Crooks and Liars:
Matt Taibbi takes the Republicans apart for becoming the party that has removed itself from the legislative process. When MSNBC's Carlos Watson tries to tell him that since they're in the minority all they can bring to the table is guerrilla warfare, Taibbi responds.
Taibbi: What you are saying when you say that is that the GOP is serving as the rodeo clowns or the class clowns of this horrific financial era.
One of the problems they have is that they've really taken themselves out of the picture as a serious force in the Congress. The Minority Leader, John Boehner, has told the party that the GOP has to get used to being not legislators, and they have to focus on being instead communicators, which means they really haven't proposed any serious alternatives to the Obama budget which makes them really non-players in the whole congressional picture.
Watson: Hang on for a second, because they could legitimately say the way the House of Representatives works, those who are in the minority, particularly those who have 80 fewer votes than the Democrats, they realistically don't have a role to play. The best thing they can do is offer guerrilla tactics, if you will, and they can say in the Senate they are doing as much as they can.
Taibbi: The business of legislating is a long, hard slog, and you have to form these bills in committee and all these guys work together constantly. And when they say at the outset that they're not going to propose alternatives, that takes them out of markup process, it takes them out of the committee process. It really makes them non-players throughout the nuts and bolts of the bureaucratic legislative process, and that's what they've done.
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