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TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article wahich reveals some of the reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP Whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) where they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular president-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.”

On January 27, 2009, House Republican leader John Boehner opened his weekly conference meeting with an announcement: Obama would make his first visit to the Capitol around noon, to meet exclusively with Republicans about his economic recovery plan. “We’re looking forward to the President’s visit,” Boehner said.

The niceties ended there, as Boehner turned to the $815 billion stimulus bill that House Democrats had just unveiled. Boehner complained that it would spend too much, too late, on too many Democratic goodies. He urged his members to trash it on cable, on YouTube, on the House floor: “It’s another run-of-the-mill, undisciplined, cumbersome, wasteful Washington spending bill…I hope everyone here will join me in voting NO!”

Cantor’s whip staff had been planning a “walk-back” strategy where they would start leaking that 50 Republicans might vote yes, then that they were down to 30 problem children, then that they might lose 20 or so. The idea was to convey momentum. “You want the members to feel like: Oh, the herd is moving, I’ve got to move with the herd,” explains Rob Collins, Cantor’s chief of staff at the time. That way, even if a dozen Republicans ultimately defected, it would look like Obama failed to meet expectations.

But when he addressed the conference, Cantor adopted a different strategy. “We’re not going to lose any Republicans,” he declared. His staff was stunned.

“We’re like, uhhhhh, we have to recalibrate,” Collins recalls.

Afterward, Cantor’s aides asked if he was sure he wanted to go that far out on a limb. Zero was a low number. Centrists and big-spending appropriators from Obama-friendly districts would be sorely tempted to break ranks. If Cantor promised unanimity and failed to deliver, the press would have the story it craved: Republicans divided, dysfunction junction, still clueless after two straight spankings.

But Cantor said yes, he meant zero. He was afraid that if the Democrats managed to pick off two or three Republicans, they’d be able to slap a “bipartisan” label on the bill. “We can get there,” he said. “If we don’t get there, we can try like hell to get there.”

Shortly before 11 a.m., the AP reported that Boehner had urged Republicans to oppose the stimulus. Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs handed Obama a copy of the story in the Oval Office, just before he left for the Hill to make his case for the stimulus, an unprecedented visit to the opposition after just a week in office. “You know, we still thought this was on the level,” Gibbs says. Obama political aide David Axelrod says that after the president left, White House aides were buzzing about the insult. And they didn’t even know that Cantor had vowed to whip a unanimous vote—which, ultimately, he did.

“It was stunning that we’d set this up and before hearing from the President, they’d say they were going to oppose this,” Axelrod says. “Our feeling was, we were dealing with a potential disaster of epic proportions that demanded cooperation. If anything was a signal of what the next two years would be like, it was that.”

But that wasn’t the only signal. A few other examples:

*Vice President Biden said he was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican senators who said: ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was: ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’” Biden said. The vice president said he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along those lines.

* One Obama aide said he received a similar warning from a Republican Senate staffer he was seeing at the time. He remembered asking her one morning in bed: How do we get a stimulus deal. She replied: Baby, there’s no deal! “This is how we get whole,” she said with a laugh.

* David Obey, then-chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, met with his GOP counterpart, Jerry Lewis, to explain what Democrats had in mind for the stimulus and ask what Republicans wanted to include. “Jerry’s response was: ‘I’m sorry, but leadership tells us we can’t play,’” Obey told me. “Exact quote: ‘We can’t play.’ What they said right from the get-go was: It doesn’t matter what the hell you do, we ain’t going to help you. We’re going to stand on the sidelines and bitch.”

Lewis doesn’t deny that GOP leaders made a decision not to play. “The leadership decided there was no play to be had,” he said. Republicans recognized that after Obama’s big promises about bipartisanship, they could break those promises by refusing to cooperate. In the words of Congressman Tom Cole, a deputy Republican whip: “We wanted the talking point: ‘The only thing bipartisan was the opposition.’” http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-th
e-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/

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"On Wednesday, all 42 Republican senators signed a letter declaring that they would block Congress from any action at all until tax cuts for the wealthy have been safely extended".

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And, from the beginning of Obama's presidency, the Republicans in Congress have blocked everything that Obama has tried to do. When the Congress had a Democratic majority, the Republicans used the filibuster and the requirement for a "super majority" vote to block every Democratic and Obama-inspired action. http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=36&SubsectionID=73&
ArticleID=106903

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WASHINGTON — High school civics teachers may tell students that Congress’ job is to pass laws, the president’s job is to execute them and the Supreme Court’s job is to interpret them.

But in this Congress, it’s become increasingly clear: Many lawmakers measure progress in repealing or rolling back existing laws.

Last July, the House voted to roll back key provisions of the Clean Water Act.

In February, it voted to roll back two Department of Education regulations, including guidelines state officials are required to follow when operating a school.

And in May, the House voted to undo the same sweeping mandatory Defense cuts that it agreed to accept during last year’s Budget Control Act.

Congress is already on track to pass fewer laws than any previous Congress in at least 40 years. To date, this Congress has passed 123 public laws with just six months left in the legislative calendar.

During the last Congress, which lasted from 2009 to 2010, 383 laws were passed. In the one before that, it was 460. No Congress in recent memory has come close to the slow pace of lawmaking exhibited by the current group of lawmakers.

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Geezer's trying real hard to shift things away from this point, and for good reason. There's no way to defend the tactics of the GOP in congress, not if one is interested in the good of the USA above the good of one political party.

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A new poll released today found that nearly half of voters believe that Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jump start the economy to ensure that President Barack Obama is not re-elected. 49 percent of respondents to the poll say that Republicans are intentionally stalling the economy.

Among independents, 50 percent said that Republicans are stalling the recovery, and 61 percent of self-described moderates said they are. Recently, news analysts from major networks (not Fox) have began to question whether Republicans really are deliberately tanking the economy to defeat Obama. The behavior of Republicans in Congress is beginning to give credibility to that charge. The poll shows that a very large number of Americans including half of Independent voters agree.

Being the party of “no” is hurting Republicans

There is more bad news for Republicans in the poll. Although 41 percent of voters believe that last week’s jobs report was bad news for the president, 40% said that it will have no effect on him, and 14 percent who said it was good news. Voters seem to be primarily blaming the Republican party for the mess, and rightfully so.

Voters have consistently attributed blame for the recession on Bush not Obama, and now they are blaming the slow recovery on Congressional Republicans. The poll flies in the face of Romney’s campaign rhetoric blaming Obama for every evil known to mankind. It appears voters are not buying it.

In addition to blaming Republicans for sabotaging the economy, only 34 percent have a favorable opinion of the GOP, compared to 55 percent who view the party unfavorably. In comparison, 44 percent view the Democratic Party favorably while 45 percent have an unfavorable opinion. Democrats may not have an overwhelming endorsement, but their favorability beats the GOP. That could spell trouble for the GOP keeping the House.

Former Republican Governor Jeb Bush criticizes the Republican Party

Former Florida Governor, son of George H.W. Bush, and brother of President George W. Bush is calling for a more moderate Republican Party. Bush said President Ronald Reagan "would be criticised today for the things he did. He added "My Dad and Reagan sacrificed political poinbts for good public policy." He said today's party has an "orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.”

“Back to my Dad’s time or Ronald Reagan’s time,” he went on, “they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support that right now would be difficult to imagine happening.” Bush also was critical of Republicans for the tone used in discussing immigration.

If Republicans continue to block every jobs bill put forth by the President, voters will begin to see that they are more interested in power than helping the economy. When the House of Representatives refuses to pass a highway bill even after it passed the Senate by a 74% majority, it will give voters pause.

Romney will double down on his attacks on Obama, and Obama will call on Congress to pass the American Jobs Act. Voters will decide which one has their backs.

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Forty-four percent said Republicans were mostly to blame while 38 percent pointed the finger at the Democrats with 18 percent undecided. The margin of error is 1.9 points.

The failure will not have come as a surprise to most Americans since 69 percent of those surveyed predicted there would be no agreement.But the outcome is not likely to sit well with the public. A Pew Research Center poll published last week said 65 percent of those surveyed wanted lawmakers to reach a compromise even if it included parts with which they didn’t agree.

“American voters are way ahead of the politicians,” said Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown. “They knew the supercommittee had little chance of success. Watch for those job approval ratings to sink even lower, although the data indicate that at least for now [u\voters hold the Republicans a bit more responsible.”

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Even before the book’s publication, Ornstein and Mann triggered a mini-firestorm on the Internet and in the conservative blogosphere, thanks to a preview they published in The Washington Post on April 27. The lengthy Outlook section piece was titled “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.”

For decades, Mann and Ornstein have been the scholars most often quoted by the media on the subject of Congress. Their stature derives in part from their hewing to a scrupulously nonpartisan line[.

Ornstein and Mann stuck out their necks in their book and Outlook article with salvos such as this about the Republican Party: “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

“This will be our last public appearance before entering a witness protection program,” Mann quipped at the May 9 Brookings forum. The standing-room-only event was moderated by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, whose forthcoming book, “Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent,” touches on similar themes.

“What an achievement it is to write a policy book about Washington that gets sold out on Amazon,” said USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page, who spoke at the forum with former Rep. Mickey Edwards, an Oklahoma Republican.

The book had already hit No. 13 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list the night before its official May 1 release, not far behind “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins. The scholars’ book sold out within a week at Barnes & Noble, is selling briskly on electronic readers, and has 241,000 Facebook fans.

Ornstein and Mann are no strangers to the spotlight. Between them, they have written dozens of books and scholarly articles on such topics as Congress, campaigns, political money, redistricting, health policy and voting. They’ve lectured in the United States and abroad and collaborated on several books, including their recent indictment of Washington politics, “The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.”

The book blames congressional GOP leaders for putting “party fealty ahead of problem-solving” during last summer’s debt limit debate, which it recounts in detail.

Ornstein and Mann heap special blame on two Washington figures: Newt Gingrich, former Republican House Speaker, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. Gingrich coarsened the political culture and perfected the strategy of year-round, partisan attacks, they say. Norquist, whose anti-tax pledge has been signed by all but a handful of Republican members of Congress, is held responsible for ongoing budget and deficit stalemates.

Ornstein and Mann also argue that the news media have sugarcoated Republicans’ culpability and should spotlight it more plainly.

For Ornstein, in particular, given his affiliation with the conservative-leaning AEI, the decision to take on the Republican Party was not easy.

“We have tried very scrupulously to be fair-minded and not take sides,” said Ornstein, a columnist for CQ’s sister publication, Roll Call. He noted that he used to pride himself following public appearances when audience members would tell him that they couldn’t tell which side he was on. “Writing this book was not an easy thing to do.”

Mann said that 90 percent of the emails that he and Ornstein have received, many of them from Republicans, have been positive, thanking the two for voicing concerns that also exist within the GOP. The recent Indiana primary that ousted Sen. Richard G. Lugar, known for his willingness to work with Democrats, by conservative Richard Mourdock, who has voiced disdain for compromise, only reinforced the book’s message, Mann said.

“Here was what a lot of people called an ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment,” said Ornstein, joining Mann for an interview following the Brookings forum. “People who were largely seen as figures of the Washington center, or the Washington establishment — however you want to frame it — were saying: ‘Wait a minute, here. This is not equivalent.’ And because we backed it up with some evidence, and it wasn’t just a polemic, it struck a nerve. And that, more than anything, I think has propelled the book.”

Their willingness to stake out a strong position, the two scholars said, reflects their growing alarm and even anger. Gridlock has gotten so bad that it could trigger economic instability, damage the Republican Party and block Congress from solving urgent national problems, they argue.

Mann said he and Ornstein “went from being discouraged to being angry.”

Both men credited Arthur Brooks, the president of AEI, and Strobe Talbott, Brookings’ president, for standing by them amid critiques from the right. In addition to thousands of comments that run the gamut on The Washington Post website — the paper stopped counting at 5,000 — the two have drawn hostile blog postings.

Official GOP reaction has been relatively muted — a testament to the good will that Ornstein and Mann have built over the years. The RNC did not return calls seeking comment. “It’s fascinating how quiet, if you will, the Republican Party people on the Hill, and so on, have been,” Mann said. “I haven’t heard anyone attack us among elected Republicans.”

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