I enjoyed reading Robert Kaiser’s take on why Congress no longer functions. For nineteen months, Mr. Kaiser had an inside seat on the drafting of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He did not find the experience uplifting. But he was, at least, reporting on something that worked. The bill became a law, and that is increasingly rare.
Kaiser identifies three reasons why Congress can’t get anything done. Politics always trumps policy, but the disparity has never been worse. Staffers do all the work. Nothing ever gets debated anymore.
If I could summarize these three things and reduce them down to one basic conclusion it is that most members of Congress neither know anything about policy nor care about policy at all. I don’t mean the big things like being pro or anti-choice or generally pro-worker or pro-employer. I’m talking about the nitty-gritty stuff that makes the government function. The legislators don’t even do that kind of work anymore.
Kaiser blames some of the usual suspects, primarily fundraising requirements and the personality types that excel at that kind of thing. But I really think the single biggest reason that Congress is filled with policy illiterates is because one party (and it controls the House) is filled with “benighted…tea party know-nothings.”
In my opinion, the Republican Party, including people who are more mainstream than the tea party folks, is so steeped in anti-government ideology, and so beset by erroneous and even magical beliefs, that it creates a breakdown in dialogue. To give an example of what I’m talking about, think back to the first real outbreak of the tea party. During the last summer recess of 2009, while Max Baucus was dragging his feet on ObamaCare, lawmakers were confronted with waves of angry protesters at their townhall meetings. Barney Frank had a memorable experience at his Dartmouth, Massachusetts townhall, when a woman brandishing a picture of Obama made out to look like Hitler, asked Frank why he was supporting the president’s Nazi policy on health care.
Rep. Frank first responded by asking her “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” Then he concluded with, “Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table; I have no interest in doing it.”
For most Democrats, that’s really the choice they face when it comes time to consider sitting down with a Republican and trying to have a conversation about how to bring down the debt or deal with climate change or stimulate the economy or slow the growth of health care costs.
About the only time Congress functions at all is when committees are doing actual markups of bills. That’s when, for the most part, a lot of the partisanship gets dropped by the wayside. It’d be even better if these markups weren’t televised, but that’s a trade-off with transparency, isn’t it?
I remember watching Sen. Chris Dodd marking up his HELP version of ObamaCare and being amazed at how constructively Tom Coburn was working to improve the bill. Coburn introduced many good amendments that were readily accepted by the Democrats. And then he walked out to cameras and denounced the whole process.
There are still skilled legislators in Congress like Henry Waxman and Orrin Hatch, but they’re becoming a rarer breed. I think Thad Cochran is a solid legislator and I kind of hope he doesn’t retire. But, for the most part it no longer matters whether people are skilled or not, because the Republican Party isn’t interested in running the federal government anymore. They just want to destroy it.
Did you read about the brouhaha in the Senate this week between Susan Collins and John McCain (on one side) and Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul (on the other)?
They were arguing over whether or not to appoint conferees to enter negotiations with the House on a Budget Resolution. A Budget Resolution is a blueprint for writing appropriations bills. It doesn’t go to the president for a signature and it isn’t a law. All it does is say that Commerce gets x amount of money and Interior gets y, and Transportation gets z, etc. Then the relevant committees figure how they’re going to spend the money. But Sen. Mike Lee was arguing that he would not allow the appointment of conferees without assurances that the committee would not do something to extend the debt limit. John McCain tried to explain to him that the debt limit could only be extended by passing a law that the president signs, and that it couldn’t be extended by a mere resolution.
John McCain discovered what it is like to argue with a living room table.
