The Wisdom of Bob Dole
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Bob Dole no longer recognizes the Republican Party that he helped lead for years. Speaking over the weekend on “Fox News Sunday,”
he said his party should hang a “closed for repairs” sign on its doors
until it comes up with a few positive ideas, because neither he nor
Ronald Reagan would now feel comfortable in its membership.
“It seems to be almost unreal that we can’t get together on a budget or
legislation,” said Mr. Dole, the former Senate majority leader and
presidential candidate. “I mean, we weren’t perfect by a long shot, but
at least we got our work done.”
The current Congress can’t even do that, thanks to a furiously
oppositional Republican Party, and that’s what has left mainstream
conservatives like Mr. Dole and Senator John McCain shaking their heads
in disgust.
The difference between the current crop of Tea Party lawmakers and Mr.
Dole’s generation is not simply one of ideology. While the Tea Partiers
are undoubtedly more extreme, Mr. Dole spent years pushing big tax cuts, railing at regulations and blocking international treaties.
His party actively courted the religious right in the 1980s and relied
on racial innuendo to win elections. But when the time came to actually
govern, Republicans used to set aside their grandstanding, recognize
that a two-party system requires compromise and make deals to keep the
government working on the people’s behalf.
The current generation refuses to do that. Its members want to dismantle
government, using whatever crowbar happens to be handy, and they don’t
particularly care what traditions of mutual respect get smashed at the
same time. “I’m not all that interested in the way things have always
been done around here,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told The Times last week.
This corrosive mentality has been standard procedure in the House since
2011, but now it has seeped over to the Senate. Mr. Rubio is one of
several senators who have blocked a basic function of government: a
conference committee to work out budget differences between the House
and Senate so that Congress can start passing appropriations bills. They
say they are afraid the committee will agree to raise the debt ceiling
without extorting the spending cuts they seek. One of them, Ted Cruz of
Texas, admitted that he didn’t even trust House Republicans
to practice blackmail properly. They have been backed by Mitch
McConnell, the minority leader, who wants extremist credentials for his
re-election.
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