard from volunteer Tea Partiers, who are often, themselves, collecting costly Social Security, Medicare, and veterans benefits to which they feel fully entitled as Americans who have \u2018paid their dues\u2019 in lifetimes of hard work.\u201d<\/p>\n

This suggests a bleak future for getting anything done in Washington. Immigration was supposed to be ripe for common-sense reform. The public is for a compromise solution, policy wonks have proposed ways to make it work, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports it, the country\u2019s leading technology firms have been clamoring for one, senior Democrats and Republicans are in favor. And yet it couldn\u2019t get past the central problem in Washington today: the extreme and obstructionist faction within the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

The next time someone blames \u201cboth sides\u201d for Washington\u2019s paralysis or issues a bland call for \u201cleadership\u201d to get us out of it, remember the case of immigration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s just false to equivocate Democratic and Republican roles in the gridlock that has gripped Washington. The Republican Party can’t even get anything done in their own caucus because of the Tea Party and their extreme political agenda. I hope independents and Democrats are paying attention and getting out to vote to get rid of these neanderthals in November 2014.\u00a0#voteblue2014 Fareed Zakaria: The party of gridlock – The Washington Post. I have been described as a centrist. And I freely admit to believing that neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on wisdom or virtue. But sometimes, reality \u2026 Continue reading this post → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2014-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":399,"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.themodestproposal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}