No, Both Sides Don't Do It

President Obama took on the Villagers Thursday night at a fundraiser and tore into the "both sides do it" nonsense that somehow it's not the GOP blocking every piece of legislation that's causing nothing to come out of Washington.

“You’ll hear if you watch the nightly news or you read the newspapers that, well, there’s gridlock, Congress is broken, approval ratings for Congress are terrible. And there’s a tendency to say, a plague on both your houses. But the truth of the matter is that the problem in Congress is very specific. We have a group of folks in the Republican Party who have taken over who are so ideologically rigid, who are so committed to an economic theory that says if folks at the top do very well then everybody else is somehow going to do well; who deny the science of climate change; who don’t think making investments in early childhood education makes sense; who have repeatedly blocked raising a minimum wage so if you work full-time in this country you’re not living in poverty; who scoff at the notion that we might have a problem with women not getting paid for doing the same work that men are doing.

“They, so far, at least, have refused to budge on bipartisan legislation to fix our immigration system, despite the fact that every economist who’s looked at it says it’s going to improve our economy, cut our deficits, help spawn entrepreneurship, and alleviate great pain from millions of families all across the country.

“So the problem…is not that the Democrats are overly ideological — because the truth of the matter is, is that the Democrats in Congress have consistently been willing to compromise and reach out to the other side."

Why would Republicans want to work with Democrats to make America better when their entire base runs on hatred, anger, and fear?

“So when you hear a false equivalence that somehow, well, Congress is just broken, it’s not true. What’s broken right now is a Republican Party that repeatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the economy, create more jobs, ensure fairness, open up opportunity to all people.”

Of course President Obama understands this.  Instinctively, Americans do too. A perfect example of this is the Warren Terrah and the Authorization of Use of Military Force declaration Congress made in 2001 for the war we've now been fighting for 13 years.  Both the AUMF and the terrorist detention facility at Gitmo remain ugly symbols of our permanent war, and they remain there because of Republicans.

You might want to keep in mind that Republicans keep passing bills specifically designed to prevent President Obama from being able to do things like close Gitmo.  That's why it's still open.  Period.