Last Thursday, a Senate committee meeting to advance legislation on child pornography victims sat stymied by a lack of quorum. “Hopefully, one more Republican will show up, so I’m not embarrassed,” said Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Instead, it was Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken who provided the necessary number of members, 25 minutes after the meeting had supposedly started. But before business could restart, Franken had something to get off his chest.
{mosads}“You know, you guys are in the majority,” Franken said. “You know when we were in the majority … we had the responsibility to provide a quorum. And I thought that you guys, your side, didn’t show up because you just resented being in the minority. But now I know … it’s just sheer laziness.”
Ultimately, the committee attendance was 6-5 in favor of the Democrats, because majority Republicans didn’t bother showing up to work.
Franken was overly optimistic in attributing the Republican absences to laziness. Rather, they don’t show up because they hate government, and lack of quorum is a feature of their governing philosophy, not a bug. Nothing underscores this more than the fact that Republicans would rather let bills get marked up with Democratic majorities than show up to do what they were elected (and paid) to do.
Republican disinterest in governing is nothing new, of course, and is consistent with the party’s general hostility to the fact that government exists at all. In the House, Republicans were in session all of 127 days in 2014, compared to the 240 days the average American works per year.
Conservative activist Grover Norquist famously quipped that he wanted to shrink government small enough to drown in a bathtub, and Republicans have worked tirelessly to accomplish that goal. What better way to sour people on the ability of government to improve their lives than to make sure government does nothing positive? And a great way to accomplish that is to not even bother showing up to work at all. If it were up to Republicans last week, Grassley’s committee would not have been able to advance legislation protecting victims of child pornography — and, apparently, that would’ve been fine with them.
But it’s not as if good things happen when they do bother to show up. They’re more interested in stripping away affordable health insurance from 11 million Americans, or passing more restrictions on women’s healthcare, than they are in improving anyone’s life.
Not only have House Republicans now voted 56 times to kill the Affordable Care Act, they’re barely pretending to try and come up with their own solution to the country’s healthcare crisis. Beyond the hilarity of coming up with a conservative alternative to the conservative Heritage Foundation-created Affordable Care Act, the fact is that any alternate legislation would look too much like “governing,” and that’s not the GOP’s interest.
Republican hostility toward helping people is so heavy, the party is holding up passage of funding for the Department of Homeland Security in a gambit to tear undocumented immigrant parents away from their American citizen children. These monsters are literally endangering our national security because it angers them that President Obama will no longer allow the families of American children to be divided.
Last Thursday, it was Democrats who provided the quorum for a Republican-led committee meeting tasked with marking up legislation to help victims of child pornography. That’s because Democrats take their job seriously. It would be nice if Republicans could follow suit.
Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.