EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM: The TerryReport

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As The TerryReport has been saying for a long time, the Republicans are winning many battles in Washington, DC, not by getting things done, but by setting the national agenda. They have managed to turn discussion almost entirely toward their points: cutting back on government spending, reducing (at some unknown future time) the size of the national debt and making government itself seem like an enemy of the people. Here is a clip from a well informed New Yorker magazine article with a link:

These days, Republicans may be losing politically and resorting to increasingly anti-majoritarian means, gerrymandering, filibuster abuse,  voter suppression, activist Supreme Court decisions, legislative terrorism, to nullify election results. But on economic-policy matters they are setting the terms. Senator Ted Cruz can be justly described as a demagogic fool, but lately he’s been on the offensive far more than the White House has. The deficit is in fairly precipitous decline, but job growth is anemic, and millions of Americans remain chronically unemployed. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and last year they won a larger share of the national vote in the House than Republicans did. And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over  spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay. “The whole debate over the last couple of weeks is playing against a  backdrop of how much to increase austerity, not to invest in the economy,”Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said last week. “We are living in a time of government withering on the vine.”

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The Washington Monument, pre-earthquake

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