Discrediting the Legislative Process Itself
John Boehner-House Minority Leader of "No"
So far in the health-care debate, Republicans have attacked the legitimacy of private negotiations, parochial dealmaking, the budget reconciliation process, self-executing rules, the Congressional Budget Office’s analyses, and even the constitutionality of the legislation. It’s a good theory: Make people hate Washington and mistrust the legislative process and you’ll make people hate and mistrust what emerges from that process.
But it’s also dangerous. As Republicans well know, private negotiations between lawmakers, deals that advantage a state or a district, and a base level of respect for the CBO’s scores have long been central to the lawmaking progress. As the parties have polarized, reconciliation and self-executing rules (like deem and pass) have become more common — and the GOP’s own record, which includes dozens of reconciliation bills and self-executing rules, proves it.
The GOP’s answer to this is that health-care reform is important. Stopping the bill is worth pulling out all the stops. And I’m actually quite sympathetic to this view. Outcomes are, in fact, more important than process. But once you’ve taken the stops out, it’s hard to put them back in. Democrats will launch the very same attacks when they’re consigned to the minority, and maybe think up a few new ones of their own.
The result of this constant assault on how a bill becomes a law — a process that has never before been subject to such 24/7 scrutiny from cable news and blogs and talk radio — will be ever more public cynicism. Evan Bayh put it well in his New York Times op-ed. “Power is constantly sought through the use of means which render its effective use, once acquired, impossible,” he wrote. Republicans, who’re likely to return to power with a majority that’s well below 60 seats in the Senate and a 40-vote margin in the House, will soon find themselves on the wrong end of that calculus.
Photo credit: Melina Mara/Washington Post.
By Ezra Klein | March 19, 2010
No comments yet.
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 
Share your comment