So How Did We Get Here? – Polarized, Uncompromising Politicians Running America

Congress has lower approval levels than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Under two dozen ultra-rightwing populists – the House Freedom Caucus – are hellbent on taking America down to its barest bones in order to rebuild it into their vision of a White Christian nationalist nation, where their priorities literally trump the constitution and the rights of those who disagree. To use procedural rules to shut this nation down. The Republican Party, once united fiscal and social conservatives who opposed Russian and Chinese autocracy at every turn (thank you Ronald Reagan), no longer exists. MAGA seeks to return us to the pre-civil rights era (before 1965), and the Supreme Court has reconfigured the country to enable that vision to rise.

There have always been extremists in American politics, some vociferous like the KKK in the WWI era, and some silent prior to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2015/6. Many were embarrassed to express their views. Some just exchanged those views with their neighbors, practicing discrimination without much notice. What changed? How did minority extremists take enough control of government institutions literally to legalize military grade assault rifles, support the autocracy in our traditional enemies, force book censorship and end the rights of women to their own bodies embodied in Roe vs Wade? And shut down most of the federal government?

You can lay some of this onto the doorstep of social media and the internet. Lone wolves no longer exist; they are linked to others with parallel views via the World Wide Web. The Democratic “rainbow coalition” of diverse desires and messages (from intellectual elites to impoverished undereducated Americans) came head-to-head with a single rightwing media monolith, devoid of fact checkers but determined to influence policy at the highest levels: Fox “News.” But the great enabling event occurred over a decade ago: “January 21, 2020 [marked] a decade since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a controversial decision that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.

“While wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups have long had an outsized influence in elections, that sway has dramatically expanded since the Citizens United decision, with negative repercussions for American democracy and the fight against political corruption… A conservative nonprofit group called Citizens United challenged campaign finance rules after the FEC stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton too close to the presidential primaries…A 5–4 majority of the Supreme Court sided with Citizens United, ruling that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections…” and campaign issues, as long as not directed by individual candidates. Brennen Center (12/12/19). The First Amendment was being used to repeal representative democracy.

Indeed, Citizens United made legal – uncapped political contributions – what is considered corruption in most of the rest of the democratic world. Wealth was given even more power, through mass media of all kinds able to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation with devastating consequences, and the race was on. Before that ruling, minority extremists seeking political legitimacy in primary elections would face funding barriers that effectively filtered them out of electability. Typically, donors waited for the candidate field to narrow itself until there were some potential “winners” emerging. Only then would campaign contributions flow. Citizens changed that vector, and democracy began to wither.

Some wealthy barons, believing that their success legitimized any view they espoused, began pure “issue” campaigns across every form of medium available… even the most rightwing concepts imaginable. Smelling that massive cash infusion for such issues, extremist candidates saw a path to early funding to lift them through the primary process and fund them beyond. By openly embracing these absurd policies, and pledging never to back down, candidates who would never have made even a slight blip on the political radar in years past found campaign contributions raining down, sometimes at flood levels. Linkage between these fountains of campaign moneys – often dark money, super political action committees with anonymous donors – and these extremists grew strong. With members of the House facing reelection every two years, literally spending 70% of their working hours raising money, that side of Congress was ripe for the picking. And the Republican Party, home to so many wealthy donors, was the path.

As time passed, many of these mega-wealthy donors surfaced and openly pressed this new generation of uncompromising rightwing candidates to do their bidding. These candidates, some believers in creative destruction and autocratic efficiency, complied. With the ascension of Donald Trump as a MAGA deity, the archaic House and Senate rules gave radical congresspeople the basis to hold America for ransom, shoving unpopular programs and policies – often reversing legislation that created mass benefits for most Americans – down the throats of the American electorate.

In the House, an ambitious GOP congressman who did not have a solid base to be easily elected House Speaker (third in line for the presidency) horse-traded his way through 15 votes until he succeeded. Kevin McCarty (R-Bakersfield, CA) offered plum committee chair positions and pledged to prevent legislation that the Freedom Caucus opposed from reaching a floor vote. The newly appointed ultra-rightwing chairs began an impeachment hearing against Joe Biden (with no tangible evidence), and Freedom Caucus demanded that as a condition of keeping the government funded that most of Biden’s passed legislative initiatives be reversed, that evangelical mandates be implemented and that the pledge that the GOP made to get the debt ceiling raised be ignored. Including defunding DOJ prosecution of Donald Trump. Since under the Constitution, all appropriations bills must originate with the House, they held some key cards. Oh, and in a shutdown, somehow Congresspeople still get paid?!

On the Senate side, the cloture/filibuster rules that required a 60% vote to bring most legislation to a floor vote, gave the minority party blocking power to legislation they opposed. As a result, the United States is the only purported democracy on earth where a majority vote of the legislature cannot pass most legislation.

Even our national voting is hardly representative. “Looking back at every presidential election since 1828 (when they began to resemble today’s system), the winner’s electoral vote share has, on average, been 1.36 times his popular vote share – what we call the electoral vote inflation (EVI) factor.” Pew Research Center (12/11/20). In fact, 5 US Presidents (including George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote. The prestigious The Economist even lists the United States as a flawed democracy… not a fully representative one.

So, when House Speaker McCarthy thought he gave the Freedom Caucus everything he could, and they still would not pass a gap spending program to keep the government alive past September 30th, he pulled a Hail Mary. He turned to House Dems and GOP moderates and pushed through a 45-day, bi-partisan interim spending measure that the Senate accepted and sent to Biden for signature. Will McCarthy survive in his speaker role? Time will tell. Can we keep running the federal government through this continuing litany of brinkmanship? Seriously?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the majority of threatened federal government shutdowns have occurred over the past decade and virtually all by Republicans in Congress.