A New Era Of Comity And Bipartisanship

Somebody forgot to tell Mitch McConnell.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Friday sent a message to Democrats that Republicans are not prepared to bend to a stronger majority.

In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), McConnell urged Reid to adopt a more conciliatory tone and warned him that Republicans will unite against Democrats if he does not. The letter was signed by all 40 GOP senators and two Republican incumbents who are awaiting the results of elections in Georgia and Minnesota.

This is the Senate GOP that obstructed practically every major bill that Democrats tried to bring up for the last two years. That's not going to stop, regardless of how many Republicans are planted in the Cabinet or throughout the federal bureaucracy. At this point, Republicans aren't interested in winning the next election, they're interested in stopping any popular policy and beating this country into the ground.

"Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of "Marxist thought," puts it: "After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments."

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival.""

They have to block health care reform because people will like it. And if government produces, the entire GOP worldview is lost. Bill Kristol said this a long time ago.

The sad thing is that these threats might just work. Reid has an election coming up in 2010 and he'll be thinking about his own political future. And let's just say the Lieberman fiasco didn't exactly inspire confidence about how Senate Democrats deal with the opposition. Now McConnell is trying to set the Congressional agenda:

The minority leader also held an unusually long news conference Friday to reiterate points made in his letter. He said Republicans are not sorry to see President Bush leave office, given his unpopularity, and praised Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for running a “fabulous” campaign “under very, very difficult circumstances.”

McConnell pressed Democrats to address the future of Social Security and urged Republicans to defeat ‘card-check’ legislation that would allow workers to bypass secret-ballot elections when organizing unions.

“What I’m saying to the new president and the new administration: ‘Do big things, and do them in the center, and you’ll be surprised at how much support you might have,’ " he said at the news conference.

Otherwise, McConnell warned, his party would stand together and block a far-left agenda.

“You're likely to have very significant unity among Republicans," he said.

(under the Employee Free Choice Act, if 30% of the workforce wants an secret ballot election they get one. Thought I'd put some facts into the mix)

This is what Barack Obama is stepping into. He's going to offer a hand of friendship and Senate Republicans are going to bite it off. They are thoroughly disinterested in compromise. They view it as a threat.