Category Archives: Congress

by | May 1, 2013 · 9:15 PM

Bipartisanship First Fails

I wrote a few months ago how, despite most peoples’ inclination for bipartisan compromise, bipartisanship often falls flat.  There is now a new concept in Washington that I call “bipartisanship first” taking hold.  This idea involves negotiating a framework or bill by congressmen from both sides of the aisle before it goes to committee.  The supposed advantage to this approach is that since both parties agree to the compromise it should be an easy sell.  Sounds logical, right?

Actually, it seems to fail most of the time.  Gun control had a commission with Vice President Joe Biden and a compromise bill with Senators Pat Toomey (R PA) and Joe Manchin (D WV) about universal background checks.  Both failed to produce a passable bill in the senate.  Senator Lindsay Graham attempted to cross the aisle on a cap and trade bill and got lampooned for it by conservatives, and now faces a possible primary challenge in the future.  The Supercommittee and Gang of 6 ideas for deficit reduction also had bipartisan support and went nowhere, which is how we got the sequester in the first place.  Now with immigration reform, despite having Senator Marco Rubio, and others, as voices to bring conservatives on board it seems to be falling apart very quickly.

Why does this keep happening?  There are a few reasons.  First, bipartisan support usually comes from moderates in the other party and does not always translate into votes from the opposing party’s base.  Furthermore that congressmen who “danced with the devil” can always be primaried later.  Second, President Obama is a great target used almost all political ads by Republicans.  If a congressmen crosses party lines to work on something the President wants, he or she will be labeled as “supporting the Obama agenda.”  Finally, supporting a framework or writing a bill is not the same as getting votes.  The best way to guarantee votes is to force all of your party’s members to fall in line.  The healthcare bill, repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill all passed mostly along party lines and were touted as achievements for the Obama administration.

Of course, the Democrats can’t do this now because they only control one chamber of congress and not a filibuster proof majority (60 votes) in the senate to pass bills themselves.  Republicans only control the House.  I do not have a solution to the problem of getting things done.  I am merely pointing out a political trend that seems to be harming more than helping the Obama administration’s legislative goals.

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by | March 12, 2012 · 8:54 AM

Solve the Deficit Problem by Doing Nothing?

By John Stang

Josh Barro thinks the deficit problem will solve itself, but politicians like to meddle too much:

You’ll note that I didn’t write that policymakers will have to “take action.” That’s because, if they do nothing, the budget will move toward balance on its own. Last year’s debt ceiling negotiations produced a deal that is scheduled to produce $2.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years. Meanwhile, the George W. Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the end of December, which would mean an extra $2.8 trillion in revenue.

However, it is widely expected that Congress and the President will intervene to stop many of those gap closing measures, just as they have done in the past. Obama remains committed to making permanent the tax cuts that apply on incomes below $250,000, which is about 80% of the total. Republicans want to make all of the cuts permanent, and all of the GOP presidential candidates want to cut taxes even further than that.

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by | January 21, 2012 · 7:05 PM

It’s All Congress Babe

By John Stang

In the 2012 campaign season, undoubtedly, the presidential race will consume most of the media coverage.  Why wouldn’t it?  After all, it is the campaign for the highest office in the land.  President Obama faces a weak economy, that could get better, but not by much.  The Republicans must prove that things will go better than last time.  In order to appeal to their respective bases, each presidential contender must make promises, some outlandish than others.  Ezra Klein reports on how many of those promises made during the campaign are kept:

Bernstein relies on two studies from the 1980s to make his point. In 1984, Michael Krukones published “Promises and Performance: Presidential Campaigns as Policy Predictors,” and found that “about 75 percent of the promises made by presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Jimmy Carter were kept.” In 1985, Jeff Fishel published “Presidents and Promises: From Campaign Pledge to Presidential Performance,” which argued “that presidents invariably attempt to carry out their promises; the main reason some pledges are not redeemed is congressional opposition, not presidential flip-flopping.”

More recent evidence supports this view, too. Politifact.com has tracked more than 500 promises Barack Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign. It found he has kept 161, passed a compromised version of another 50, and has either been rebuffed by Congress or is making progress toward another 239. In only 56 cases — about 10 percent — has Obama actually broken a promise, and in the biggest of those cases — ending the Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000 — there’s a good chance the promise will be kept when the tax cuts expire at the end of this year.

This is pretty astounding, and slightly better than expected.  What I think people focus on too much is how much a president can accomplish, when really congressional races matter more.  After all, congress does make the laws and having a sympathetic congress can only help a president’s agenda.  This is why I’m very skeptical that if Ron Paul is elected president he could feasibly pass anything he proposes because he must either sign executive orders to do it or go through congress, which is not going to be cheerleading eliminations of federal departments.

It’s not hard to prove this theory.  The reason President Obama had such a successful first part of his first term is that he had a Democratically controlled congress, despite their disagreements on some matters.  George W. Bush was a similar story, he had a Republican controlled House and Senate until 2006.  If the GOP is really angry and wants to turn the country around, they need to take back the senate, much easier said than done.  Of course, as University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball notes:

One thing we do know is that the number of split results in House districts — as in, when voters simultaneously pick one party at the presidential level and another party in their House contest — has steadily declined over the past generation. In 1984, there were 196 split districts: the result of President Ronald Reagan’s romp combined with the reelection of a Democratic House. That number has declined since then to 83 split districts in the 2008 presidential race (split district stats come from Vital Statistics on American Politics). As the conservative Democrat and (especially) the liberal Republican becomes extinct, one can imagine the number of split districts declining further. Of course, individual candidates, issues and scandals will undoubtedly affect some individual races, but the national tides in many places will be paramount.

Needless to say that which direction the country goes will depend a lot less on the presidential campaign than on who controls the House and the Senate.  It’s congress that controls the docket, not the president.

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by | December 21, 2011 · 2:23 PM

Where Congress Should Go on the Payroll Tax Cut?

By John Stang

In light of the house rejecting the senate’s 2 month extension of the payroll tax cut and, and other topics in the bill, many bloggers are offering opinions on what the congress should do next.  First, the Wall Street Journal editorial staff wrote a blistering column against the house GOP.  While the Wall Street Journal says that extending the payroll tax cut for 1 year or 2 months was not a good policy, and that the house members were in the right on this one; they had no strategy for countering attacks and that they should just cut their loses and pass it:

At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post agrees, extend it now and debate it later:

The GOP, if it has not the wherewithal to oppose a payroll tax reduction (When will Congress ever have the nerve to increase it and stem further hemorrhaging of funds available for Social Security? Why not cut the entire tax, according to the Democrats’ logic?), then cut a deal and come back to finish the work in 2012. If the Democrats want another 10 months of payroll tax relief, then Republicans should get something for that (e.g. more cuts, a definitive decision on the pipeline). Just not now. In January.

Others want the GOP to hold their ground and have the senate come back for a fight.  The Heritage Foundation writes:

And this is where America finds itself. The House is in one corner. The President is in another. And Senators checked the box and hopped a flight home for the holidays instead of doing the people’s business and reaching a compromise. Though President Obama would like us to believe the onus is on the House, it’s the Senate that has dropped the ball. And for the sake of the American people, they should come back to Washington and get to work on reaching an agreement.

Dave Weigel at Slate believes the GOP has held out before and they’ll do it again:

Yes, the Republicans are coming off as intransigent. But Democrats want to re-elect the president, so they’ll ultimately give up a lot to extend a tax cut and unemployment benefits. In the meantime, Republicans can figure out what leverage they have to weaken the welfare state. Despite how it looks right now, it doesn’t make sense to doubt them. After all, they’ve had a lot of practice at this.

The National Review  likes the House provisions and think its worth fighting:

By contrast, the House bill is paid for by, among other things, extending the federal pay freeze, reforming government-employee pensions, introducing modest means-testing to Medicare, and stepping up (sadly necessary) efforts to prevent millionaires and illegal immigrants from improperly receiving government checks. Such reforms should hardly be controversial, let alone a cause for which Senate Democrats are willing to make 170 million American taxpayers suffer.

The bill contains more conservative provisions as well, such as checking the devolution of unemployment insurance into de facto welfare, undoing onerous EPA regulations, and implementing a two-year Medicare “doc fix” partially offset by further defunding of Obamacare. But as Speaker Boehner implied in a letter to President Obama, there is room for negotiation on the contours of these provisions — if the Senate will appoint negotiators to join House Republicans in a conference committee, something they have so far been unwilling to do.

Finally, many wonder if the WSJ editorial board understands what their talking about.  Talking Points Memo doesn’t think so:

They seem to have their payroll tax cuts mixed up. The two percent holiday that’s been in effect for the past year, and the extension Congress is fighting about right now, are both toemployees’ share of the Social Security FICA tax. The theory behind the policy is that by increasing worker take-home pay, the cut provides suffering consumers with additional purchasing power, and thus stimulates demand, which is exactly what this sluggish economy needs.

Earlier in the year, President Obama proposed broadening this tax cut to include the employershare of the Social Security FICA tax. That policy operates on the theory that reducing cost-per-employee will create the incentive for job creation. It’s a weaker theory — a lot of big employers are already sitting on a bunch of cash, but aren’t hiring because they don’t have enough customers (see above about demand). But this is what the Wall Street Journal’s editors seem to think has been going on all year — and they’re completely wrong.

In my opinion, the house should just extend the payroll tax cut for a year, which not much different than how other short term tax policy works.  Two months is not ideal, but most businesses will see it as temporary. So if a deal is cut later, that should negate any effects the short term extension has.  Plus, if the GOP does not extend the payroll tax, it will look really bad and seem like they are raising taxes.  Basically, it gives Democrats an election issue to take advantage of.

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by | November 30, 2011 · 4:51 PM

Who Says Bipartisanship is Dead?

By Luke Brinker

The only thing more predictable than the failure of the congressional “Supercommitee” last week to produce an agreement on deficit reduction was the ensuing punditry lamenting the absence of bipartisan comity on Capitol Hill. Whatever happened to the days when Republicans and Democrats worked together on such landmark issues as civil rights, tax reform, and energy policy?*

But before sounding the death knell for bipartisanship, it’s worth noting that on a bipartisan vote of 60-38 yesterday, the Senate voted to allow military detention of terrorism suspects – including American citizens arrested in the United States. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, offered an amendment to prevent just this sort of unconstitutional abuse, but to no avail. As Udall argued, the Senate’s rejection of his amendment “open[s] the door to domestic military police powers and possibly den[ies] US citizens their due process rights.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican whose Manichean worldview informs his willingness to sign away both congressional prerogatives and Americans’ constitutional rights in the name of the “war on terror,” justified the action by saying, “I don’t believe fighting Al Qaeda is a law enforcement function. I believe our military should be deeply involved in fighting these guys at home or abroad.”

So despite the withering away of Al Qaeda’s top leadership – and experts’ assessment that there is no longer a monolithic “Al Qaeda” as much as many regional Al Qaeda-inspired groups – Graham argues that we need martial law in the United States to defend against what he portrays (ridiculously) as an existential threat. Constitutional protections are quaint niceties unsuited to these Very Dangerous Times.

But it wasn’t just neoconservative Republicans like Graham voting to allow military detention of US citizens. Fourteen Democrats – Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire – plus independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, voted with Senate Republicans to defeat Udall’s amendment.

Support for Udall’s amendment was also bipartisan, but much less so. Of 47 Senate Republicans, a grand total of two – Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mark Kirk of Illinois – thought that the constitutional, civilian justice system is strong enough to withstand the test of Islamic terrorism.

Yesterday’s vote raises two important points. First, the Ruth Marcuses and Tom Friedmans of the world can stop complaining that Democrats and Republicans can’t come together on anything. Second, bipartisanship is not, by definition, synonymous with good policy.

A major explanation, of course, is that liberal Northeastern Republicans became Democrats and conservative Southern Democrats became Republicans. The parties sorted themselves ideologically.

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