[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren:

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.

[…] virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

[…]

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy […] Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

[…] focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. […] There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard."

[…] intentionally sabotage government programs by denying them adequate resources and then complain that the programs don’t work, thus justifying further reductions in resources leading to more problems. The goal is to ultimately abolish the program on the grounds of being ineffective.

Of course it always helps if you can also deny the government agency administering a program a permanent leader, as Republicans in the Senate have routinely done during the Obama presidency. This forces agencies to operate on “automatic pilot,” unable to move forward and deal with issues arising within its jurisdiction, thus leading to problems that justify abolition of the agency and the programs it administers.

Another tactic is to make sure that an agency never knows exactly what its budget is. In the last three years, virtually every agency of government has had to deal with wildly fluctuating estimates of how much money it will have to spend, owing to various budget deals, sequestration and Congress’s unwillingness to pass regular appropriations bills, not to mention the constant threat of a government shutdown.

Right now, every agency is operating under a “continuing resolution” that expires on January 15. A “CR,” as it is called, simply allows agencies to spend at the previous year’s rate without any adjustment for inflation or changes necessitated by new laws or changing circumstances. This means that programs that should be cut continue to operate even as those that desperately need funding are deprived of adequate resources.