As the Cabinet proceedings have been going along (at a pretty fast clip, it should be noted), every new Republican win has been met with a chorus of how the Democrats in Congress aren't doing enough to block the Republican amending/invoking of lesser-known laws in order to railroad their way through the process. And as a result, we now have Secretaries of Education and State, to name but two, that are not only stupefyingly unqualified for their jobs, but have done everything except explicitly promise to totally upend the current system, regardless of how many middle-class lives are affected.
I'm torn about this, as I'm sure other liberally-minded people are. First of all, I don't want to see the system I've believed in my entire political life bent into something that changes its very nature to exclude people I support, and that allows the buying of Cabinet chairs. This part of me thinks that the remaining Democratic minority must use any means necessary to prevent us from being pushed slowly back into a fascist oligarchy, where government is literally run by big business. The past eight years have been a clusterdump of Republican obstructionism, laced with the threat of (and actual) government shutdowns, and dereliction of patriotic duty by Republicans in order to get their way. Why shouldn't the Democrats do the same?
On the other hand, I think perhaps the worst thing we can do is take this eye-for-an-eye, free-for-all mentality the Republicans have served us, and use it as justification for continuing to do the same ourselves. Even when I'm not sure what I want, I know that don't want this underhanded bullying to become normalized. In fact, I don't know if I could support a Democratic party that uses these tactics, playing chicken with the fate of middle-class citizens over the future of the Affordable Care Act, or mass deportations, or global industrialization, or a host of other important issues that people who don't live in Washington have to deal with every day. That's not the party I want to be a member of on principle, regardless of whether they manage to push their agenda through or not.
But then I vacillate -- I go back to the other side, acceding that politics has really changed, and is not likely to go back as long as these kinds of tactics turn out to be the ones that "win". What the Democrats are doing now is like practicing non-violent protest against a pack of marauding dogs; regardless of your nobility, you're going to lose, and the only lesson they're going to learn is that their tactics won.
What gives me a little ray of hope is that I'm seeing the progressive wing of the Democratic party starting to marshal its forces. The dissenting voices of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are taking concrete form, and don't sound quite as pie-in-the-sky unrealistic as the rhetoric that kept me from becoming a full-on Bernie supporter. Maybe that's the seed that this election has sown; the idea that a grassroots movement which serves everyone, not just the rich/white/straight/Christian/males, can wrest the power away from where it's been entrenched for decades, and start to get America functioning correctly for everyone.
Until then, the true faces of the Republicans in Congress have now been revealed, and naturally, there are two of them: 1) those who are too scared of what they have to lose to call out the obvious insanity of the presidential administration, and 2) those that are going to play along until they can gather whatever self-serving scraps they can, then scramble to get out of the way of Trump's inevitable downfall. I don't know how anyone could be a proud supporter of either of those kinds of person.
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