Pictured: Republican House member (via morguefile.com)

Negotiation is the process of reaching a compromise between two or more opposing parties, each of whom has something the other wants, and who has the legal right to grant or withhold it. My experience has mostly been in litigation, where a plaintiff has a viable claim, and a defendant has the ability to offer a monetary and/or injunctive settlement. The usual purpose of a settlement in litigation is to avoid the future costs/risks of continuing to prosecute or defend the case.

If one party to a lawsuit is asserting claims or withholding evidence in bad faith, proper negotiation is impossible. In many litigation scenarios, a party who engages in such bad faith, or their counsel, may be subject to penalties. In a contract negotiation, the subsequent discovery that a party has withheld or misrepresented material information could be construed as breaching the contract, could invalidate the contract, or could justify modifying the contract on terms favorable to the other party. Our political system, apparently, does not have equivalent checks, unless voters actually go to the effort of holding their elected representatives accountable. This brings us to the current hubbub over House Republicans’ determination to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) at all costs.

The ACA passed with a majority vote of Congress in early 2010. That it passed by largely party-line vote has never invalidated legislation in the past, but that is apparently a strong argument in the minds of the ACA’s opponents.

While the results of the 2010 elections might seem like something of a repudiation of Obama’s presidency up to that point, House Republicans have had over 2.5 years since then to propose changes to the ACA or their own healthcare measure. Instead, all they have done is vote to repeal it, something they know is doomed to failure. If they had any ideas of their own for healthcare reform, they would have brought them up by now, but the truth is that much of the ACA, specifically the individual insurance mandate, was once touted as a conservative alternative to a single-payer system. Since they now oppose something that was once their idea, they ought to have a new alternative, but all they have is the status quo.

In the summer of 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the ACA.

In the 2012 election, voters had a choice between the guy for whom the ACA was nicknamed, and a guy who pledged to repeal the law on his first day in office. (Let’s ignore for a second the fact that presidents cannot single-handedly repeal laws.) Voters chose the guy for whom the law is nicknamed by a comfortable margin.

Since then, Republicans in the House have demanded a legislative agenda that is almost identical to the platform of the guy who lost the 2012 presidential election. They somehow still have the gall to accuse the President and the Senate of refusing to negotiate. Negotiation occurs when each side has something the other side needs. House Republicans have nothing to negotiate with, so instead they denied the government a budget, forcing it to shut down. They may still prevent the government from paying its debts in what might be a violation of the 14th Amendment (“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law,…shall not be questioned.”)

This is not a party coming to the table for a good-faith negotiation. This is a party that has taken a hostage and is barking demands through a megaphone. Don’t give me any crap about how the Democrats did it too under Bush, because no. At worst, they held up  judicial nominees at a time when Republicans controlled the entire Congress and the White House. They never shut everything down, and they certainly never demanded anything remotely resembling a “liberal” agenda in exchange for doing their jobs.

Imagine for a second if the Democrats, during that brief time between 2001 and 2003 when they had a thin majority in the Senate, had demanded that the Republican majority enact a single-payer healthcare system, impose background checks for all gun purchases, renew the assault weapons ban, overhaul the immigration system with a mass grant of legal status to people who entered the U.S. as children, and whatever other sort of  schemes Republicans seem to think liberals always want to do (replace the national anthem with “It’s Raining Men,” let’s say); on penalty of a total government shutdown. That’s pretty much what House Republicans have done this year, demanding a grab bag of conservative and Tea Party agenda items (which they can’t get through normal legislative channels) in exchange for actually acting like legislators.

So don’t try to tell me that the government shutdown is somehow the Democrats’ fault for refusing to negotiate. I know you are lying.

Photo credit: greyerbaby from morguefile.com.