Working with Monsters

You do know what you get when you drain the swamp, don't you? All those Things wandering around in the open.

Some horrified ferment around the tubes this morning on the Times story outing Senate Democrats threatening to collaborate with our monstrous president-elect:

On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, elected Wednesday as the new Democratic minority leader, has spoken with Mr. Trump several times, and Democrats in coming weeks plan to announce populist economic and ethics initiatives they think Mr. Trump might like.

Bernie Sanders was on local NYC radio yesterday saying much the same thing (and voicing strong support, by the way, for minority leader Chuck Schumer, who he says will be a great leader of our diverse organization), and one of my favorite Senate progressives, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, is quoted in the Times story as well, which may—I hope it will—help people rethink what this means.

There's a strong, and completely understandable, revulsion to the idea of working with Trump, who is a very bad and in many ways disgusting man, but I'd like to make a little more than a Devil's advocate case that Democrats or liberals-and-progressives or what you will should be prepared to do this, under certain circumstances that are not all that likely to obtain, as follows:

Take your government hands off my senators

Filibusters don't kill bills, senators kill bills, according to McCain's gang of well-fed elderly mavericks (HuffPost, via ThinkProgress):

"We have so many new members of the Senate, about half of the senators have never seen the Senate work properly because they've only been here five or six years," [Sen. Lamar] Alexander said. "So we're trying to get back to the days when the motion to proceed wasn't used to block so many bills and when the majority leader allowed senators to offer almost any amendment. Most of that has to be established by practice, by good behavior, rather than by changing the rules."

Irate Chagrian senator during the Great Galactic War. From starwars.wikia.com.

It's just like child labor. Outlawing it missed the whole point; what they should have been focusing on was more good bosses, who would treat the little scamps with some kindness, see to their getting some kind of rudimentary education, make sure they had a nutritious lunch, and so forth. But no, liberals just couldn't resist getting involved and putting a stop to the whole thing by burdensome regulation, as usual, and what did we get?

Exactly what you'd expect, that's what. If you outlaw child labor, only outlaw children will have jobs, in fields like illegal drug retail marketing, sex trade, and worse—not to mention how much child labor simply got outsourced to places like Bangladesh and Honduras, cutting our country off from who knows what kind of economic growth.

In the same way, the senate worked just fine in the days of John C. Calhoun and Mark Hanna and silver-voiced Everett Dirksen. The problem nowadays isn't the rules of the institution, it's the inferior class of people that run it. No names, but you must have noticed some of those guys sneakily introducing legislation that could lower your ROI, and you know very well why: because the voters like it. Now they not only want to maneuver those Trojan horses into the chamber, they want to force folks to vote on them, just like in France or something. Can you imagine that? And a lot of those bills could pass!

Surrealism

He was farther out than you thought, with a vengeance. From Christianist News Service (just kidding, Cybercast News Service) News:

Speaking from Capitol Hill on Friday morning after the lack of support for the plan, Boehner was asked, “What went wrong?”

He said, “Listen, there was a perception created that that vote last night was going to increase taxes. Now, I disagree with that characterization of the bill.  But that impression was out there.”

“Now we had a number of our members who just really didn’t want to be perceived as having raised taxes,” he said.  “That was the real issue.”

Boehner continued: “One of my colleagues the other night had an analogy of 100 people drowning in a pool and that he was the lifeguard.  And because he couldn’t save any of them, does that mean he shouldn’t have done anything?  And his point to them was, if I can go in there and save 99 people that are drowning, that’s what I should do as a lifeguard.”

“But the perception was out there, and a lot of our members did not want to have to deal with it,” he said.

Hold that analogy a second, I think it's trying to get away!

Image from Swimming Pool Safety News.

I figure Boehner meant to say "because he couldn't save all of them", because if he couldn't save any of them then he couldn't have saved 99. Obviously for a working lifeguard saving 99 lives in a single pool is a pretty big deal, and worthwhile even if one refractory swimmer goes and drowns anyhow.

But what's the analogy to, actually? Who's in danger of figurative drowning? Because I hadn't heard of the proposals of Plan B being meant exactly to save anybody, unless, well, the Republican members of the House, whose failure to participate in finding a way around or over that fiscal declivity might bring about their figurative extinction.

Or are all the members really lifeguards? Are the potential drowning victims the figurative 99 taxes that are getting lowered against one that is also getting lowered but is getting the perception created that it is getting increased? Or is it really getting increased, and hence a drowning victim, and creating the perception that all of them are getting increased by synecdoche, creating the lifeguards' weary negativity?

Or am I just vainly trying to separate the sheep analogies from the goat analogies? Baaa.