The beautiful word "Compromise"

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post posits that the 2012 election will not end the gridlock. I think he's right, but I also think we are starting to see the emergence of a theme for the 2012 election. This theme is embodied in the Occupy Wall Street anger, has similar origins to what began the Tea Party, and can even be glimpsed in some of the views of lawmakers in Congress. People want our elected officials to fight the good fight, but in the end they MUST come to a conclusion that moves us forward. That means compromise.

My own view is that the GOP has made compromise a dirty word - at least they have made compromising with Democrats a "sin" (in their own parlance) and therein lies the problem. The GOP chose to make a full-stop in legislation after the 2010 mid-terms. Can you name a single bill that the House has passed? Almost all of the House bills die because they are symbolic base-stirring BS - bills which allow them to point to the "fight" they are fighting on behalf of extreme ideologies of the GOP base - mostly around abortion limits, and the GOP has taken the filibuster to records in terms of invoking it. This latter effort means that even if the GOP gains the Senate, the GOP has set a precedent that the minority party can block anything and everything with the filibuster. This is not governance, this is an insurgency that sacrifices the country in favor of extreme partisanship and fringe ideology. This from Milbanks' article on this topic:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell seems to grasp this in his more candid moments. He has argued that a divided government provides “the best time, and some would argue the only time, to do really hard things, because really hard things done on a partisan basis cannot be accomplished” without creating “a wipeout in the next election.”

That’s certainly true: If Republicans were to win the White House and the Senate and then use that power to rewrite Medicare and Social Security without Democratic support, the backlash would make the Tea Party look genteel.

But just as often, McConnell gets swept up in the wait-’til-next-year logic, as when he said that defeating Obama is “the single most important thing we want to achieve.”

Similar wishes drove Paul Ryan, the House budget committee chairman, to forgo a debt compromise with Democrats in favor of a partisan plan that cuts spending without tax increases. “We need to accentuate” differences, Ryan said, “to give the country a real clear choice” in 2012.

But Americans have already made a clear choice, repeatedly: They want their representatives to compromise. In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 64 percent said lawmakers should attack the debt problem with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. But only 25 percent thought that lawmakers will agree on a plan.

The lack of faith that lawmakers will do the obvious, necessary things goes a long way toward explaining why Congress enjoys an approval rate of 14 percent. In this case, good things do not come to those who wait.

The Tea Party started because people were angry at the Wall Street bailouts. Occupy Wall Street has very similar seminal roots. Americans are polled repeatedly that they want our lawmakers to compromise. Given the GOP intransigence, isn't it time to vote these extremists out of office? I think it is.