Gridlock: Is Compromise in Congress Impossible?

Moderates used to be a voice of reason on the right

There's been some ideological consolidation within both parties that has led the 112th Congress into some particularly sticky quagmires in its first five months in session.

But if recent examples of legislative gridlock make you scratch your head and wonder...

Is Congress broken? Is it being held hostage by political extremes and therefore unable to reach agreement on anything? Is the legislative branch of government undergoing a historic change?

...then maybe you haven't been paying attention. McClatchy Newspaper writers David Lightman and William Douglas asked these questions today as Washington journalists. And as a result they had to rely on their inside the beltway sources and D.C. politicians to answer them -- and it took them 1,300 words to do it. "The evidence is inconclusive," they write.

Lucky for me, I'm content to dispense with evidence and build my arguments on common sense, thus allowing me to draw a conclusion. Besides, my Rolodex is no match for those accumulated by Lightman & Douglas in their combined 60+ years as journalists. But I really do think the answers are pretty simple, and I can deal with each question in 150 words or less.

Is Congress Broken? No, but you have to think of it as an unreliable kitchen appliance. Sometimes it works. Other times it goes on the fritz. We wait for it to self-correct, and if it continues to malfunction we replace it. There's a degree of built-in functional obsolescence in Congress. That's the way companies sell more microwaves, blenders and toasters. And that's the reason we have elections every two years. Every other November we have an opportunity to fix Congress, or replace it with another.


Is it being held hostage by political extremes...? It's a very vivid hyperbole. And a strong argument can be made that the moderates who remain in each party after the mid-term shellacking of 2010 have very little influence at the moment. But when it comes to identifying the cause of gridlock, disagreement between the parties has always been and will always be a more potent force than agreement within the parties. The fights between Democrats and Republicans might be more vitriolic when each party is controlled by its extreme elements and stalemates may last longer, but gridlock isn't necessarily less common when there are moderate voices within each party to urge compromise.

Is Obama the only remaining moderate on the left?

...and therefore unable to reach agreement on anything? That's kind of a ridiculous question. Obviously, they're able to agree on many things. Even if many of those agreements, such as the recent "continuing resolutions" that prevented a government shutdown earlier this year, fall in an agree-to-disagree category. I think what Lightman & Douglas really want to answer is Will Congress agree to raise the debt ceiling? Which is more difficult. But I think they will because they must. Both sides will probably walk away feeling like the other got over on them. But they will compromise, because neither side wants to chance handing the other party a deadly weapon to use in next year's campaigns.

Is the legislative branch of government undergoing a historic change? Yes, but it's not likely to be a lasting change or one whose impacts are historically significant. Changing is one of the only things Congress does reliably. But most of the times those changes are fleeting, and those that last are usually not accurately identified as sea changes. To rephrase the question Will the high school government text books of my unborn children have a section on the fiscal fights of this Congress? Yes. But it won't be as long as the chapter on the fight the last congress had over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

60 Minutes Asks Obama What Pakistan Knew about Bin Laden

I jumped the gun by filing my last post on Saturday. I hadn't the slightest idea that if I had procrastinated a little bit  more I would have been able to capitalize on the President's interview with Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes, just a couple of hours before the deadline.

Those of you who saw the complete interview will know that Obama said many things that were contrary to my original argument, which I made "thinking aloud" just a few hours after I heard the news that bin Laden was dead. While acknowledging that some "people inside of government, (or) people outside of government" in Pakistan was helping bin Laden hide, he urged caution in reacting to the inevitable truth that somebody in Pakistan screwed us over. That's why he's President and why I shouldn't write about foreign policy. I'm too hawkish. I shoot first and ask questions later.

So I'm not going to paste the parts of the transcript that contradict my overall argument. What Obama and I agree on in the following excerpt is that the United States needs to find out how bin Laden was able to hide in plain sight of the Pakistani government. But the takeaway here is the way Kroft put these questions to the President. The setup for the grand finale... C'mon, you think they knew somethin' don'tcha?...is excellent.

KROFT: You didn't tell anybody in the Pakistani government or the military.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: No.
KROFT: Or their intelligence community?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: No.
KROFT: Because you didn't trust?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: As I said, I didn't tell most people here in the White House. I didn't tell my own family. It was that important for us to maintain operational security.
KROFT: But you were carrying out this operation in Pakistan.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah.
KROFT: You didn't trust 'em?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: If I'm not revealing to some of my closest aides what we're doin', then I sure as heck am not gonna be revealing it to folks who I don't know.
KROFT: Right. Now the location of this house, the location of the compound just raises all sorts of questions.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Uh-huh.
KROFT: Do you believe people in the Pakistani government, Pakistani intelligence agencies knew that bin Laden was living there?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don't know who or what that support network was. We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate. And we've already communicated to them, and they have indicated they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks bin Laden might have had. But these are questions that we're not gonna be able to answer three or four days after the event. It's gonna take some time for us to be able to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site.

Others in the administration have been asked these same sorts of questions from journalists, members of Congress and others, who like myself are troubled by the idea that somebody in Pakistan had to know this sonuvabitch was hiding within their borders. I'll have to address that later. But in the meantime, in the interest of fair treatment to the President's remarks on CBS, I would like to post the complete interview here:

...But 60 Minutes hasn't made it available and I don't want to use a bootleg. So this is all they officially put up on YouTube:

What Pakistan knew about Bin Laden and What the US should do about it

Behold! The miracles of Photoshop

Those of you reading this have heard me say this already -- It is literally incredible that Pakistani intelligence officials were unaware that Osama Bin Laden built a massive bunker in their backyard and lived there for years.

Naturally, they deny any knowledge. They didn't even suspect it. Quelle surprise! It's a tough sell. Especially if you're willing to buy into their line in defense of Pakistan's record on terrorism -- Pakistan has been an integral part in the "global war on terror," since 9/11. They've been able to gather good intelligence that has put the brakes on lots of terrorist attacks before they even got rolling. But they were supposedly clueless about Bin Laden's hideout. I don't think so.

But how can I disprove the assertion that Pakistan didn't know? I don't pretend that really matters, because if they knew, then they were uncooperative in our interests at best, and complicit in the interests of terrorists at  worst. And if they didn't know, then they're not as good as they claim to be at best, and totally incompetent at worst. Whether they knew or not, the fact that Bin Laden was hiding right under their noses, is reason enough to reconsider U.S. foreign policy towards Pakistan.

So if you're not convinced that Pakistan knew something about Bin Laden's whereabouts, and you think that makes some kind of difference, I only ask that you suspend your disbelief and assume that Congressman Brad Sherman, the ranking Democrat on the House terrorism sub-committee, knows a thing or two.

"Bin Laden spent a million dollars building a compound in this very ISI/Pakistan military-flavored town," Sherman told the BBC. "I don't think he would have chosen to do that if he didn't have acquiescence. Ya know, someone hiding from the CIA doesn't build a giant compound in Langley, Va."

Apparently there was no available real estate between Quantico and Langley

So the Congressman suspects Pakistan knew something about Bin Laden. And I would add, the CIA suspected the same going into the operation. Leon Panetta says the U.S. didn't share any intelligence with Pakistani officials before the raid because they were worried it would compromise the mission. In other words, the CIA didn't want ISI tipping off Bin Laden before the helicopters were already overhead.

The question of what exactly Pakistan knew and what the U.S. should do about it is a subject open to debate. A subject I will address in a later piece. But by way of setting up that debate -- let's agree it's a foregone conclusion that Pakistan knew something substantive about the world's most wanted terrorist living 35 miles outside its Capital.

And as I write this, Reuters is reporting that Pakistani intelligence officials say Bin Laden may have been living within their borders for seven years before he was killed. That's intel they ostensibly got after the fact, from one of his widows.

An Unforeseen Consequence of the Budget Agreement

Washington D.C. Mayor, six councilmembers, go to jail after protest to defend abortion rights

D.C. Mayor Vince Gray blocks traffic

I don't think Congress was bargaining for this. The White House probably didn't see it coming either. But their 11th Hour budget agreement to avert a government shutdown had a distinctly partisan stink to it for local government officials in Washington D.C.

The deal included a couple of "riders" -- those little, seemingly insignificant bills attached to great big important ones -- that the Mayor and several city councilmembers were agitated with. They were so pissed off, in fact, that they got themselves arrested over it. And their supporters at a rush-hour rally at the Capitol Monday night, already righteously indignant about Taxation Without Representation, cheered as cops scooped up the mayor, the city council chairman, five other members of the council and 34 others.

Two riders had local government up in arms. One prevents the city from spending its tax dollars on abortions and the other forces D.C. to implement a school voucher program. It's hard to imagine Obama or Democrats pushing to include those conservative bills in the budget agreement. So it's pretty obvious who Mayor Vince Gray was lashing out at.

“All we want to do is spend our own money," Gray said during the rally. "Why should women in the District of Columbia be subjected to a set of rules that no other woman is subjected to? If we want a school voucher program, we should choose it ourselves.”

Paul & Eric's Bogus Journey

Deficit Reduction and the Next Budget Battle

Eric & Paul give Bill & Ted a run for their money

I am loath to tread in Paul Krugman's footsteps. Especially given that I just watched Peter Beinart lead a Q&A with him on Wednesday. But I choose to write about Congress, and this week the most interesting thing coming out of the legislature is going to continue to be House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal for 2012 and the decade beyond. Ryan, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor are about to embark on what they believe will be an Excellent Adventure in deficit cutting. They're calling it a Path to Prosperity. But I, like Krugman, fear they're going to be leading us all on a Bogus Journey.

Krugman's work in economics won him a Nobel Prize. And my work in economics is a shoo in for a Booby Prize. So when he says Ryan's budget plan is "a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking," there's not a lot I can add to that. But that's never stopped me before.

Like it or not, Republicans -- Ryan and Cantor in particular with their positions of leadership in the House -- are setting the agenda for future budget negotiations. Even as they struggled with President Obama over how much government should spend in the next five months they were laying the groundwork for the next big budget battle, which entails cutting the deficit. And as nasty and protracted as cutting a few dollars here and there was recently, watching a Republican House tangle with the White House over how to reduce the deficit in the long term is going to be nastier and drag out even longer. And however cruel its logic and however wishful its thinking, the Budget Chair's plan represents the opening salvos in what will be a prolonged fight. It's the starting point for the negotiations; and how much, or how little of it remains when the dust has settled remains an open question.

Ryan's Path to Prosperity has no chance of surviving the rumble that's about to go down in one piece for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is that it cuts funding for the Obama's health care reform law. The Budget Committee Chairman knows his proposal will never make it to the president's desk. And if he were under any delusions about it making through the Senate intact, never in Paul Ryan's wildest dreams would Obama sign it as is. And he doesn't care. 

"It really doesn't matter to me" if his approach is adopted and signed into law, Ryan said on NBC's Meet the Press. "What matters to me is that we try to fix the problem."

I take that as an explicit admission of the true goals of the Republican Party when it comes to the economy. Reducing the deficit and cutting America's debts would be fine. And if that's your stated preference, other folks are less likely to discover your true position. Because the important thing, what Ryan and the Republicans hope will result from his plan, is a rightward shift in budget policy, which is already pretty far right of the center.

Obama will unveil his plan for cutting the deficit this week, and it goes without saying that we'll wind up with something between what Ryan proposed and what the President plans on suggesting. I recently made an attempt to argue that Obama ought to engage in some issue uptake with respect to Ryan's emphasis on entitlement reform. It was my hope that if he took the lead on that issue he might be remembered as the President who saved Social Security from bankruptcy and from Republicans who wanted to hand it over to their fat cat buddies in private enterprise. 

I was apparently unconvincing. So rather than trying to defend the argument that the President should address Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security reform in his deficit cutting plan, I'll simply predict that he will do so. But I'm not yet willing to stick out my neck on whether he'll be successful at saving any of them, either from financial ruin or from the GOP vultures.