AS THE summer has gotten underway, the American political landscape is, as has become normal of late, red hot. The talk of reaching across the aisle spoken by both sides following the 2004 elections has given way to partisan wrangling and battle after battle showing that bipartisanship, for all intents and purposes, seems dead in American political life. As the rhetoric seems to only get worse and worse, the hope that proper discourse and true compromise will return to American politics seems to be fading fast.
Unfortunately, some of the people that should be calming things down, party leaders, have been some of the worst offenders. The Democrats have Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, who seems to be in the news about every week for the newest ridiculous allegation he's made against Republicans. Whether it is claiming that Republicans have "never earned an honest living in their lives" or attacking the party for being made up of white Christians (an interesting charge coming from the DNC chair who is, after all, a white Christian), Dean has received much-deserved heat for his comments, and has made it clear that he has no intention of leading the DNC on a constructive path of working with Republicans to attain the goals that both sides believe in.
Dean's statements, however, pale in comparison to the statement made by Senate Assistant Minority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., when he attacked the administration for its handling of Guantanamo Bay by comparing it to Nazi prison camps and Soviet gulags. This was a dangerous statement to make, when it is known claims about American treatment of detainees has sparked violence in the past. Fortunately there were no major incidents as a result of Durbin's speech, but the sheer partisanship Durbin was tapping showed yet again the deterioration of proper discourse in modern politics. In the end, Durbin did at least have the decency to apologize for the statement.
Naturally, the blame does not lie solely with Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has been on the offensive against Democrats all summer. When Frist first became Senate majority leader, many in the Senate spoke of him as a pleasant man known as a consensus builder. Frist's tenure has proven him anything but. Time and time again, Frist has attacked the Democratic Party as being anti-faith (despite the overwhelming majority of party members who are, themselves, very religious), and Frist used the filibuster flap to make the absurd claim that Democrats were just interested in keeping Christians off the bench.
Then just recently there was Karl Rove, the mastermind of President Bush's election victories. Rove gave a speech to a major conservative group arguing that liberals wanted to respond to Sept. 11 by giving the terrorists "therapy." This flat-out ignored poll data collected after Sept. 11 showing that an overwhelming majority of liberals supported a military response. Yet again, Karl Rove proved that even an event that once unified America can now be used to further deepen the divide.
All of these events we have seen this summer have shown more and more that bipartisanship is dying or dead in America. In a country that's practically fifty-fifty, both parties have the power to practically shut down the operations of the government. As bipartisanship continues to falter, the filibuster will become an ever more consistent tool in the Senate, and subsequently no significant government action will be taken on critical issues like Social Security, the environment, or even the inevitable Supreme Court vacancy.
While there is still some glimmer of hope (such as 14 moderate Senators who came together to save the Senate from a meltdown by stopping Frist's absurd "nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster while also ending the Democrats' overuse of the judicial filibuster), bipartisanship is dying in America. The leaders of both parties are continuing on a path to make sure it can't come back to life. The United States is a fifty-fifty country, and until reason and compromise returns to politics, the state of politics in America will only continue to deteriorate, creating disasters in every field of government work. We can only hope the politicians get the picture in time, and that sometime soon, the bickering will end.
Sam Leven is a Cavalier Daily columnist. He can be reached at sleven@cavalierdaily.com.
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