The current issue of The New Yorker has a story by Dexter Filkins on the growing risk of war between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon ("Will Hezbollah and Israel Go to War?"). It delves deeply into not just the current crisis, but the entire history of Hezbollah, which was founded in 1985. Hezbollah has had the military aim of destroying Israel ever since. It has adopted a political strategy inside Lebanon as well, preventing the existence of a functioning government in that nation. American politics aren't explicitly addressed in Filkins's article, but I recognized a similarity between Hezbollah's tactics and the GOP's.
Lebanon has been without a President and a functioning legislature since 2022. According to the constitution, parliament elects the President, and the candidate favored by Hezbollah—with Iran's backing—has been unable to secure the necessary votes. Hezbollah's elected representatives are seen as unusually competent ("some of the hardest-working people in parliament," a cabinet member told me), but their main task is to secure a head of state sympathetic to their priorities. Whenever members of the opposition move to elect a President on their own, the Hezbollah representatives and their allies walk out of the chamber, making a quorum impossible. Since 2022, this drama has repeated itself dozens of times. The former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told me, "Parliament is unable to exercise even its most basic powers."Source: The New Yorker.
Hezbollah can't get its way, but it can keep anything from getting done until it does.
That reminded me of how the GOP has approached governing in Washington, DC. Going back at least as far as 2016, when Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings on President Obama's nominee for an open seat on the Supreme Court, the GOP has taken to extreme measures to prevent Congress from exercising even its most basic powers until it can get its own way. This continues into this current election year.
In February, Senate Republicans killed a bipartisan border security bill that even the GOP's chief negotiator, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), described to NBC News as "by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades." But GOP support evaporated when Donald Trump came out against it because he didn't want President Biden to share in the credit of passing the bill. In a social media post, Trump wrote, "A Border Deal now would be another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats. They need it politically."
The GOP doesn't want to solve problems. They want to campaign on them.
The parallel political strategies of Hezbollah (keeping Lebanon's parliament from electing a president) and the GOP (keeping Congress from passing even a bipartisan border security bill) might not be directly connected. They might just be a case of two extremist political parties adopting similar political practices to accomplish their own extremist ends. But the parallels between Hezbollah and the GOP are discouraging to anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.
And that's what I learned today.
"Parallels arise,
Politics in different lands,
Governance at risk."
—h/t ChatGPT
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