Article first published as Indictment of the American People on Technorati.

The 2010 midterm election is more an indictment on the American people than the politicians of either party.

The Democrats spent the last 22 months trying to save our nation from the ravages of Republican rule. They made mistakes along the way, but everything they did was a move toward helping and protecting average Americans. Meanwhile, instead of helping to create jobs and restore the economy, the Republicans did everything possible to force extended suffering for their political advantage — tragically, the American people have rewarded them for their treachery.

Way to go America!

For the record, President Obama and the 111^th Congress inherited the worst American economic collapse since the Great Depression. The average American household had lost a quarter of their wealth, $13 trillion in all. The Dow would close at a low of 6,547, with stocks overall dropping from a high of $22 trillion to $9 trillion. Job loss was at 3 million for 2008, and the economy was still shedding more at a rate of over 600,000 per month.

The first action the new Congress took was to stop the hemorrhaging with the federal Stimulus. Split between $228 billion in tax cuts for 95% of Americans, $224 billion in funding to help the unemployed and prop up Medicaid, and $275 billion for direct investment in job creating infrastructure, energy and technology projects, the legislation passed the House without a single Republican vote.

The very same Republicans who had voted in favor of spending $700 billion to bailout Wall Street bankers just three months prior, suddenly became budget conscious and adopted intransigent positions against spending to help average Americans. Republican leaders, including John Boehner and Eric Cantor, rallied to the aid of Wall Street but dug in their heels and fought against helping Main Street.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that the writing was already on the wall the moment that President Obama took office. The initial action of a Republican minority to oppose the Stimulus grew into unrelenting opposition to any form of legislation that would help the American people, impede the unfettered profiteering of Wall Street, or slow the offshoring of jobs.

While the Democrats continued striving to keep the average American’s nose above water, the Republicans did everything they could to make sure they kept choking.

Democrats attempted to address the issue of more than 45 million Americans without healthcare insurance. And instead of working to ensure that any legislation was effective, instead of embracing reform to deal with skyrocketing costs, the Republicans blocked all attempts without compromise. They fought to maintain the profits of healthcare insurers and Big Pharma and instead of helping to govern, seized the opportunity for political advantage with fear-mongering sound bites about the “government takeover” of medical services, death panels and the coming of Armageddon. All incidentally complete lies!

The Democrats later attempted to pass Wall Street reform to prevent a future round of too-big-to-fail collapse and bailout. The Republican response was to meet with the Wall Street bankers and plan their strategic opposition. The bill passed the House, again without a single Republican vote, but it was in diluted form in order to gain any minority support in the Senate.

For 22 months, the Republicans fought every action taken to create jobs. They opposed legislation to address the rising costs of education. They attempted to block Democratic efforts to close tax loopholes and stop the bleeding of jobs overseas. They fought against repairing our infrastructure, against small business aid, against unemployment insurance, against saving the jobs of teachers, nurses and firefighters. They argued against the President’s attempts to hold BP responsible for destroying the ecosystem of the Gulf and blocked efforts to increase their liability limits. They battled against climate legislation, clashed on the issue of gays in the military, and resisted all attempts to require disclosure of campaign funding sources They even opposed legislation to lend aid to 9/11 first responders and stood against extending the Bush tax cuts unless the extension included the richest 2%.

The bottom line is that the Republicans did everything they could, from gross distortion to outright lying, from uncompromising rhetoric to unprecedented filibuster to stop any form of legislation that might improve the lot of average Americans. Their aim was to make things as bad as they possibly could for the American people in order to leverage their misery for political gain — and they were rewarded for it.

Manipulated to feed the source of their exploitation, the American electorate deserves an indictment for societal insanity. But there’s no sense in convening a jury, because all evidence points to the conclusion that the defendant is already brain dead. This is a sad day for America.

Article first published as Can Republican Obstructionism be Morally Justified? on Technorati.

In 2008, our nation experienced the most devastating blow to the economy in nearly 80 years. When President Obama took office, the country was hemorrhaging nearly 600,000 jobs per month, and instead of helping address the crisis, the Republicans in the Congress united to obstruct any and all actions taken by Democrats. This complete refusal of an entire party to participate in the process of government is without precedent. Is there really any moral justification for self-serving obstructionism?

The only action taken by the Congress that enjoyed widespread Republican support was the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which was initiated under President Bush and served mostly to save the Wall Street banks and protect the profits of the very wealthy. But once Obama took the helm, regardless of the fact that unemployment was already at 7.6% and climbing, the Republicans, to the person, decided that their chances for reelection and a return to power were better served by blocking or at least stalling any legislation to promote economic recovery.

The Stimulus was the first major effort of the Congress to help middle and working class Americans. With 3.6 million jobs already lost in the recession, the Democrats were quick to assemble some form of relief. The legislation could certainly have been better formed, but instead of offering thoughtful amendment, instead of participating in the process of government they were elected to serve, the Republicans sat on the sidelines and used the media to launch every form of unsubstantiated ridicule and criticism they could muster. Even to this date, and in spite of the widespread acknowledgment of positive impact by economists, Republicans still attack the stimulus without substance.

But this was just the beginning. On and on the story went, with Republicans in both chambers working against anything that might prove beneficial to the average American. With 47 million people not covered with health insurance, the Republicans fought healthcare reform, and arguably prevented a system that could have reduced costs from being implemented. With the financial system that created the collapse of the economy still intact, Republicans fought against legislation to plug the holes and prevent a similar crash from occurring in the future.

Republicans in Congress fought against job aid to the states. They blocked lifting of the cap on liability for BP’s Gulf oil disaster. They obstructed the closing of loopholes to prevent further offshoring of American jobs; they filibustered small business stimulus; they’ve even set records for the blocking of presidential appointments. There really is no doubt that the Republican agenda, as set by the Party leader when President Obama was elected, Rush Limbaugh, is to do everything in their power to ensure that the President fails — no matter what the cost to average Americans.

Without a filibuster, House Republicans have been unable to obstruct at the level of their party brethren in the Senate. As a result of this discrepancy, the current Congress has passed 420 pieces of legislation through the House of Representatives that are presently stalled in a Senate where the Republican minority filibusters anything and everything, just because it can.

The Senate filibuster, which was insightfully omitted from the Constitution by the Founding Fathers for exactly the reasons of obstruction we now see being played out, has only existed in its present form since 1917.  But after decades of sparing use, the last two Republican minorities have made the filibuster much more prevalent in the Senate than the vote. The last Republican minority set the all-time record for filibusters at 139, but the present crop wasted no time in trying to keep up. Those 420 blocked bills are the result of 118 filibusters through the middle of September.

Over the course of going on two years of a Democratic Presidency and Congress, the Republicans have found nothing that they could support as a party. They have been the categorical “Party of No,” and have not joined the majority in passing a single piece of major legislation to address the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Things are so bad that the Republican minority even recently blocked defense spending.

The only thing that Republicans have joined together to support since Bush’s TARP is the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But of course, even this support only materialized in opposition to the Democratic position to extend the cuts for only the middle class.

Republican voters need to ask themselves whether or not they really want to support a party that will fight to protect the rich, that will even promote the falsehood that tax cuts for the rich benefit anyone but the rich. They need to ask themselves if they really want to support a party that will deliberately obstruct the very process of government they are sworn to protect. And most importantly, they need to ask themselves if they can support the utterly immoral tactic taken by Republicans to sit idly by and allow Americans to suffer so that they could improve their chances of regaining political power.

To argue that the dysfunction of the federal government is purely a Republican issue would be naïve. Long unable to move forward on Democratic legislation, the new Congressional majority of 2009 was quick to let loose and take advantage of a Democratic executive branch.

The ARRA was the first significant legislation to wear the stamp of a Congress controlled by Democrats. Although it has been successful, in spite of Republican spin, one has to wonder how effective it might have been if more keenly honed to address directly the specific issue of job creation. It’s true that it included $288 billion in tax relief that cut the tax bills of 95% of Americans, and that it also sent $224 billion to aid the states and pin up Medicaid and unemployment insurance. But the $275 billion that went to direct investment was not, like the other portions, intended to sustain current spending and break the fall. It was allocated for the express purpose of creating jobs.

It is within this direct investment component of the stimulus that the Democrats established their most resounding successes, but unfortunately it also exhibits their most disappointing failures. There’s little room for legitimate complaint about the $90 billion allocated for clean energy or the $20 billion that will fund the digitizing of medical records. Both of these programs will pay dividends to American taxpayers far into the future. But the vast sum of grant money distributed into the black hole of government gives cause for concern and lends substance to the Republican argument that Democrats are all about bigger government.

Though the data is not coded to ease such extraction, a brief analysis of the information provided for download at http://www.recovery.gov/ reveals some interesting facts. The data representing all allocations through the end of June includes 347,915 awards of contracts, grants and loans, totaling $237 billion. Interestingly, a query of the data looking for “recipients” with a name that includes “school” or “education” finds 59,916 awards totaling $47 billion. Similarly, a search of “college” or “university” nets 26,047 awards for nearly $17 billion. Looking for funding that went to cities, a query of “city of” returns 16,364 award and another $17 billion; counties apparently received on the order of $12 billion, state departments of transportation around $19 billion, and other state departments and housing authorities close to $20 billion more.

All told, on the order of $131 billion appears to have gone to government organizations. This is not to say that none of this funding found its way into the private sector, or that thousands of private sector jobs were not created. Many of these government agencies, from school districts to transportation departments, maintain a practice of subcontracting to industry vendors. But once the money is fed into the bureaucratic machine, suspicion arises, and rightfully so. Such practice is viewed as more SNAFU (Situation Normal All Fouled Up) because accountability and transparency are severely obscured. The result is that both the motivation and effectiveness of the investments is appropriately called into question.

Fortunately for Republicans, not long after the Stimulus, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. From that point on, steadfast Republican obstruction has reigned supreme over timid Democratic initiative. As stated above, the Republicans, without doubt, deserve their share of the blame in this, but if not for the Democrat’s extreme lack of intestinal fortitude, much more meaningful legislation could have been passed. From healthcare to finance reform, the Democrats have allowed themselves to be bullied, never once requiring the filibustering Republicans to actually stand up and control the floor of the Senate. Instead, each time they compromised and produced diluted legislation of questionable worth.

In the end, the most well defined accomplishment of our near completely dysfunctional Congress is a starkly polarized populace. Americans on both sides of the debate blame the other. The Tea Party blindly carries the banner of smaller government and continues to grow in its numbers, railing against an ineffective government but upholding positions that only promise to make it more so. When will we learn?

Government is not the enemy, but the sorry excuse in Washington sure is. The solutions are before us, but the path we’ve chosen, through two political parties that fight harder for control than for the wellbeing of the nation is leading us to destruction. The American people need to wake up, to refuse to listen to anymore political rhetoric and to start asking more intelligent questions. America doesn’t need smaller government, nor does it need larger — it needs effective government, and it needs it now.