Listening to John Boehner and House Republicans tell it, you'd think that the 2012 election was all about the American people voting to empower the GOP to obstruct the president's agenda at every turn. "The American people voted for divided government!" so that's what they'll get, by golly! They're just listening to the American people.
But according to the closing tallies of the 2012 election, the American people didn't vote for the "two sides" to come together and agree to meet Republicans halfway for a deal on a forcible rape-based economy.
Think Progress reports:
As of this writing, every single state except Hawai’i has finalized its vote totals for the 2012 House elections, and Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1,362,351 votes in the overall popular vote total. Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only 48.03 percent — meaning that the American people preferred a unified Democratic Congress over the divided Congress it actually got by more than a full percentage point. Nevertheless, thanks largely to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have a solid House majority in the incoming 113th Congress.
Either Republicans are tone deaf, or they just refuse to listen, but because they've gerrymandered themselves into majority power in the U.S. House of Representatives for the foreseeable future, they'll continue to cling to that power and intentionally misread the election. Because everyone knows the American people voted to butcher the safety net to give tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.
Republicans did not win a policy mandate equal to the president, laughable as they insist, and what power they do have, they've essentially stolen. They're not negotiating as equals, as much as they're negotiating as the various fringe minorities that constitute today's Republican party.
But you can't tell them that because they seem to be listening to some other America. An America where we're all billionaires and corporations, and we can never get enough pollution, or religion in public school. This America they're listening to, someone should check to see if it actually exists before we do what it tells us.