In fact, they’re rushing to jam the thing through before Doug Jones can be certified, in a stunning act of hypocrisy from the same people who demanded that Obamacare wait until Scott Brown was seated and held up a Supreme Court seat for a year.
.. the Pundit’s Fallacy: “belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.” I.e., “Obama can win the midterms by endorsing Bowles-Simpson,” which the vast majority of voters never heard of.
.. Today’s Republicans are apparatchiks, who have spent their whole lives inside an intellectual bubble in which cutting taxes on corporations and the rich is always objective #1.
.. Their party used to know that it won elections despite its economic program, not because of it – that the whole game was to win by playing on
- social issues,
- national security, and above all on
- racial antagonism,
then use the win to push fundamentally unpopular economic policies.
.. the GOP may also be engaged in the fallacy of points on the board thinking – I’m taking the phrase from Rahm Emanuel, who believed that Obama could gain electoral capital simply by racking up legislative victories.
The idea is that voters are impressed by your record of wins, or conversely that they’ll turn away if you don’t win enough.