Eric also brought up a some good points with regard to my second post from Saturday, my latest "Fuck You King George" rant, that need further discussion. He points out:

What I find interesting is that when the Democrats were in the minority, their supporters claimed that there was nothing that they could do to stop the Republicans because they were the minority, but now that the roles are reversed, the Dems say that the Repub. minority has the ability to stop the majority.By the way, I am not a Repub or Dem. I find both disasteful.

Some of this has to do with which party controls which house, on how those numbers break down, and on the amount of influence that certain sections within each party have over the party as a whole and its leadership. So, when comparing the specific maneuvering of each party while in the minority on specific legislative initiatives etc., the situation gets much more complicated. And each party will of course try to use whatever power and influence they can to block or weaken certain legislation proposed by the majority. That's not a bad thing in itself; it just means there is an opposition, which is good. But, ideally, opposition is a good thing because it should, in most cases, lead to compromise, especially on popular legislation.

I'm afraid I would do a poor a job in doing a comparison on that level of the previous Democratic and Republican minorities in congress because something that extensive would be better handled by an expert, or at least someone with more extensive knowledge, on congressional politics. I do want to bring up, however, this article by Matt Taibbi in which Taibbi does some in depth research and analysis of the previous Republican dominated congress. Taibbi starts out his article by pointing out:

To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.

This blanket criticism applies, of course, to congress in general and thus to whoever is occupying the majority or minority positions. However, the recent 109th congress, dominated by Republicans while their party also controlled the White House, was something altogether different:

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."

Taibbi goes on to provide a lengthy examination of how the Republicans, not only abdicated their oversight responsibilities, but actively did everything they could to limit the role of the opposition (which under what had been the overall historical normal run of things in congress should have produced some meaningful compromise and went some way toward performing congress' overall function), and showed nothing but contempt for and often outright violated normal congressional procedure to an extent that has little precedent in congress' history:

It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. Washington was once a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed together, played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even shared the same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town -- and congressional business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply does not exist.

American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft -- a fact the Republicans don't even bother to conceal....

Although cooperation between the two parties has ebbed and flowed over the years, historians note that Congress has taken strong bipartisan action in virtually every administration. It was Sen. Harry Truman who instigated investigations of wartime profiteering under FDR, and Republicans Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker Jr. played pivotal roles on the Senate Watergate Committee that nearly led to Nixon's impeachment.

But those days are gone. "We haven't seen any congressional investigations like this during the last six years," says David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale who has studied Congress for four decades. "These days, Congress doesn't seem to be capable of doing this sort of thing. Too much nasty partisanship."
One of the most depressing examples of one-party rule is the Patriot Act. The measure was originally crafted in classic bipartisan fashion in the Judiciary Committee, where it passed by a vote of thirty-six to zero, with famed liberals like Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler saying aye. But when the bill was sent to the Rules Committee, the Republicans simply chucked the approved bill and replaced it with a new, far more repressive version, apparently written at the direction of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"They just rewrote the whole bill," says Rep. James McGovern, a minority member of the Rules Committee. "All that committee work was just for show."

To ensure that Democrats can't alter any of the last-minute changes, Republicans have overseen a monstrous increase in the number of "closed" rules -- bills that go to the floor for a vote without any possibility of amendment. This tactic undercuts the very essence of democracy: In a bicameral system, allowing bills to be debated openly is the only way that the minority can have a real impact, by offering amendments to legislation drafted by the majority.

In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five percent of all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last year Democrats ran the House, that number had dropped to thirty percent -- and Republicans were seriously pissed. "You know what the closed rule means," Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on the House floor. "It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly undemocratic." When Republicans took control of the House, they vowed to throw off the gag rules imposed by Democrats. On opening day of the 104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced his intention to institute free debate on the floor. "Instead of having seventy percent closed rules," he declared, "we are going to have seventy percent open and unrestricted rules."

How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first session of this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven were appropriations bills, which are traditionally open. That left just one open vote -- H. Res. 255, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 2005.

In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule, outside of appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable bills have been a genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-leafed clover of legislative politics.

(Emphasis mine). This is just a small excerpt from Taibbi's article, but the whole thing is worth reading for a much more in-depth analysis and for the profiles of the Republican congressmen that were voted out in 2006. In his article he makes a good argument that it has not been business as usual in congress (or in our government overall) since Bush has been in office and since the Republican party has largely been in charge.

Thus, the Republicans' continued obstruction is even worse. The post that I pointed to for further explanation in my original post makes the key point that Republicans are obstructing for the sake obstructing as evidenced by the many legislative initiatives they have held up that are immensely popular across the political spectrum and much needed by any objective and even centrist point of view. Furthermore, Republicans have been obstructing meaningful, popular, and much needed legislation as a political strategy and then bragging that their strategy of obstruction is having the purely political effect that they want. There is simply no excuse for this other than putting party and ideology above what's good for the whole country for no good reason and at a time when these reforms are very much needed. This is the kind of thing that makes the Republican party unique these days.

It is also true that the excuse has been made by Dem supporters that the Democrats were limited in what they could do while in the minority. Progressives and Democratic supporters have lamented the fact that we did not have enough numbers to easily block things in the recent past, such as Bush's nominees to the Supreme Court, Roberts and Alito. This is probably the type of criticism that has often been given as a means of explanation by many of the Dem strategists and pundits on a lot of cable news commentary. However, this type of commentary may be a bit misrepresentative of a good deal of criticsim that that has been leveled at the Democrats by their base in recent years. Thus, while I can't really dispute that this kind of explanation is given as to why Democrats have been unable to provide a more meaningful opposition, I want to point out that the majority of the really strident criticism of the Dem's performance prior to 2006 and currently from the progressive base, which I believe is increasingly representative of the views of many Dem supporters across the country (and which is starting to have some real impact on the Democrats), is that the Dems didn't fight hard enough while in the minority (with the Roberts and Alito confirmations, the Patriot Act, and other legislation) to provide a tough and meaningful opposition, even if their efforts would have ended up failing, and that they aren't fighting hard enough even in the majority.

And despite whatever failures the Democrats should be rightly criticized for, any such criticism coming from the Republican party (with very, very few exceptions), especially from Bush given his and the Republican party's performance as a whole since he has been in office, is nothing short of transparently blatant hypocrisy. Bush and the Republican party have ensured that it hasn't been business as usual in our country for long time now, so for Bush to engage in the usual tactics of accusing the majority of not getting things done because they face stiff opposition at this point in the game is bordering on the absurd.