| Redux |
02-21-2010 05:14 PM |
Despite the partisanship and rancor...and far more filibuster attempts by the minority party than any time in history...the first year of the 111th Congress was as productive or more than any recent session of Congress....or as Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote recently:
Quote:
....this Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president -- and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson.
The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it -- $288 billion -- came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history...
....leveraged some of the stimulus money to encourage wide-ranging education reform in school districts across the country. There were also massive investments in green technologies, clean water and a smart grid for electricity, while the $70 billion or more in energy and environmental programs was perhaps the most ambitious advancement in these areas in modern times. As a bonus, more than $7 billion was allotted to expand broadband and wireless Internet access, a step toward the goal of universal access.
Any Congress that passed all these items separately would be considered enormously productive. Instead, this Congress did it in one bill.
Lawmakers then added to their record by expanding children's health insurance and providing stiff oversight of the TARP funds allocated by the previous Congress. Other accomplishments included a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation law in nearly two decades, a credit card holders' bill of rights and defense procurement reform.
Certainly, the quality of this legislative output is a matter of debate. In fact, some voters, including many independents, are down on Congress precisely because they don't like the accomplishments, which to them smack of too much government intervention and excessive deficits. But I suspect the broader public regards this Congress as committing sins of omission more than commission. Before the State of the Union, the stimulus was never really sold in terms of its substantive measures; it just looked like money thrown at a problem in the usual pork-barrel way. And many Americans, hunkering down in bad times, may not accept the notion of "countercyclical" economic policies, in which the government spends more just when citizens are cutting back.
Most of the specific new policies -- such as energy conservation and protection for public lands -- enjoy solid and broad public support. But many voters discount them simply because they were passed or proposed by unpopular lawmakers...
If the midterm elections in November turn out to be more like 1994, when Democrats got hammered, than 1982, when Republicans suffered a less costly blow, the GOP will probably be emboldened to double down on its opposition to everything, trying to bring the Obama presidency to its knees on the way to 2012. That would mean real gridlock in the face of a serious crisis. Given the precarious coalitions in our otherwise dysfunctional politics, we could go quickly from one of the most productive Congresses in our lifetimes to the most obstructionist.
And voters would probably like that even less.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012902516.html
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Health reform, more than anything else, has clouded and poisoned the environment and this is not all that unusual. To some extent, the debates in Congress in the past over similar major legislative initiatives (Social Security in the 30s, Medicare in the 60s) were rancorous and partisan. The difference being that in the end, the final votes were less partisan.
IMO, more than anything else, it has been a failure of communications for which Obama and the Democratic Congress are now facing the backlash. |
