By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It was a spectacularly dysfunctional week in Washington, D.C., and everywhere else if the news is accurate. It can be summed up by the 72-hour ‘humanitarian’ lull in Israeli/Palestinian violence that lasted less than four hours. “Feel good” stories were limited to cute critters and babies found on YouTube, providing temporary respite from death tolls, disturbing results of climate studies, and fears of deadly pestilence on the move. (I’m providing a few links to the former — Google if you’re interested in the latter.) One can be forgiven for looking the other way, declaring a news fast, which is the politically correct term for avoidance.
Establishment politics did as it has accustomed the public to expect from it this week, spending taxpayer money to muddy up the waters and waste time. The Republican House behaved in dependably myopic fashion, insisting that the American people can no longer tolerate the tyranny of Barack Obama and his lawlessness, voting to sue him for overstepping his authority to regulate the Affordable Care Act, legislation they themselves have voted more than 50 times to kill off. While not much is expected to come of it, it’s the principle of the thing, according to John Boehner, who was busy tanning and drinking Merlot when George W. Bush mangled more American principle than any American leader before, or after.
As Jon Stewart illustrates nicely, Obama’s tweaking the ACA is just an echo of Dubya doing same for Medicare Part D, so going after Obama with a lawsuit is the equivalent of having a snit and pointing fingers. And using executive privilege puts the Prez in the catbird seat, at least as far as mainstream Republicans see it. The irony of expecting Obama to use his unilateral power to deal with things they choose not to — like, for instance, immigration issues and even, as was suggested by the Supreme Court in regard to contraception, the ACA — while suing him for doing so, is not lost on them. Frankly, this is one of the few times I’ve seen this party acknowledge its own tendency to hypocrisy (and, to be sure, few members, if any, would explain it in those terms).