Congress looking like a degenerative condition
Acutely partisan and all but dysfunctional, Congress has completed its most elementary task after an intense weeks-long struggle, finalizing a deal to fund the government just days ahead of a shutdown deadline. (Associated Press)
All but?
The most exasperating thing about the United States Congress plodding grudgingly to the finish line of this year’s session, with the bare minimum of work done, isn’t just that it’s happened before and the people paid handsomely to look after our interests have learned absolutely nothing.
No, the worst thing is that there’s no reason whatever to believe this chronic disease of politics over statecraft will get any better in the foreseeable future, and every reason to expect that it will just get worse. Maybe much worse.
By now this whole show has become as familiar to Americans as Andy Griffith reruns, but devoid of even minimal entertainment value. (Maybe that’s part of what has made Capitol Hill such a nasty place in recent years — these folks need to lighten up and laugh a little.) Lawmakers arrive at an eleventh-hour agreement to keep the government limping along for a few more weeks, leaving most of the important stuff to be dealt with next year.
Those few weeks, of course, will take us past Election Day, which is really the bottom line here. As bad as congressional gridlock is anytime, it gets especially disgusting every four years.
So what did we get this time around? A compromise (parental discretion is advised concerning this political profanity) on Zika funding — which, for the record, the president requested in February — and on aid for tainted-water victims in Flint, Mich., along with emergency funding for Louisiana.
Could these matters have been dispensed with much sooner, so Congress would have had time to take up things like Medicaid, the debt ceiling and tax policy? Don’t ask.
Republicans blame Democrats for the delay, saying Minority Leader Harry Reid was deliberately stalling to keep GOP lawmakers from campaigning. (Do Reid’s fellow Democrats, who are after all the minority party, not need to campaign?) Democrats blame Republicans, saying the holdup was primarily over aid for Flint, and implying that race (naturally) was behind the stalemate.
Who’s to blame? To most Americans, whose approval ratings for Congress are roughly comparable to those for head lice, the prevailing answer at this point would probably be: Who cares?
When this stopgap measure expires, of course, we’ll know who is going to be the next president, and neither outcome involves much hope that Washington’s lingering sickness will be in for any healing, or even minor treatment.
If the next president is Hillary Clinton, she will almost certainly face the same resistance from congressional Republicans who have opposed the incumbent president on virtually every issue.
If it’s Donald Trump … well, who can really know? Certainly he will face bitter opposition from Democrats, who will not only oppose him ideologically, but will also be seeking political payback for GOP stonewalling of Obama. But he will also be facing skepticism — and that’s a mild word in this case — from within his own party, which has not exactly embraced him, and many of whose most prominent figures have publicly repudiated him.
Of course, the presidential election isn’t the only one that will be on November ballots across the nation. Some American voters might take their frustrations with Congress out on … Congress. Whether or not that happens, and what if anything will change if it does, is impossible to know.
Yet even as they stumbled to a messy solution to meet the Friday midnight deadline, some lawmakers were looking ahead to next year, when tough tasks await the next Congress and new president. (Associated Press)
No kidding.
This story was originally published October 1, 2016 at 5:14 PM with the headline "Congress looking like a degenerative condition."