Specter: GOP the “party of obstructionism.”
As President Obama loves to say, let me be perfectly clear: I’m not about to argue this point with Sen. Specter.
You know. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA). He was a Democrat until political opportunity made him a Republican in 1955, and he was a Republican until political oppportunity made him back into a Democrat in 2009.
Yeah, him. He called the GOP the “party of obstructionism.” Via Think Progress and Memeorandum:
On the Republican side, it’s no, no, no. A party of obstructionism. … You have responsible Republicans who had been in the Senate – like Howard Baker, Bob Dole, or Bill Frist – who say Republicans ought to cooperate. Well, they’re not cooperating.
Obstructionists. Not cooperating.
Well, duh.
When you’re a political party whose philosophy (speaking very generally) calls for limited government, smaller government, which considers any expansion of government power to be an equal limitation of personal freedom, then you tend to oppose much of what government followers, functionaries, fetishists want to do.
And you willingly, purposefully, obstruct.
That’s not a bug, Sen. Specter. It’s a feature. In fact, part of the reason the Republican Party is in the mess it’s in these days is that they — the national GOP — forgot about all that. They became the “me, too!” party. Or so it seemed. They did all they could to prove that they could spend just as well as Democrats. They could create new and expensive and encompassing programs just as well as Democrats.
Part of the reason they’re so far out of power right now is: they stopped being the “party of obstructionism.”
Would they would not have.
(The TrogloPundit, a.k.a. Lance Burri, is returning to political commentary after suffering his worst week of football picks ever.)