Republicans, I’m told, were elected to Congress by the people, and yet they’ve done absolutely nothing. This indictment has now mutated into “Republicans gave President Obama everything he wanted,” i.e., the GOP and Obama were basically colluding against the American voter this whole time.
Republicans have been dreadful on plenty of fronts — the quality of their advocacy, the spine they show making arguments, and the lack of innovation and malleability in the focus of their policies, to name a very few — but resistance to Obama’s legislative agenda was definitely not one of them. If Republicans had capitulated in the way the average angry populist claims, Obama would not have needed to enact some of the most consequential abuses of executive power since World War II.
Some of this anger is propelled by false expectations and wishful thinking about how government works — which is to say, when voters don’t get what they want they assume the system has failed. On one hand, voters are under the impression that presidents should be able to craft law and policy and make everything great again; and on the other, they are angered about the ineffectiveness of the legislative branch. It all depends on which of these corresponds with their own political affiliation.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
. Just saying...I took the position in an attempt to balance out CEP.