Quorum Calls: Giving ‘Do Nothing Congress’ New Meaning
Behold, the world’s greatest deliberative body.
At 9:36 a.m. on Thursday, a clerk with a practiced monotone read aloud the name of Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii). The chamber was nearly deserted. The senator wasn’t there. Not that she was really looking for him.
Instead, the clerk was beginning one of the Capitol’s most arcane rituals: the slow-motion roll calls that the Senate uses to bide time.
These procedures, called “quorum calls,” usually serve no other purpose than to fill up empty minutes on the Senate floor. They are so boring, so quiet that C-SPAN adds in classical music: otherwise, viewers might think their TV was broken.
This year — even as Washington lurches closer to a debt crisis — the Senate has spent a historic amount of time performing this time-killing ritual. Quorum calls have taken up about a third of its time since January, according to C-SPAN statistics: more than 17 eight-hour days’ worth of dead air.
When it comes to legislative action, 2009 and 2010 were an unusually busy period, with the Senate taking up some of the most consequential legislation in the generation. Maybe, the thinking goes, such an intense period of policymaking activity will inevitably be followed by a more relaxed schedule.
But the institution has gone from frantically busy to catatonic. One is tempted to hold a mirror to the Senate’s nose, just to make sure it’s still breathing.
David Fahrenthold’s explanation of quorum calls is helpful, albeit mildly soul-crushing.
A clerk reads out senators’ names slowly, sometimes waiting 10 minutes or more between them. But it’s usually a sham. The senators aren’t coming. Nobody expects them to. The ritual is a reaction to what the chamber has become: a very fancy place that senators, often, are too busy to visit.
This is what happened: Decades ago, senators didn’t have offices. They spent their days at their desks on the Senate floor. So clerks really needed to call the roll to see if a majority was ready for business.
Now, senators spend much of their time in committee rooms, offices and elsewhere. If no big vote is on the horizon, often nothing at all is happening on the Senate floor.
But Senate rules don’t allow for nothing to happen. That would require a formal adjournment, which would mean lots of time-consuming parliamentary rigmarole. Instead, the last senator to speak asks clerks to fill the time by calling the roll.
We’re not, by the way, talking about pro-forma sessions, intended to prevent presidential recess appointments. This is just the norm of the Senate most of the time, even during the course of its usual schedule.
Of course, senators could be doing something, at least in theory. The Democratic majority doesn’t bring bills to the floor, because they know Republicans will filibuster them (and even if they passed, the GOP-led House would never consider them). Dems could bring nominees to the floor, but Republicans won’t allow that, either. Dems could work on a budget, but they not only know the House won’t cooperate, but also know even trying would become fodder for attack ads.
“Why are we here?” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) asked. “The Senate is not operating the way it was designed, because politicians don’t want to be on record.”
Well, that’s partially true, but the Senate is also not operating the way it was designed because guys like Coburn filibuster everything that moves.
Regardless, let’s go ahead and retire “the world’s greatest deliberative body” description. No one appreciates the humor.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, June 10, 2011
No Credibility Or Integrity: What McKinsey & Company Has To Hide
An outfit called McKinsey & Company released a report this week making all kinds of discouraging claims about the Affordable Care Act. According to the study, nearly a third of American businesses will stop offering health coverage to their employees as a result of the new reform law. Several news outlets pounced on the release of the report, as did many Republicans.
The White House’s Nancy-Ann DeParle, in a rather understated response, urged caution.
A central goal of the Affordable Care Act is to reduce the cost of providing health insurance and make it easier for employers to offer coverage to their workers. We have implemented the law at every step of the way to minimize disruption and maximize affordability for businesses, workers, and families. And we agree with experts who project that employers will continue to offer high quality benefits to their workers under the new law. This one discordant study should be taken with a grain of salt.
That’s putting it mildly.
McKinsey claims to have done a survey of 1,300 employers. How was it conducted? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said. What were the questions? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said. How were the employers chosen? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said. What were the statistical breakdowns among businesses of different sizes? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said.
Who funded the study? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said.
Kate Pickert noticed a small tidbit in the report: McKinsey acknowledged having “educated” those participating in the survey. And what, pray tell, did the company say to respondents that might have affected the results? You guessed it: we don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said.
Politico added today that it “asked really nicely” to at least see the questionnaire McKinsey used to conduct the employers survey, but the company refused.
Raise your hand if you think the McKinsey & Company report has some credibility problems.
But here’s the angle to keep an eye on. How soon will Republican talking points simply incorporate this highly dubious claim into all arguments about health care policy? That’s usually how this game works — sketchy outfit tells the GOP what it wants to hear; Dems point out how baseless the claim is, and the media presents the information in a he-said-she-said format, leaving the public to think “both sides” have merit.
Keep this in mind the next time you hear a Republican claim on television, “We recently learned that a third of American businesses will stop ensuring their workers.” It won’t be true, but that won’t matter.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washongton Monthly-Political Animal, June 9, 2011
Mitt Romney’s Flawed View Of Freedom
The bales of hay were stacked strategically in the hope that they’d make it into the television screen. The sturdy white barn nearby provided an image worthy of a Christmas card, the symbol of a solid, calm, industrious and confident country. The slogan behind the candidate, “Believe in America,” did not invite debate.
Whatever the punditocracy may have made of Mitt Romney’s formal announcement of his presidential candidacy last week, we could all give the guy credit for trying to reassure us that not everything in politics has changed.
In an age of media flying circuses where you never know who is running for president and who is just trying to boost book sales and speaking fees, Romney did it the old-fashioned way. He really, really wants to be president, and he offered pretty pictures to encourage us to watch him saying so. It was the venerable liturgy of our civil religion.
Unfortunately for Romney, he barely got his moment in the sun because dark clouds rolled in. Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani showed up in New Hampshire on the former Massachusetts governor’s magical day, underscoring why Romney is plagued by the word “putative,” which almost always appears before “front-runner.”
But Romney’s travails are about more than the man himself. They speak to the
condition of a party that won’t let him embrace his actual record and constantly
requires him — and all other Republicans — to say outlandish things.
Romney’s greatest political achievement, the Massachusetts health-care law, was a genuinely masterful piece of politics and policy. The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza recently wrote a superb article about how Romney got the plan passed. The campaign should be
reproducing the article in bulk. Instead, Romney’s lieutenants will pray that Republican primary voters never read the story. Working with those horrid Democrats to pass any sort of forward-looking government program is now forbidden.
When Romney spoke at Doug and Stella Scamman’s Bittersweet Farm, he was guarded in talking about his health plan, saying he “hammered out a solution that took a bad situation and made it better. Not perfect, but it was a state solution to our state’s
problem.” The crowd gave him modest cheers when he got to the part about health
care being a state problem.
But he received what was, by my reckoning, his loudest response when he pledged “a complete repeal of Obamacare.” That’s where the GOP heart is, and Palin and Giuliani both got into most of the Romney announcement stories by bashing him on health care. When you’re forced to tiptoe around your accomplishments, it’s no wonder you get accused of shifting your shape.
Yet it was Romney himself who exposed contemporary conservatism’s core flaw.
“Did you know,” he asked, “that government — federal, state and local — under
President Obama, has grown to consume almost 40 percent of our economy? We’re
only inches away from ceasing to be a free economy.”
Actually, the federal government of which Obama is in charge “consumes” about a quarter of the economy — and this after a severe recession, when government’s share
naturally goes up.
But even granting Romney his addition of spending by all levels of government, the notion that we are “inches away from ceasing to be a free economy” is worse than absurd. It suggests that the only way we measure whether an economy and a country are “free” is by toting up how much government spends.
Are we less “free” because we spend money on public schools and student loans, Medicare and Medicaid, police and firefighters, roads and transit, national defense and environmental protection? Would we be “freer” if government spent zero percent of the economy and just stopped doing things?
Romney, presumably, doesn’t think this, but the logic of what he said points
in exactly that direction. We thus confront in 2012 nothing short of a fundamental argument over what the word “freedom” means. If freedom, as the conservatives seem to insist, comes down primarily to the quantity of government spending, then a country such as Sweden, where government spends quite a lot, would be less “free” than a right-wing dictatorship that had no welfare state and no public schools — but also didn’t allow its people to speak, pray, write or organize as they wish.
Many of us “believe in America” because we believe its history shows that our
sacred liberties are compatible with a rather substantial government that invests in efforts to expand the freedom from want, the freedom from fear, the freedom from unfair treatment and the freedom to improve ourselves. That, as the politicians like to say, is what this campaign is all about.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 6, 2011
Slow Learners: Social Security Privatization Still A GOP Goal
Congressional Republicans have faced all kinds of heat recently for their misguided campaign to end Medicare and replace it with a privatized voucher system. It’s tempting to think the GOP would not only back away from this crusade, but would also learn a valuable lesson about Americans’ appreciation for bedrock domestic social programs.
Alas, that’s not the case. A few days ago, Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, a member of the House Republican leadership, unveiled the “Savings Account For Every American Act,” which would allow Americans to withdraw from the Social Security system and opt into a privatized system.
Of course, with Social Security functioning as a pay-as-you-go program, if workers “opt out” of the system, Social Security would either (a) crumble with insufficient funds; or (b) need Congress to spend more money to make up the difference. How would Sessions address this? By all appearances, he hasn’t thought that far ahead.
Democrats, not surprisingly, were only too pleased yesterday to go on the offensive.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday predicted that House Republican plans to let workers opt out of Social Security would fail as voters realize how it will threaten their retirement.
“Seniors who have paid into Social Security through a lifetime of hard work shouldn’t end up in a risky privatization scheme to gamble their retirement on Wall Street,” Israel said. “The public has rejected this kind of Social Security privatization in the past and will again.”
Israel accused Republicans of looking to resolve the government’s fiscal crisis by scaling back Medicare and Social Security, while ignoring higher corporate taxes.
In fairness, I should note that “Savings Account For Every American Act” (or, “SAFE Act”) isn’t exactly on a fast track to the House floor. After being introduced late last week the bill, H.R.2109, has an underwhelming six co-sponsors. That’ll likely increase, but Social Security’s supporters probably don’t need to leap into action to defeat the bill just yet.
Still, there’s something truly amazing about the fact that any Republican officials would pursue this at all. The American mainstream has shown, over and over again, that Social Security privatization is a non-starter. The very idea pushed Bush’s presidency into a downward trajectory in 2005, and it never recovered. Even Paul Ryan, when shaping the radical House GOP budget plan, left Social Security out of the equation.
For that matter, after the economy crashed in 2008, I assumed it’d be a long while until Republicans started talking up Social Security privatization again.
Perhaps Pete Sessions and his cohorts are slow learners?
I suppose the real fun would be putting the Republican presidential field on the spot. “Mr. Romney, a member of the House Republican leadership is pushing legislation to privatize Social Security. If such a bill reached your desk as president, would you sign it?”
Inquiring minds want to know.
Update: One of the six co-sponsors is Republican Caucus Chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas. This is relevant because it means two members of the GOP leadership are on board with this proposal.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, June 8, 2011
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