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In an example of Republican obstructionism rendered beautiful by its simplicity, the GOP yesterday killed a House bill that would increase funding for scientific research and math and science education by forcing Democrats to vote in favor of federal employees viewing pornography.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the ranking member of the House science committee, introduced a motion to recommit, a last-ditch effort to change a bill by sending it back to the committee with mandatory instructions.

In this case, Republicans included a provision that would bar the federal government from paying the salaries of employees who’ve been disciplined for viewing pornography at work.

To proceed with the bill and bring it to a final vote, Democrats would have had to vote against the motion to recommit, and against the porn ban.

But they didn’t have the stomach for it, and 121 Democrats jumped ship and voted with Republicans to kill the bill.

“We’re all opposed to federal employees watching pornography. That is not a question; but that’s not what this was about,” he went on. “The Motion to Recommit was about gutting funding for our science agencies.”

Democrats pulled the bill off the floor after the motion passed and promised to introduce it again next week.

The bill — a re-authorization of the 2007 COMPETES Act — has been supported by interests usually seen as aligned with Republicans, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/gop-kills-science-jobs-bill
-by-forcing-dems-to-vote-for-porn.php 2011, a partial explanation of why the public "doesn't get it":

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At first blush, it’s tempting to think congressional Republicans are simply out of their minds to kill jobs bills during a jobs crisis. It seems insane — Americans are desperate for Congress to act; Americans overwhelmingly support bills like the one considered by the Senate last night; and yet GOP officials seem wholly unconcerned. Aren’t they afraid of a backlash?

Well, no, probably not. The reason probably has something to do with voters like Dale Bartholomew.

Now, my point is not to pick on one random voter quoted in an Associated Press article. He’s very likely a well-intentioned guy who’s simply frustrated with what’s going on in Washington. I certainly don’t blame him for that.

Consider, though, the significance of a quote like this one.

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“If Romney and Obama were going head to head at this point in time I would probably move to Romney,” said Dale Bartholomew, 58, a manufacturing equipment salesman from Marengo, Ill. Bartholomew said he agrees with Obama’s proposed economic remedies and said partisan divisions have blocked the president’s initiatives.

But, he added: “His inability to rally the political forces, if you will, to accomplish his goal is what disappoints me.”

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Got that? This private citizen agrees with Obama, but is inclined to vote for Romney anyway — even though Romney would move the country in the other direction — because the president hasn’t been able to “rally the political forces” to act sensibly in Washington.

That is heartbreaking, but it’s important — Republicans have an incentive, not only to hold the country back on purpose, but also to block every good idea, even the ones they agree with, because they assume voters will end up blaming the president in the end. And here’s a quote from a guy who makes it seem as if the GOP’s assumptions are correct.

It’s hard to say just how common this sentiment is, but it doesn’t seem uncommon. The public likes to think of the President of the United States, no matter who’s in office, as having vast powers. He or she is “leader of the free world.” He or she holds the most powerful office on the planet. If the president — any president — wants a jobs bill, it must be within his or her power to simply get one to the Oval Office to be signed into law.

And when the political system breaks down, and congressional Republicans kill ideas that are worthwhile and popular, there’s an assumption that the president is somehow to blame, even if that doesn’t make any sense at all. Indeed, here we have a quote from a voter who is inclined to reward Republicans, giving them more power, even though the voter agrees with Obama — whose ideas (and presidency) Republicans are actively trying to destroy.

... if voters who agree with Obama are inclined to vote for Republicans because Republicans are blocking Obama’s ideas, then not only is 2012 lost, but the descent of American politics into hysterical irrationality is complete http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/the_incentiv
e_behind_gop_obstr032969.php certainly agree with that last part.

It's not just bills, it's everything. Judicial nominees, for example. Republicans have effectively imposed a blockade on the president’s nominees for dozens of seats on the federal judiciary. They have filibustered an unprecedented 17 judicial nominees, and imposed RECORD wait times on others. Of the 22 current judicial nominees:

•10 were approved unanimously by both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee
•6 received just one “no” vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee
•13 are from states with a Republican Senator who supports their nomination
•11 would fill “emergency” vacancies, where the lack of a sufficient number of judges to hear cases is preventing courts from handling their caseloads — delaying or effectively denying the public access to the justice system.

Look at the comparison between Bush and Obama:

http://thinkprogress.org/progress-report/blockade-the-gops-unending-ef
fort-to-block-obamas-nominees/]

Harry Reid nailed it:

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Political divisions in this chamber are so great they often prevent the Senate from performing even its most fundamental duties.

The divisions are so great they have prevented this body from confirming presidential nominees – our constitutional obligation.

These days, it’s no longer enough to be a qualified nominee.

It’s no longer enough to have bipartisan support.

And in the case of judicial nominees, it’s no longer enough to be reported unanimously out of committee.

Last year, my Republican colleagues blocked or delayed scores of outstanding nominees. Why? Because they want to defeat President Obama, who made those nominations. That’s their number one goal.

And at the end of last year, Republicans refused to allow votes on 16 judicial nominees who were reported out of committee unanimously.

Unfortunately, this year may bring more of the same. Already this year, some Republicans have gone to the floor and threatened to drag out the confirmation process for every nominee for the rest of the year.

This Republican obstructionism is supposedly retribution for President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray – an eminently qualified nominee – to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

With a qualified leader at the helm, the Bureau will be able to effectively protect middle class families from the greed and excess of big Wall Street banks.

It will not impact smaller financial services firms that help Americans who don’t use banks. And it will not impact banks that deal fairly with consumers.

But it will serve as a watchdog against the kinds of abuses that nearly collapsed our financial system in 2008.

President Obama’s right to recess appoint Mr. Cordray is protected in the Constitution.

President Bush had the same right to make recess appointments – even though Democrats kept the Senate in pro forma session.

Bush didn’t exercise that right – or challenge the pro forma sessions in court – because Democrats worked with him to confirm hundreds of his nominees.

Unfortunately, Republicans have refused to work with President Obama as Democrats worked with President Bush.

Instead they are threatening political payback and more delays.

This brand of obstructionism is the reason Americans are disillusioned with Congress. They believe Congress can’t get anything done. http://democrats.senate.gov/2012/01/30/members-of-congress-must-play-b
y-the-same-rules-as-everyone-else/ terms of numbers, President Obama steadily lost ground to entrenched Republican obstruction in the U.S. Senate, ending his first two years with almost double the number of vacancies that he inherited. Of the 105 nominations submitted by President Obama during the first two years of his term, only 62 – 2 Supreme Court justices, plus 16 courts of appeals and 44 district court judges – were confirmed. That is the smallest percentage of judicial confirmations over the first two years of any presidency in American history. It is also the fewest number of confirmations since 1977, during President Carter’s first two years in office, when the judiciary was 40% smaller.

With so few judges confirmed during the 111th Congress, the federal judiciary was pushed into crisis. Vacancies increased from 55 to 97 – leaving nearly 1 in 8 judgeships unfilled. “Judicial emergencies”3 more than doubled, from 20 to 46. Court filings also increased during this period.4 With fewer judges available to handle growing dockets, access to justice took a severe hit.

For the most part, responsibility for the growing judicial crisis should be laid at the feet of Senate Republicans, who embarked on a deliberate and unprecedented pattern of blocking and delaying floor votes on every nominee, regardless of whether they opposed the nominee in committee or on the floor.

President Obama saw a smaller percentage of his nominees confirmed – 58% – in the first two years of his presidency than any president in American history, and smaller numbers – 62 – confirmed during his first two years than any president since Carter.

Senate Republicans used every parliamentary tool they could to obstruct and delay President Obama’s nominees, including placing secret holds on each judicial nominee who reached the Senate floor, even those that had the support of Republican home-state senators. They also denied votes on 13 nominees at the end of the 111th Congress who received no Republican opposition in committee.

Senate Republicans announced their plan at the very beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency. On March 2, 2009, six weeks after he took office, all the Republicans in the Senate signed a letter effectively appropriating to themselves the nominating power of the executive branch by vowing to block nominees

Historically, cloture votes have only been necessary for highly controversial nominees to courts of appeals. Instead, Republicans repeatedly denied consent on almost every nomination, including those for district court seats, and regardless of whether the nominee faced opposition in the Judiciary Committee. The same held true for nominees to seats that were judicial emergencies.Tons more at http://www.afj.org/judicial-selection/state_of_the_judiciary_111th_con
gress_report.pdf the very beginning, as was their plan, they've stopped everything they can stop:

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Republican Senator Richard Shelby has taken obstructionism to new heights: he's placed a blanket hold on all 70-plus executive nominees awaiting approval to join the Obama administration. A single hold can take a week to overturn. Shelby, rather than opposing the nominees, is seeking concessions, including an expensive tanker, for his home state of Alabama.

Republican Senators have placed many holds on Obama appointees, including Sen. Jim DeMint's hold on the head of the Transportation Security Administration. But this marks an unprecedented escalation in the Republican strategy of obstruction. Have the Republicans gone too far?

Longtime opponent of filibusters and "holds" Matthew Yglesias called attention to this as a prime example of the stupidity of such rules:

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I congratulate Shelby on fully exploring the logic of the modern United States Senate. Why, after all, should a great nation of 300 million people have a functioning government if preventing the government from functioning can help a lone Senator advance parochial interests? Why should a Senator act like a statesman when all the objective forces are urging him to act like an unusually pretentious ward heeler? Why hold one nominee when you can hold seven or seventy? Good for him! Now can we change this process?

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LOTS more on this one at http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2010/02/has-gop-obstructionism
-gone-too-far/25596/ have been masters of blocking appointments and nominations, and left the Obama Administration essentially hobbled in many aspects:

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There also are two vacancies on the seven-member Federal Reserve Board. On Monday, Professor Peter A. Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, withdrew his nomination to one of those spots.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner noted Monday that the failure to fill vacancies in several agencies was making it difficult to write all the rules called for by new financial regulatory legislation

Blocking confirmations makes it “less likely that there will be enough capable people in the regulatory bodies to bring the care and judgment necessary for the new rules to work,” Geithner said.
The job of Treasury assistant secretary for economic policy also is vacant. http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Blogs/Capital-Exchange/2011/06/07/Republ
icans-Block-Key-Economic-Appointments.aspx#page1

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We do not remember a time like this when an entire year of a president’s term has passed without all of the appointments filled and key government offices operating at half-staff.

The latest and most visible withdrawal was that of Erroll Southers, President Obama’s choice to head the Transportation Security Administration. This was a key job at a time when this office, operating under the umbrella of the Homeland Security Protection Agency, is carrying the burden of protecting travelers from terrorist attacks.

Southers’ credentials are impeccable. He was a former FBI agent currently serving as assistant chief of airport police in Los Angeles. Yet his nomination remained blocked for months by Republican opposition. In his announcement that he was withdrawing his nomination Southers complained that he had become a political lightning rod. “I am not a politician. I’m a counter-terrorist expert. They took an apolitical person and politicized my career.”

Another loss to the nation was the withdrawal of Annette Nazareth from the position of deputy in the United States Treasury Department at a time of the nation’s most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Nazareth, a former staffer and commissioner with the Securities and Exchange Commission, fell under severe assault.

Other Obama appointments that have backed off after weeks and months of personal assault from Republican ranks include Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the high-profile CNN medical correspondent picked for the office of Surgeon General; former Senator Tom Daschle who was named to run the Department of Health and Human Services and oversee the overhaul of the nation’s broken health care system; and New Mexico Governor and former presidential candidate Bill Richardson to the high post as Secretary of Commerce.
Yet another Obama choice for the Commerce Secretary slot, New Hampshire Senator Judd Cregg, also withdrew his nomination citing “irresolvable conflicts.”

There has been much criticism of President Obama and his administration for failing to bring about much of the “change” Mr. Obama promised during his hard-fought campaign for the nation’s top job. But in all fairness, a president working without a full staff of people to help make and carry out such changes cannot be expected to work miracles.

The Republicans in the Senate have succeeded in blocking the presidential appointments with incredible skill. The process of filling hundreds of key positions by appointment followed by Senatorial confirmation has become such a politically twisted process it both discourages and demoralizes candidates. This tends to turn away the best people for these jobs. They just do not care to have their good names and reputations dragged through the mud for months.

The appointment process has been clearly shown to be broken, and consequently an obstruction to good functioning government. Yet since 1996, nothing has been done to fix it. The nation has obviously suffered because of it. http://perdurabo10.tripod.com/galleryi/id108.html February of last year I found an excellent treatise on what it took me so damned long to accept; that the right WANTS things to get worse in order to get power in 2012:

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Republicans are pushing back against the notion that they are simply obstructionists, that they are the “Party of ‘No’!” But as they do so, their obstructionism has reached new heights.

Specifically, you could look to these examples: Senator Mitch McConnell; Senator Judd Gregg; and Senator John McCain (who thought he was in favor of net neutrality before he started to raise money opposing it and calling it a “government takeover of the internet;” and on cap and trade legislation, which he was one of the major supporters of until Obama proposed it; or then changing his position on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.)

What you think about Republican obstruction determines what you think of Obama. The almost unanimous view of the right wing opinionosphere is that Obama is the most left-wing world leader since Mao Zedong. Obama’s supposed radicalism justifies and explains the unified Republican opposition. Yet no reasonable observer can judge Obama’s policies and actions as very far from the center. He has been ambitious, but cautious. So, with that explanation found to be implausible, what other explanations are there?

Andrew Sullivan posits one which seems the typical and politicized answer – and the one I would have given before the health care debate:

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The core narrative of Obama’s promise and candidacy remains what it always was, in my view. He’s struggling against ideology to enact pragmatic reform.

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There is truth to this claim – but it is insufficient given Obama’s pragmatism and moderation. On a range of issues, Republicans supported Bush and opposed Obama (for example, compare the treatment of failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid with that of failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab or even deficit spending in general.) This suggests the ideological motivation is not sufficient. Ezra Klein describing Senator Mitch McConnell’s vote against the Conrad-Gregg Deficit Commission posits an explanation that seems most compelling in understanding our current political gridlock, in predicting who will do what:

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McConnell’s actions cannot be explained by beliefs, which is something that makes people very uncomfortable. But they can be explained by party incentives, which is something that makes people even more uncomfortable. We’re very familiar with a model of Congress in which legislators disagree over policy and that causes them to vote against one another. We’re much more concerned by the idea that they don’t disagree at all, but are simply trying to win the next election.

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Simply put, for the most part, voters are not electing individuals with ideologies, but parties incentivized and empowered to obstruct to get into power. This creates the dynamic described in an email sent to James Fallows by a source who claims to have witnessed this conversation regarding the stimulus bill:

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GOP member: ‘I’d like this in the bill.’

Dem member response: ‘If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?’

GOP member: ‘You know I can’t vote for the bill.’

Dem member: ‘Then why should we put it in the bill?’

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Ezra Klein, citing John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, explains why this is an effective political strategy, even if it means giving up on governing:

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“People believe that Americans all have the same basic goals,” write Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, “and they are consequently turned off by political debate and deal making that presuppose an absence of consensus. People believe these activities would be unnecessary if if decision makers were in tune with the (consensual) public interest rather than cacophonous special interests.”

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Disagreement and deal-making, in other words, signal something going wrong in the political process. They signal that legislators aren’t acting in service of the common-sense consensus of the American people, and are instead serving special interests. Moreover, that’s often true.

In other words, most people, not having the time to figure out what is really going on as misinformation and ideology muddy the news, apply heuristic reasoning – shortcuts for guessing answers to complex problems. People don’t judge policies on the merits as there are conflicting claims, but instead on stories about the process as legislation is being debated and stories about effects after a policy is in force. Given this, its clear that Republicans are taking advantage of the dynamic described well by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com:

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Republicans can brand any policy as “partisan” simply by opposing it, however moderate it might in fact be.

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With the typical focus on ideology, this seems backwards. But a focus on ideology doesn’t explain the underlying facts – either the public opinion about what is happening in Washington or the uniform opposition of Republicans. At some point, this dynamic will change – because the media will need a new story and the public will grow bored and the facts will eventually seep into the public consciousness. Remember how effective the fear-mongering was after September 11? Eventually, it began to be seen as a stale political tactic – and though it may work again, for the moment, it seems to have lost its magical power. So, too, will this strategy – even if the Democrats never figure out an effective way to counter. http://2parse.com/?p=4789

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It goes on and on. I can't find specific figures on how many appointments have been blocked, but I'll bet that's unprecedented, too. There is no question whatsoever that the Republicans decided en masse to stop anything and everything Obama tried to do for our country. And the righties here claim that Democrats have done the same thing--NOT! Not in anything like the numbers we've seen since Obama was elected.

They made their intentions clear from the beginning, and nobody has stopped them. Mitch McConnel was very up-front about it: “I am amused with [Democrats’] comments about obstructionism... I wish we had been able to obstruct more.”

How can ANY sane person argue that there hasn't been massive obstructionism, or that it's been a "good thing"?? The nation definitely HAS suffered from it, and continues to do so.

I know it's long; it could have been much longer. I just needed to document a BIT of it, I'm so pissed off. These people were ELECTED by the people, dammit, what fucking right do they have to act ONLY in their own self-interest, while the rest of the country suffers??

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Helms deep wasn't just about defending the people of Rohan, they also HAD to pin down the Uruk-Hai to give Gondor a chance to wear down the armies of Mordor without getting steamrollered from the flank, which was what the whole mutual assistance policy between them was based on - cause conversely Gondor would prevent Rohan from being flanked.

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