Its Not "Bi-Partisanship", Its Tyranny By the Center.

For those of you as "thrilled" with the Lame Duck Session managing to pull together and pass the majority of its rotten agenda as I am, let me explain to you why this isn't a cause for concern.

Lame Duck Sessions have a well-deserved reputation for un-accountable and corrupt policies pushed through by retiring or ousted politicians serving their special interests, especially in years when control of one or both houses will shift once the new Congress is sworn in. They are an opportunity for the defeated majority to engage in all the "midnight legislation" voters don't approve of, based on the philosophy of "they didn't re-elect us anyway". However, THIS Lame Duck Session has been very peculiar and illustrates a trend that both party leaderships continue to pretend not to notice, but that will hit them right between the eyes the day the new Congress is sworn in. I realize the term "bi-partisanship" is a fairly recent invention, but I think the level of inter-party cooperation we've seen in this Lame Duck Session is almost unprecedented in the history of Congress as a whole, much less in Lame Duck Sessions which tend to see very unilateral movement.

Obama may have peddled "bi-partisanship" for the last two years like it was going out of style, but in practice the Democrats did almost everything unilaterally: stimulus bills, Obamacare, climate change treaties - hardly any of this got a single Republican vote and most of it had significant revolts from the fringe left, but the supermajorities allowed the establishment Dems to ignore these conditions while chanting "bipartisanship" like groupies on LSD. Well, it would appear the midterm election instantly brought everyone back from the 1960s Collectivist trip. I remind you that its called a Lame Duck session because it is still the old Congress, not the one we elected in November, and yet NOW, despite one of the most unilaterally operating compositions in history, NOTHING is passing without massive inter-party compromise. The stimulus and unemployment extension that this same Congress passed unilaterally on multiple occasions died in Lame Duck Session TWICE. The Republican hostage-holding of the Lame Duck Session was bad for other reasons, but don't be fooled by the insipid rhetoric that Democrats HAD to compromise to keep the under 250k tax cut. The House passed it and the Senate was blocked from voting on it rather than poised to fail it, the new Senate could have voted on it the day it took power, and despite Republicans having gained a net of 6 seats, it would have passed just fine; I'll discuss why in a moment. It was a similar story with the rotten-to-the-core-as-usual budget bill, START, and the drowning of the one decent economic proposal of the session in the DREAM Act - each of these votes saw 0 party unity on either side of aisle. Obama's party still has super majorities in both Houses, and he's had to compromise and woo a large number of Republican votes to pass his Lame Duck session agenda, known historically to contain the most unaccountable and unpopular one-sided policies.

The reason for this is very simple. The Democrats were obviously punished in this election by voters for their assinine unilateralism in an economic meltdown, but no matter what John Boehner or Mitch McConnell says, the Republican establishment got a thrashing, not a "mandate". Unfortunately for them, Democrat unilateralism came too soon after the unapologetic and wanton tyranny of Bush Jr. and his Republican Congress, and the memories of those days are still too fresh even in the minds of the uninvolved and ignorant American electorate. THIS is why Republican establishment candidates dropped like flies in their own primaries; if we gave the GOP any kind of mandate, it was a mandate toward austerity, NOT compromise. The fact that Boehner, who once spearheaded the doomed austerity campaigns against Obamacare and the stimulus packages, is now as willing to sell his testicles to Obama as Obama is to McConnell and he is absolutely unsurprising. But what is heartening is that Boehner and McConnell are as unpopular among Republicans as Obama and Reid among Democrats despite having gained significantly on paper. In this Lame Duck Session, their sudden enamorment with bi-partisanship has only succeeded in giving Obama enough votes to make up for his revolting fringe, and pissing off their own base ever more while they're at it.

This trend is about to become exponentially worse. The Republicans may have gained a net of 63 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate, but the change in composition is a lot more than this. The 63 is a NET number because Republicans actually picked up 69 or 70 new seats in the House, but lost 6 or 7 to Democrats, adding up to a total of almost 80 district take-overs from one party to the other. And neither the House nor Senate net accounts for the dozens more seats picked up by new legislators who have replaced retiring members from the same parties. These new legislators had to win a primary with no incumbent within their own party to get to the general election, and while the media was obsessed with reporting on incumbents losing primaries, it grossly under-reported just how badly non-incumbent establishment candidates got slaughtered in open seat primaries across the entire country; and this refers to BOTH parties, not just Tea Party vs establishment Republicans. Seeing as the old Congress with mostly establishment legislators has already begun to revolt against party leadership in light of this election, come January we are going to see the kind of austerity this country hasn't experienced since the late 1930s and the derailing of the New Deal.

In short, the short-lived "bi-partisaship" we have seen in this Lame Duck session is nothing more than the death throws of the obsolete corporate and special interest cronyism of both party establishments; cronyism that we've had to choose the lesser evil of for decades but that is now having to join forces against the country's ever-growing disgust with it - not "compromise" - to get things done. Once the new Congress takes power, these establishment proposals will get equal amounts of votes from both sides of the aisle and STILL not have enough to pass, now THAT will be entertaining to say the least. I have this crazy theory that for any kind of representative government to work, it has to be made up of multiple factions that strongly disagree on everything rather than loosely defined party lines that are identical with the exception of the special interest that holds their leash. I'm not saying any of these are saints, but we are finally approaching an age in which Congress will be fragmented between at least 4 dramatically different factions - Progressives, the stalwart social conservative and civil libertarian factions that the Tea Party will almost invariably split into - who will still come together for economic votes, and the remnants of both party establishments that may as well merge into a faction called "the old corrupt luddites". Of course there will be alignments and alliances on various issues, but the 3 former factions agree in that they absolutely detest the 4th, and whether or not it declares any sort of formal unity, it will continue to take electoral beatings until it is reduced to insignifcance. Its not a mandate for either party, its a mandate to get rid of both. Viva the re-alignment, its about damn time.