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Nevilledog

(51,184 posts) Fri Jan 29, 2021, 07:08 PM Jan 2021

"Many of my fellow politicians won't tell voters the truth. The result was Jan. 6."

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Adam B. Kushner
@AdamBKushner
Amazing piece by Eric Cantor, former House leader: "Many of my fellow politicians won’t tell voters the truth. The result was Jan. 6."

Perspective | Many of my fellow politicians won’t tell voters the truth. The result was Jan. 6.
Telling the public only what it wants to hear is no way to keep democracy going
washingtonpost.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/many-of-my-fellow-politicians-wont-tell-voters-the-truth-the-result-was-jan-6/2021/01/28/08e38ff6-618a-11eb-afbe-9a11a127d146_story.html

In the fall of 2013, in the middle of what was at the time the second-longest government shutdown in American history, Republican leaders in Congress kept asking each other one question: “How did we end up here?” That is also the question I have had in recent weeks, especially as I witnessed the violent attack on our Capitol and our democracy on Jan. 6.

The answer is the same in both cases: an unwillingness to speak truth to power. In businesses, employees speak truth to power when they deliver unwelcome facts to their bosses. In government, appointed officials do that when they tell elected leaders something they don’t want to hear. But in a democracy, the people are the ultimate source of power. Our elected officials work for us, and they fail us when they decline to tell us truths that we, the people, don’t want to hear.

Even worse, they fail us when they set up false expectations we desperately want to believe.
Back in 2013, the expectation was that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives could force the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass — and compel President Barack Obama to sign — a repeal of his signature health-care initiative. This false narrative started with a few outside groups like Heritage Action and Tea Party Express arguing that the barrier to repealing Obamacare wasn’t the president; it was elected Republicans who were unwilling to fight hard enough. These groups purposely ramped up expectations, overpromising, even knowing that the end result would under-deliver.

At first, this was a political headache for me and my colleagues: Few elected Republicans wanted to spend much time or political capital refuting people who were part of the base. But then a small group of lawmakers in the House and the Senate, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), started telling the base what they longed to hear: that Republicans could indeed defund Obamacare simply by insisting on it as part of a larger annual government spending bill. These members, and indeed every other elected Republican, knew better, but very few were willing to say so. I had dozens of meetings with individual lawmakers, as well as group sessions, imploring my colleagues to take a different approach, because shutdowns don’t work. Often, these same members would leave the meetings and go on cable TV to talk about how leadership wasn’t fighting hard enough, and only they were. And the shutdown was born.

*snip*