With Republicans now trying to undo Obama’s legacy, we should also remember THEIR legacy from the Obama years. In an effort to make Obama a failed president, they broke our political system. Mitch McConnell played a long game that finally gave Republicans both Houses of Congress and the White House. He also gave the country Donald Trump.

Republicans like to blame Obama for the partisanship that’s ripped the country apart, but they own much of the blame. This week, former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor wrote a piece on Obama’s legacy saying, “President Obama started with an outstretched hand, but pulled it back with a policy lurch leftward to a place we could not go.” Cantor says that Obama refused to compromise on the stimulus and on health care, but a look at what Republicans were saying at the time is more revealing.

Just ten days after Barack Obama’s inauguration, House Republicans proudly voted unanimously against the stimulus package. A Heritage Foundation analyst said, “We’ll look back to that vote as one of the most significant votes Republicans cast. It gave them a very coherent voice.” In the Senate, a group of Republicans worked with Democrats to reduce the size of the stimulus and to add more tax cuts, but the final bill only got three Republican votes.

Even more telling is the story of the Obamacare fight. Unlike the narrative pushed by Republicans that it was a rushed bill, the Affordable Care Act was a long debated bill that drug out for almost a year. In his re-telling of it, Cantor claims Democrats refused to adopt Republican plans. More believable is the article Republican columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote at the time the Affordable Care Act finally passed in March, 2010. Frum said of the GOP:

“At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.”

The goal was to make Obama fail, not make government work. Six months later, McConnell defined Republican priorities by saying, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Frum’s article also explains why Republicans will have such a difficult with repealing the ACA.

“…[T]he gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

“Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid?”

Clearly, governing was secondary to scoring political points. The GOP refused to negotiate even when Obama took up their ideas. Today, the GOP believes their own rhetoric and have left themselves with few options to address health care.

Republican intransigence increased when the Tea Party became a major factor in Republican politics. They shut down the government over raising the debt limit and eventually brought down their own House Speaker. While they were unable to stop Obama’s second term, they made Congress increasingly dysfunctional. The House voted more than 50 times to repeal Obamacare but never offered any help in making it work.

In the Senate, Mitch McConnell abused the filibuster to the point that Democrats eliminated it for most confirmation hearings. Republicans were right when they said Democrats would one day regret the decision, but they were wrong to say that they weren’t doing anything the Democrats hadn’t done. By the time, Democratic Leader Harry Reid pulled the so-called “nuclear option,” Republicans were blocking 17 court nominees and 59 administration nominees. To put that in perspective, when Republicans controlled the Senate in 2005, then-GOP Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to use the nuclear option when Democrats held up seven judicial appointments with filibusters.

McConnell’s final and most outrageous act was denying Obama an appointment to the Supreme Court. In disregard for all Senate norms, he refused to hold hearings to replace Antonin Scalia even when Obama nominated a man praised by Democrats and Republicans alike. The goal, again, wasn’t to make government work but to fire up his conservative base and prevent Obama from governing.

As Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote:

“The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Mitch McConnell and the Republicans broke our political system. McConnell played a long game. He understood that the party in the White House would get the blame for government dysfunction and failure. He made Washington as dysfunctional as possible, even while people were struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression. He inflamed the passions of an angry electorate and got Trump as a nominee. In essence, he put partisanship and party politics before the good of the country. Now, we have to live with the mess he made.

Thomas Mills

Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >