For a decade and more, I have pointed out that Republican members of the Senate and House do not work very hard. Completely apart from issues of fanaticism or craziness, there is the quantifiable matter of work ethic. Much in the news: this Congress has seen bills become law at the slowest pace in 100 years, even as this president has used the veto power hardly at all.
In the Senate, the reason for such low productivity has been filibusters, with the last 5 years containing 90% of the filibusters across the entire history of the republic. In the House, where the majority has its way easily, the problem is that the GOP is the majority. The minority has zero power in the House. The onus at all levels and in all ways for what happens there falls on the majority.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/12/03/248565341/lawmakers-in-name-only-congress-reaches-productivity-lows
Consider this statistic to be a fluke? Ever since the far more active, republican-led Congresses headed by Newt Gingrich gave way to the New Republicans controlled by Rupert Murdoch, every chamber led by Republicans (House or Senate) has broken records for lowest numbers of days in session, fewest hours attended by majority members, fewest committee hearings and fewest subpoenas issued. That last statistic is especially telling, for a party that screams publicly about corruption in the Obama administration, yet holds almost no investigation hearings and calls almost no witnesses.
(Despite such screams earlier - that the Clinton Administrations was "the most corrupt in US history," during the first 6 years of GW Bush's tenure, when every branch and lever of government as in GOP hands and FBI agents were diverted from counter-terror duties to search for Clinton era corruption "smoking guns," not ONE senior Clintonite official was even indicted for any kind of malfeasance of office, the first time that has happened, ever. Talk about calling white black!)
By the way, the recent dismal Congressional inactivity record would be even worse, if you remove the nearly FIFTY times the US House of Representatives has passed futile and pointless bills to cancel Obamacare, knowing they would get nowhere. The Senate passed a budget. The House has not only failed to do so, it has refused more than twenty invitations to attend House-Senate Budget Reconciliation talks, which the Constitution prescribes as the method (not shut-downs and sequesters) for getting our fiscal home in order. During the Gingrich Era, such meetings worked. Why not now? (Hint, it has to do with the reason that Rupert Murdoch had Newt fired.)
Now the response of any Republican who has read this far is predictable. The cant on the far right is to proclaim that government rigor mortis is a gooood thing! Determined to ensure that government of the people, by the people SHALL perish from the Earth, the New Confederates, adore deathlike inactivity, even though it is the most hypocritical thing imaginable.
Think! If government is to big, then the agenda should be to pass bills that aim to simplify and to deregulate. Um… duh? And on that basis, democratic offers to reduce the number of tax loopholes should be something that any non-hypocrite conservative would be willing to discuss… along with other simplifications.
But for all their howling against Big Government, the GOP never brings forward any bills to actually de-regulate or simplify. ALL of the major acts of de-regulation in our lifetime -- e.g. elimination of the horrid/captured Interstate Commerce Commission, or the Civil Aeronautics Board, or telecom deregulation, trucking… and the greatest deregulation of all… the unleashing of the Internet -- every one of these deregulations were performed by democrats.
Oh but there's one exception. One industry that the Republican Party has taken the lead in deregulating, not once but over and over again, across the last 40 years, stripping the power of the peoples' agencies to oversee and watch for excesses by banks, S&Ls, Wall Street and so on. The Finance Industry. In that one narrow field, the Republican Party at least thirty times pushed through active bills stripping away supervision. And time and again the results were the same… another giant rape-raid of the middle class.
Sorry, this is inconvenient. And double sorry that it is not "argument by pithy FaceBook-posted jpeg." But dig this. Not one of my objections or denunciations had a single aspect that was "leftist." I push people to read Adam Smith more than anyone else alive! Indeed, it is the way that the Koch-Murdoch-Sa'udi owned and insane new version of the GOP has betrayed Adam Smith's capitalism that makes me infuriated. That and the utter refusal of today's "ostrich" conservatives to face the simple fact that can then lead to hard-healing. To admit that:
"My side has gone stark, jibbering insane."