The year the government broke
Published October 11, 2013
by Todd Purdum, Politico, October 11, 2013.
In the nearly two decades since the last government shutdown, fierce partisanship, recurrent brinkmanship and routine dysfunction have been the national governing norm. For a full generation, the widespread consensus has been that Washington is “broken.” And yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that historians will someday look back on the cheerless battles of 2013 as qualitatively different — more relentless, more remorseless and more depressing than the other fights of the past 20 years.
The capital was briefly abuzz — and the financial markets aloft — on Thursday, with optimistic hints of a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid default. But only for a few weeks or months — while Congress and the Obama White House haggle on toward another showdown over the same issues they’ve been litigating for months. Talk about defining dysfunction down.
Google the phrase “worst Congress ever,” and so many bipartisan citations pop up from the past two or three years as to summon that old line from the limbo: How low can you go? Pretty low, it turns out. The Washington Times’s “Legislative Futility Index” found that the Congress that ended in January was the least productive in history, and a Gallup survey last summer found public support for the institution hovering at around 10 percent — an all-time low level of support for any American institution.
Indeed, the root of the reason that the government is shuttered is that Congress has passed none of the regular appropriations bills that are supposed to be fought over, but taken for granted.
Tension between branches of government is baked into the Constitution, and the history of the Republic is replete with bitter conflicts — over territorial expansion, slavery, civil rights, economic regulation and international intervention. On the merits, the struggle over Obamacare is nowhere near as grave, no matter what its detractors or proponents may pretend. But the tone, tactics and oratory of this debate are overheated out of all proportion. And the fight does feel worse than those Washington long ago grew used to, if only because “compromise” — that other germinal notion of the American system — is anathema to the tea party wing of the House GOP, for whom every deal is a sell-out by another name.
For those members, from deep-red Republican districts, the incentives toward conflict are so strong as to overwhelm the natural instincts for compromise of their nominal leader, Speaker John Boehner. For them, doing nothing at all is a positive outcome that saves the nation from the ills of big government.
“In the past, dysfunction was largely transactional,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “It had to do with bigger or smaller, or more or less. But for the opponents of Obamacare, this is kind of a holy quest for them to repeal it, or defer it, or incapacitate it in some way. There’s a depth of animosity that really cannot be assuaged with the kinds of half-a-loaf solutions that Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were able to arrange in 1996. It really does feel like they’re arguing over Biblical interpretation and each side looks at the other as some kind of apostate. And we know how long religious wars can last.”
The differences are not only theological but also deeply personal. In his news conference on Tuesday, President Barack Obama went out of his way to embarrass the speaker, with whom he tried to negotiate a “grand bargain” on taxes and entitlements at the time of the last debt ceiling impasse in 2011. “Whenever I see John Boehner to this day, I still say, ‘You should have taken the deal I offered you back then,’” the president declared. Leave aside the fact that Boehner and his colleagues remember the negotiations differently. Saying “I told you so!” is seldom the best strategy in difficult negotiations.
If Obama can barely conceal his contempt for his adversaries, their disdain for him and his signature legislative initiative is equally apparent, despite Boehner’s latest effort to find a way out of the impasse by urging his members to support a six-week extension of the debt ceiling while negotiations continue on other matters — including the government shutdown. “Three and a half years they’ve had to get this and they can’t even get the darn websites to work,” said Rep. John Fleming (R-La.). “That portends a very bad future for it, so to be honest, I think from this point Obamacare and all of its flaws begin to take over. And we’re going to still try to be as forceful as possible.”
For his part, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said that he had told Boehner he could not support the speaker’s latest idea, even though he judged most members of the Republican caucus would do so. “I just feel that we’re backing up instead of going forward,” Gingrey said of the state of play.
One sign of just how bad things have gotten is that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for so many years a hot-headed maverick who annoyed colleagues of both parties, has emerged as a measured, statesmanlike voice of conciliation in the current crisis. “We started out with a false premise here, on this side of the aisle,” McCain said this week. “And that was that somehow we were going to repeal Obamacare.” Noting his own opposition to the president’s plan throughout the legislative debate over it, and into the 2012 election, McCain added, “The American people spoke. So somehow to think that we were going to repeal” the law, “of course was a false premise, and I think did the American people a grave disservice by convincing them that somehow we could.”
Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), one of a handful of House GOP moderates who has drawn widespread media attention for working with Democrats to try to find a way to re-open the government and raise the debt ceiling without political preconditions, said the problem is that there are “two to three dozen” House Republicans who “don’t share that same sense of governance,” and “who somehow pretend that Mitch McConnell is the majority leader of the Senate and Mitt Romney is president.”
Asked if he felt his name was apt for someone who has lately taken incoming fire from colleagues angered by his accommodation, Dent just chuckled and said, “It’s a great name, an English name — the Latin root is ‘tooth.’” He added, “Only in this town can a person become momentarily famous for stating the obvious.”
In fact, Dent stands out because congressmen these days are much more apt to deny the obvious. Dick Cheney’s defiant contention as vice president that “deficits don’t matter” seems quaint in comparison with the prevailing brand of conservative populism, which is willing to swat away inconvenient facts as if they were so many pesky flies.
“I’m of the philosophy that we don’t need to raise the debt ceiling,” Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) said this week. “We have enough money, enough revenues coming in on a daily basis that we can pay our bills.”
Indeed, the essence of conservatism has changed in the past sixty years, as it has incorporated elements of nihilism and anti-intellectualism that past Republican elites would have scorned. Sarah Palin has nothing in common with the reigning right-wing Republican of the post World War II era, Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), who was known as “Mr. Conservative.” In “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party,” published last year, the author Geoffrey Kabaservice recounted what happened when a voter at a campaign rally once asked Taft’s wife if he was a “common man.”
“Oh, no,” Martha Taft replied. “He is not at all. He was first in his class at Yale and first in his class at Harvard Law School. I think it would be wrong to present a common man as a representative of the people of Ohio.”
Former Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), who first went to work as a congressional staffer in 1977 and later served seven terms himself before becoming Obama’s transportation secretary in 2009, said, “I would rank this Congress as the worst in the sense of their inability to do anything, to pass any major legislation. Nobody can ever remember when Congress couldn’t pass a farm bill — always bipartisan, always with a good, comprehensive approach. Nobody can remember when a Congress has ever passed a two-year transportation bill, not a five-year one. People can’t remember a time when the Senate was able to do a bipartisan immigration bill and it’s not even considered by the House.”
“I think at some point Boehner has to say that ‘I care more about moving these issues forward than I do about my leadership,’’’ LaHood added. “If he doesn’t lose his speakership over the fact that he’s willing to use Democratic votes to pass things, he’s going to lose it over the fact that Republicans will get voted out of office and lose the majority in the next election. People around the country are scratching their heads. America is the greatest country in the world, but it can’t get its act together.”
