Do you despise Congress?

Do you despise Congress? You’re not alone.  The current Congress’s 11% approval rating is the lowest since polling began. Yet, because of gerrymandering and the resulting hyper-partisanship, people tend to support their own particular Representative, and to heap the blame on the other party.

Is everything just a subjective matter of partisan opinion. Are there  explicit statistical reasons to credit one party in particular with the present mess?

“I think you’d have to go back to the 1850s to find a period of congressional dysfunction like the one we’re in today,” says Daniel Feller, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Tennessee. In modern history, “there have been battles, delays, brinkmanship — but nothing quite like this,” says Thomas Mann, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, in a book about Congress with a title that provides a succinct answer: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. Mann acknowledges there have been worse times for Congress, but he reaches back a very long way for a comparison.

“There were a few really bruising periods in American congressional history, not only the run-up to the Civil War, but also around the War of 1812,” Mann says.

Ah, but as I’ll show you (below) things are not only biliously hateful within the hallowed Capitol walls. There is another sin that’s become rampant there… one never reported in the press, but in some ways more contemptible than any other.

== Comparison to the “merely” insane 1990s ==

I have long pointed out that Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1995 started out with some impressive activity.  Part of it was disturbing, like the banishing of all scientific advisory staff from Congress, freeing right-wing members to simply declare any facts they felt like uttering. This action was an early harbinger of what became today’s pyrotechnic, outright and open War on Science.

On the other hand, Newt’s initial negotiation of Welfare Reform and budget balancing measures with President Clinton had stunningly impressive results. In fact, those two major accomplishments should have demonstrated conclusively what can be achieved for the national good by pragmatic people negotiating mixed methods to solve problems.

In 1995 Newt and other Republican intellectuals proposed a Health Care plan that later became the  template both for RomneyCare in Massachusetts and ObamaCare in 2009. The main features – Insurance changes combined with a required individual mandate – were at the time offered as a market alternative to the more European style “HillaryCare” that the democrats proposed.  Still, the Republicans under Gingrich, in the 1990s, appeared to (occasionally) want to deliberate, negotiate, dicker, come up with some way to move ahead.

It was in that spirit that Barack Obama based his Health Care Plan entirely upon the Republicans’ earlier proposal. Let’s make that even plainer… the “socialist” ObamaCare bill is almost identical to the Gingrich proposal that was in the Republican Party platform for a decade and that Romney instituted in his state. If that isn’t negotiation, I don’t know what is. But… of course… by then the GOP had moved on.

== The Era of Absolute-No Begins ==

It seems hard to look at it the last decade of the 20th Century as one of halcyon political statesmanship, since 75% of the time Gingrich and the 1990s Republicans were engaged in volcanic partisan behavior rife with irony (e.g. assigning nearly all divorcees to prosecute the just-once-married Clinton for marital misbehavior.) But the 25% of the time that Newt spent on problem solving helped to make the 90s work for America. And, under Gingrich, the GOP-led Congress was part of that.

Alas, things were evolving fast within the GOP. Roger Ailes was taking charge. Soon, the fact that Gingrich actually negotiated with the (constitutionally elected) enemy some of the time became seen as a criminal offense against conservatism and he was ousted from his leadership posts. To this day, many in the party refuse to forgive the fact that Newt co-designed working legislation with William Jefferson Clinton.

So far, we’ve been discussing things that are common knowledge. But it gets much, much worse. What ensued after Newt’s ouster — years of howling and lynch mob tactics — have masked from the public a far more important fact: that the GOP-led Congresses from 1996 through 2006 were also the laziest and least effective in 100 years.

I don’t say that from any “liberal” perspective. Rather, I base it on objective and unambiguous standards of hard work, time and productivity. Giving their employers what they pay for. The recent Republican Congresses passed fewer bills, held fewer hearings, issued fewer subpoenas and held fewer days in active session than almost any other since the era of William McKinley. The record is damn near perfect. There are no metrics of legislative or deliberative indolence that weren’t broken by the GOP-led Congresses of the last decade or so.

Wanting “less government” is a pat but stupid excuse for this, since Republicans go on and on about changes they would like to make!  De-regulations and privatizations. Abolishing departments! Restricting abortions. Hemming in gays and abrogating foreign treaties. Border walls to build! And penalties for hiring illegal immigrants. Unifying church and state. Reining in the judiciary and unleashing corporations, and so on…. Well? Then why didn’t you actually do any of those things?

The GOP owned Congress and the Courts for ten years, and operated all three branches of government for six of those years, with nothing whatsoever to stop them from passing anything they wanted. Yet, amid a tsunami of complaints, they would not even issue subpoenas or hold investigations to harass their enemies! Nor even show up on days that they were paid to.

Lip service. That is all  Republican Senators and Representatives actually delivered on any of those matters so dear to Tea Partiers and the GOP base. Words, lots of angry words. No actions. Well, almost none.  One constituency actually got enough attention to get bills passed. Do you remember which? De-regulation of the banking and mortgage and credit industries. Liberation of Wall Street gamblers. Removal of gas mileage standards. Plenty of the sort of thing that sent our economy toward a cliff.

Otherwise?  Pure laziness.

== Watch out for the voting machines ==

Nearly every county in America now uses electronic voting machines that – under several dummy corporations – are made by a single deeply-Republican family. Given the irregularities that erupted in past years — and the potential for untold mischief – I had expected that this matter to  receive copious attention from Democratic groups.  Yet I’ve heard nothing.  Nothing at all. In fact, lack of attention is deeply disturbing.

Now dig this recent statement:

 ”If someone were to hack into the machine, if the logging is not secure and doesn’t protect it from rollback, that would allow someone to tamper with it and leave no trace.” – Candace Hoke, Cleveland Marshall College of Law professor, on defects in optical ballot scanners currently in use in voting in the U.S.; quoted in USAToday.

One bit of progress.  In most counties and precincts a separate paper record is kept, that can be audited. In most cases, this means a physical ballot that you marked by hand and that was scanned-in as it went into a box. It’s an improvement, allowing random audits that might catch any cheaters. Still is this true in YOUR area?  It’s your duty to check.

If your region doesn’t use this method… if you use a “voting machine” with a touch screen, for example… then when you finish voting, ask to see the log of your vote on the printed record.  Verify that it printed what you remember voting. Spread the word about this and make your friends curious! If enough people do that, then one of many failure modes will become a bit less likely.

If you cannot do this simple check, start asking why. Bring it up on your own discussion lists and make it viral.

==And the SuperPacs==

Finally, by now all of you savvy types will have watched the YouTube of Stephen Colbert handing his SuperPac over to Jon Stewart.  It is rich, hilarious… and educational… and absolutely scary for the future of our republic.  This will be the summer and autumn of lies.  Expect a BILLION dollars – no less- to be spent by Super-Pacs with zero reporting of where they got their cash. Is this the America you want?

Any American with a lick of patriotism has to know by now… we must get the money out of politics. Or the Republic is over.

Suggestions for the Lame Duck Congress

Folks have asked if I’ll offer another checklist of suggestions for near-term political action, now that the U.S. House of Representatives is about to pass into Republican hands. This new set of proposals would bookend the To-Do list that I wrote back in 2006, when the Democrats swept back into control of the House.

Well, it’s been an eventful four years, an era that proved my fundamental diagnosis… that most of our current political craziness is not so much about hoary-stupid “left-right axis” but rather by personality type. For example, Democrats are not primarily typified by “leftist” outlooks, but by a manic personality. A frenzy to try things. Indeed, nearly all of the pro-capitalism experiments that have been tried, in recent years, also came from dems. (An assertion I can easily prove.)

In contrast, although Barry Goldwater disowned the “neoconservative” sub-species as crazy and contrary to most classical conservative values, the one consistent trait that Republicans always seem to display (and did in Goldwater’s saner version) is the depressive personality type. Beyond pathological grouchiness, recent GOP politicians have also been among the laziest since the beginning of the republic, passing less far legislation (even when they held every branch of government), holding fewer hearings and proposing fewer bills — even on their favorite issues — than any other Congress in 100 years.

(Reminder: this appraisal hasn’t a scintilla to do with superficial issues of “left-vs-right.”)

But that psychological diagnosis is beside the point. The last 4 years have been frenetic, all right. So, shall I attempt once more to offer recommendations, now that the frenzied workaholics only have a few weeks left to try things? Since Nancy Pelosi and her crew saw fit to ignore almost everything my earlier catalog of desires, why should I bother?  The Democrats have scarcely more than a month, before depressive-phase gridlock settles onto Capital Hill.

=== FIRST, IS DIVIDED GOVERNMENT A BAD THING? ===

Don’t many of your neighbors ascribe to the nostrum that “divided government is best”? Indeed, there have been silver linings to past episodes of division. After Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican resurgence, Bill Clinton decided to turn his attention away from grand scale legislation* to becoming the best administrative president on record. Distracted by sexual witch hunts, the press paid little notice when JD Powers and other neutral analysts called the Clinton Administration the most efficient and well-run and… believe it or not… honest in US history.

(Despite Fox-rhetoric, not one Clinton era official ever went to jail, or was evenindicted, for malfeasance of official duties. Not one. The first time that’s ever happened in US history.)

If Barack Obama were to follow that course — simply tuning the civil service to deliver our money’s worth under current law — well that may be a disappointing fall-back.  But, since the core and central neocon aim has always been the undermining and ruination of the United States Civil Service (ask me why), its restoration under BHO would be a victory, of sorts. (You never noticed any of this?  Well, whose fault is that?)

(* Note: I leave out the strange year 1995, when Newt’s fresh-new Neocon Congress actually experimented with acting like grownups, seeking to achieve real accomplishments by … um… legislating! And by negotiating with Clinton and the Democrats. Certain measures that passed that year, under the “Contract With America,” were moderately impressive, including Welfare Reform and budget control measures that later enabled Clinton to clamp down and deliver the only substantial budget surpluses since World War II.  And Democrats who are incapable of parsing how 1995 was different than the deLay/deMint era are too-easily falling into simple-minded partisanship of their own.

(Alas, this brief era passed away with lamentable swiftness, as the Republicans dumped Gingrich and swerved into their ongoing weird combination of disciplined dogmatism, culture war, jibbering anti-intellectualism, and stunning laziness. Again note: this ain’t about “left-right” but sanity.)

=== ENOUGH GRUMBLING. HOW ABOUT SUGGESTIONS? ===

All right, then. Are there things I’d recommend for the coming political phase?  There are two time regimes to consider.

a) The remaining lame duck session of Congress.  (I’ll race through these.)

b) The stretch following Boehner’s installation as Speaker, until the 2012 elections. (I’ll save these for next time.)

=== CAN LAME DUCKS ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING? ===

Oh, they are scrambling. Pelosi and Reid and the Capital Hill Dems. Frenetic to getsomething done in the next 6 weeks, they’ll not pay the slightest heed to myrecommendations.  Still, here are a few.

1.  Limit any tax cut extension to 5 years. I believe the Bush tax cuts for the rich should be allowed to expire… compensated with a new-jobs credit and new equipment credit for small businesses. But if the cuts are to be continued, I agree they should expire in another 2 years.  In fact. all the rest of the cut extensions should be for no more than 5 years.

Why tie the hands of a future president and Congress?  Give some future Congress the same choice YOU now face.  In 2015, the economy may be much better, and we could get another chance to start paying down the mountain of debt. (The way adults do.) It will be easier, at that point, to not pass a continuation of some of the tax cuts, than it will be to pass an actual increase.

2. Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Bush era corruption. Um, why hasn’t this happened already? Were you actually hoping/expecting to reason with fellows like Senator deMint? Were you trying to take the high road and set an example?  Were you that naive?

Wasn’t the whoring at the Minerals Management Agency enough of a smoking gun?  Enough cause to unleash a special prosecutor… and also to enact my other suggestion, to establish the office of Inspector General of the United States? IGUS would ensure that never again could a political cult take over Washington and turn the US Civil Service into its private brothel.

I believe a special prosecutor can be appointed by simple majority vote, without being blocked by filibuster. In any event, there is nothing more important that the Dems could do, during their remaining six weeks.  I’m especially interested in seeing light shone on the vetting of “emergency clause contracts” during our twin trillion-dollar wars, wherein massive amounts of American wealth simply vanished to Only God Himself Knows Where.  Appoint a Special Prosecutor! Unleash him.  And let Boehner just TRY to call him back.

3. Get the lame duck Congress to re-fund the Office of Science and Technology Assessment. Pre-pay the trivial cost for 10 years in advance, out of pocket change. Scientific-minded Americans have been urging of return of a nonpartisan OSTA, ever since 2006.  Rush this through!  And force the GOP to filibuster this blatantly moderate and reasonable act.

This is so vastly more important than the political caste seems to realize.  No other single act would better demonstrate that the Democrats favor the tradition of “reality-based decision making” that underlies the Enlightenment. No other single act would better show what side they are on, in the ongoing “War on Science.”

4. Give the minority party the power of subpoena. Yes this seems nerdy. But I explain in my earlier list of suggestions. This will seem self-serving if done right now.  Better if you had done it last year. But grab the chance.  Do it now… and force Boehner to yank it back.

I have tons of other suggestions. High priorities that I wish the Dems had chosen to work on, during their brief stint trying to catch up.  (And not one of my proposals had even a hint of “socialism” about it! Indeed, they were all remarkably pro enterprise!)  But it is clear that we are heading back to gridlock in a few weeks.  So I will stop yattering about those things…

…and talk next time about what ought to happen during the Boehner Era.