What's confounding and self-perpetuating about our broken politics is that reason and fair-mindedness amount to unilateral withdrawal against unreasonableness and unfairness.
They look like naiveté and weakness. And neither side thinks it can risk that, lest it betray its base and get run over by the other side.
The human inclination is to flip back the middle finger when the finger has been flipped to you, then to reverse and repeat, leading to a permanent emotional and tactical condition of flip-er and flip-ee.
The two-party system, at least as it's degenerated to dysfunction, needs to be blown up. It should be replaced with a multi-party system in which groups of various philosophical gradations must form consensus-based coalitions in order to establish a functioning government.
Maybe the center-leftists like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock could join with the center-rightists like Maine Sen. Susan Collins. Maybe they could bring in some of their similarly spirited friends like Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich, Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, former Arkansas Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe and Republican pragmatist Mitt Romney. Maybe they could do something constructive on health care--like Romneycare from Massachusetts, same as Obamacare, until, that is, Romney became the presidential nominee of a combatant in our broken system and was required by the prevailing rules of partisan nonsense to disavow his own success and decency.
Maybe such a coalition could nominate for the U.S. Supreme Court a lawyer of sterling personal and professional credentials who had never worked on a political campaign or been a judge--or even contributed a penny to a politician, because politicians have too much money already--and therefore was known only for his qualifications and character, not his partisanship or predilection.
Alas, I dream. The current Washington political condition is embedded by money and refueled by resentment. It is Humpty Dumpty, and there are no king's men even to try to put it back together again.
Consider President Donald Trump's nomination of a Republican operative and known political quantity, Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court. Behold the inanity and petulance of the ensuing debate.
Last week several Democratic senators filed a Freedom of Information request for documents related to Kavanaugh's work as staff secretary, thus the human inbox and outbox, for former President George W. Bush.
It's an unreasonable request designed a little as a fishing expedition but more as a delaying tactic. There are more than a million pages of such documents. It's possible something would reveal relevance about Kavanaugh, although the staff secretary moves documents rather than formulates them. But forcing the release of millions of documents and then perusing them would put Kavanaugh's nomination on a slow track, maybe past the election when it's possible if unlikely the Democrats could take over the Senate.
Such Democratic tactics are unfair. But they're not as unfair as what the Republicans pulled in 2016--refusing even to consider an entirely legitimate nomination, that of Merrick Garland, made by Barack Obama with nearly a year left in his term.
So, a couple of senators and presidential wannabes--one Democratic and one Republican--got into a modern debate, meaning on Twitter.
The Democrat, Kamala Harris of California, tweeted that it's not right to push through Kavanaugh's nomination while withholding potentially relevant documents.
The Republican--Your Boy Tom Cotton, petulant as always--tweeted back that Harris already had said she opposed Kavanaugh's nomination and that, as a result, she didn't deserve any documents.
Let's size that up: Harris is exploiting well-placed Democratic resentment over Republican treatment of Garland to advocate a fishing expedition and delaying tactic. She's wrong to insist open-endedly for voluminous documents, but she's right to stand for transparency. Cotton is right that it's redundant or contradictory to say you oppose a nominee pre-emptively and then assert that certain unreleased documents are essential to consider him fairly. But he's wrong to suggest that Harris' opposition removes any broader need for transparency and accountability.
Cotton also stands guilty coincidentally of the prevailing sin of broken Washington, which is hypocrisy.
In 2015-16, because he was mad about something Obama had done, he singularly blocked the nomination of a friend of the president to be ambassador to the Bahamas. He told the nominated woman in a private meeting--by her account--that he had nothing against her but was interested in her only because of the president's high regard for her.
While Cotton played that juvenile game for 15 months, the nominee became ill and died.
There's no good guy in the little set-to between the contradicting Harris and the whining Cotton. Cotton is worse, of course, that being a given with Cotton.
Assessing the competing degree of affronts in the two choices the parties force-feed us is the way we decide our political races. And look where it's gotten us. It's a process that has populated Washington with varying degrees of affronts run amok.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/12/2018