Senator Bill Proxmire used to give out the Golden Fleece Award for government pissing away money on absurdly expensive, completely pointless and massively failed projects. Whether he was right or wrong in any given award, what he accomplished was making public what Congress buried in long bills that purportedly served worthy purposes and how federal agencies used their putative mandates for purposes never imagined.
Biden came into office promising “bold and transformative” initiatives. They were a bit costly, upping Senator Everett Dirksen’s “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” into the trillions. But if you want to reimagine everything, it won’t come cheap. So how did that work out?
Congressional Democrats passed the relief bill on a party-line vote. Watering it down to achieve bipartisan support would have been a “mistake,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said at the time, one that Democrats would not be making again. The administration only had so much time, after all, to try to pass the most pro-worker labor reforms in a generation, or to put an end to congressional malapportionment.
This barely scratches the surface of boldness. Isn’t the voting rights bill, H.R 1, worth a mention? Gun control? Police reform? Student loan debt?
Well, now it’s August, and Congress has not passed either of those things (or a serious climate bill, or major health care reform, or immigration reform). Instead, we might soon get a larger than usual bipartisan highway bill, if the Senate manages to pass it before heading off for recess.
Biden hoped to muster some bipartisan support so that these massively expensive and foundationally challenging bills would reflect more than half a country beating up the other half, fomenting ever more hostility and division. It would also serve to stem the potential undoing when Congress changed hands in the midterms, as was possible if not likely, And as the media reminds us, many of the purposes of these bills are very popular, provided the survey asks only about the bill’s name and not what’s buried deep within its bowels.
The argument is that bipartisanship is unachievable because the Democratic majority margin is to slim, and subject to slippage by moderate Dems, and the Republicans are unwilling to put country above party, easily invoking the filibuster to stymie any effort to get anything done. And they’re not wrong.
The Democrats, of course, have the slimmest possible Senate vote margin, and the party’s right flank — Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in particular — made it clear that they did not support eliminating the Senate’s de facto 60 vote requirement for legislation. Mr. Biden’s full infrastructure plan would not have passed with 51 votes the day after the Covid relief bill even if he had tried to do it that way.
But what if these “bold and transformative” proposals were cut down to size, short enough to read and digest, with neither buried pork nor grossly unpopular radical shifts wrapped up in a word most can agree about like “infrastructure”?
From a policy perspective, splitting the proposal in two makes little sense. If the Democrats manage to carry out the second half of their plans, and pass a broader bill with even more funding for infrastructure later this fall, they will have achieved the same result — just a lot slower than if they had allowed these negotiations to die months ago and moved forward with reconciliation on their own. Keeping the two bills separate really only makes sense to those whose minds have been warped by spending multiple years in that strangest legislative body, the United States Senate. There politicians learn that the deal is the goal in and of itself, and whatever it does or doesn’t do is of secondary importance.
If one presumes that the original infrastructure bill was wonderful, or at least more wonderful than not, then cutting it into pieces just delays the ultimate goal and makes it a problem. But what if a bill is named to be about “infrastructure,” which the public supports because we don’t want our bridges to fall down or our roads to crumble, but isn’t just about bridges and roads?
Paid leave is infrastructure.
Child care is infrastructure.
Caregiving is infrastructure.— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) April 7, 2021
They called it “infrastructure,” and there are many who support the funding of the “care economy,” but there are many who called it bullshit. If you want to do something about caregiving, don’t pretend it’s infrastructure and try to pass it openly and honestly.
Buried in the 2700 page infrastructure bill: pic.twitter.com/9IOPlXRQ1k
— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) August 4, 2021
Did you know that the “infrastructure” bill would give rise to a “national motor vehicle per-mile user fee”? Maybe you think that’s a great idea. Maybe not. But did you know it? Even this pared-down bipartisan infrastructure bill, clocking in at about 2700 insufferably unreadable pages, contains things the public is largely unaware of and highly controversial.
The problem is that there are uncontroversial aspects of many of these bills that are important to accomplish. If a bridge on an interstate could potentially collapse from lack of maintenance, most people would want it fixed. But should fixing a bridge be held captive to some grand plan to address inequity in highway location?
Instead of “bold and transformative,” what if Congress smurfed its grandiosity into bite size nuggets of bills that could be read and digested, understood and approved, bit by bit? Rather than burying radical schemes inside huge omnibus bills with salutary titles and unpalatable details, Congress went small and accomplished the things we could all mostly agree on and then put the wilder, bolder, more radical, more controversial changes on the table individually?
Intransigence in the Senate has paralyzed its ability to function, and that’s served no one as there are nuts and bolts issues to be addressed. If issues were addressed in clear, concrete laws, it would be far harder for partisan senators to make up lies to justify their intransigence. People might even realize they were being played for fools or that they elected a blithering idiot to Congress.
So why doesn’t Congress write more modest, focused, readable and comprehensible laws? Then we would know what they’re really up to, what they’ve buried in the huge pile of paper and what they’re calling “infrastructure” (or any other cool name that conceals less palatable purpose) it’s really part of some grandiose scheme to transform a nation into something the majority of its citizens don’t want and won’t support. After all, if they did, there would be no compelling need to bury it and our elected officials would tout it, open;y tell us about it, with pride in what they hope to accomplish.
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