Obama Seeks to Ease Partisan Gridlock

WASHINGTON (MNS) In a move that is being widely hailed as a bold step toward breaking partisan gridlock in Washington, the Obama Administration, working in cooperation with Democratic chairman of all major Congressional committees, has decided to formalize the Republican minority’s ability to block or wholly denature all of their major legislative projects.

While full details of the plan have not yet been released, anonymous sources inside the Administration are pointing to a system whereby a full text of any new initiative drawn up by the Democratic caucus or any Cabinet department will be turned over to the staffs of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh within 6-12 hours of being drafted. If they object to any of its provisions, the president and his party will strike or re-write the troublesome parts within a matter of hours.

In explaining the move one source said, “We view this as a major advance in transparency. For some time now, our leadership has, with the connivance of the mainstream media, cultivated the idea that having control of the Congress and a 60-vote majority in the Senate means that we can basically pass whatever we want. Unfortunately, this much-repeated meme does not take into account our own mortal fear of the Republican attack machine or our party’s complete lack of governing principles.”

The move was prompted by Congressman Henry Waxman’s recent appearance on Democracy Now. When asked by Amy Goodman why he had dropped his long-standing support for a single payer health system, Waxman replied, “There would have to be massive taxes, increases, to make up for the lost money that’s now being spent by employers for their employees. And by the time we would be through trying to accomplish something like that, the Republicans would demonize it. So what President Obama suggested was a practical compromise way to accomplish the goals that we wanted.”

The source went on, “We decided that if Henry Waxman, who generally passes for a very liberal lawmaker in the Beltway imagination, was openly admitting his quaking fear of the minority party on America’s most progressive news program, there was really no reason to continue our pretense of wanting to take the country in bold new directions on this and other issues.”

When asked how it was that during the Bush years, the Republican party had, with only razor thin majorities in both houses, managed to shift the spectrum of acceptable political thought more dramatically than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, he replied, “ We are different from them.” And then to illustrate his point he told a story. “You know, a the end of every cabinet meeting we invoke the memory of that sports groupie we all knew in college who used to service entire varsity teams in the hope of finding the one guy or girl who would set them up in the suburbs. For years, people have portrayed this as a dishonorable way to proceed. We look at it differently. We very much identify with that willing groupie and figure if we just keep on putting out for the varsity, those good jobs will be there for us all on K Street in 2012 or 2016”.