The Structure and Snares of Our Politics

If you tune in to one of the major cable news channels these days, chances are you're either going to be deluged either by commercials or a longstanding verbal melee between the Republican and Democratic parties that dominates our political landscape...I'm starting to prefer the commercials.  Nowadays with this dead-end impeachment adventure going through the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Republicans scurrying to create counter-narratives to accuse the accusers, all that we as Americans are getting is a horizontal, us-vs-them squabble instead of getting a fair, pro-and-con treatment of the many important issues we face and really care about.  This is easier to see when I watch C-Span2 when the U.S. Senate is in session and speakers from each party talk on the floor about various issues that they deem to be important. Although it gets little treatment in the mainstream media, the immediate concern in the Senate is next year's appropriations funding bill that the two parties are having a major spat about, each accusing the other of deliberately holding it up and being anti-military.  The major bone of contention about this bill, which the two parties had both signed off on this past summer but which afterward the Republicans allotted a diversion of funds for a border security wall that President Trump wants, is never expressed by GOP senators like Minority Whip John Thune, who repeatedly in his speeches hammers the erroneous point that his colleagues on the other side of the aisle are against pay raises for those serving in the military and want to hold up military aid to Ukraine.  This kind of sideways bickering and grandstanding is going on from both parties with plenty of blame to go around, and issues are being placed on the backburner while the rhetoric just keeps getting turned up.

So I've decided to divide how to look at politics into two basic components: vertical politics and horizontal politics.  Vertical politics is issue and philosophy-based, while horizontal politics is the "us-against-them" perpetual battle transpiring between the two major political parties for power and influence in the next election (and there's always a next election)...turn on the cable news channels and chances are you'll see a lot more of the latter than the former, about which I think more Americans ultimately care the most. It doesn't automatically follow that each of us will go along with our own chosen party's positions on every issue...I look at each one on its own merits and then look at how the politicians are aligning themselves on it, not the other way around.  So in this I am primarily a vertical political follower, not a horizontal one who tends to first emotionally bond with his or her "side" and leaders and denigrates the character and intentions of the "enemy" side while seeing the different issues and their treatment as only secondary factors in their own party gaining, keeping, or losing control.  So if you're horizontally oriented in favor of the Democrats you might speak in outrage over the Senate Republicans blocking the advancement of some 250+ bills they have passed in the House since gaining voting control in that body following the 2018 midterm elections.  The Republicans just as horizontally reply that it's the House Democrats' fault for passing partisan legislation that they know in advance has no chance of either passing the Senate or getting the President's signature.  And so they whine and bicker...

If politics in Washington, DC were run in a vertical manner, you would see...even in divided governments where regarding the Presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives each party controls at least one branch...issues advanced through Congressional committees, continual contact between the Executive and Legislative branches to see what the President would be willing (or unwilling) to sign, and a spirit of compromise.  In divided governments the final legislative products on some more contentious issues might not address some important aspects that the two sides couldn't agree on, but the issue would still be advanced on the points in which they had common ground...until in a later Congress it is readdressed.  But what we see now is horizontal politics: the Democratic House passes its own bills according to its own ideology without regard to whether the Republican-controlled Senate will be able to approve a reconciliable bill in that body or whether the President will sign it into law.  Now I'm not picking on the Democrats per se...during Obama's tenure as president the Republican house did likewise, passing a slew of measures they knew had no chance of advancing through the Senate, much less into law.  But words like "compromise", "deals", and "collaboration" have become taboo in a toxic political environment where those who dare to reach across the aisle to the other party to forge consensus legislation are in danger of finding themselves targeted for "primarying" by their own party in the next election...I see this more on the political right than on the left as talk show hosts like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Levin regularly denounce Republican lawmakers who they see departing from the "script": just look at how the conservative GOP governor of Georgia is currently undergoing their wrath just because he is appointing as retiring senator Johnny Isakson's replacement somebody who isn't enough of a partisan warrior for them.  I sadly see no end in sight to this present trend, just worsening...