After a reminder from my Best Reader and also from The American Prospect, Your Humble Blogger just spent an hour listening to Sen. Kennedy’s recent Critique of Administration Policy at the Brookings Institution. Well, watching and listening; C-SPAN has the video stream in its Politics and Elections archive. For those of you (if any) who are interested in the whole thing, but would rather read than watch and listen, the texts are available in pdf from Brookings.
Just for a taste, though, the final sentences:
This is the pattern and the record of the Bush Administration. Iraq. Jobs. Medicare. Schools. Issue after issue. Mislead. Deceive. Make up the needed facts. Smear the character of any critic. Again and again and again, we see this cynical and despicable strategy playing out. It's undermining our national security, undermining our economy, undermining our health care, undermining our schools, undermining public trust in government, undermining our very democracy. We need a change. November can't come too soon.
Other than the fun of hearing our Lion roar (and how many people can carry off a six-fold anaphora twice in an hour), the thing I found most intriguing was the sense that Sen. Kennedy has a job to do, and that this administration is preventing him from doing it properly (as he sees it). What he calls the “Administration's win-at-any-price tactics” include not just real hardball negotiating, which the Senator may not like but would not be outraged by, but outright deception, as well as jettisoning what Norman Ornstein called the norms of legislation. “The Medicare bill is a poster child for how not to write a law,” Senator Kennedy said. “Even a sausage-maker would be offended by how this law was made.” And remember, he’s been trying to improve health care policy since before Your Humble Blogger was born or thought of.
During the question and answer period, he complains about the Republican leadership refusing to allow a vote on the minimum wage. He describes being shut out of conference committee negotiations between the House and the Senate. During the question and answer period, he talks about the recent pension funds negotiation, five days of negotiation before finally agreeing on amounts that (it’s pretty clear) he felt were inadequate but the best that could be got. Then the White House shot it down. “The Senate doesn't work that way,” he said.
I try to remember, but often forget, that legislation is tough work, and that people such as Sen. Kennedy put in a lot of hours doing their jobs. They are, most of them, serious people doing serious things. And they are now working with people who are not serious, who have no concern for others, and who disregard both the way things have been done in the past and the way things will need to be done in your future. Imagine, in your own workplace, what that would be like. Yes, Our Only President’s incompetence, short-sightedness, cronyism, insularity, contempt for democracy, wrong-headedness, bad judgment, and arrogance will be felt by many others far more than by Senator Kennedy, who, after all, has a good job, fantastic health care, a safe pension, access to marvelous public transportation, education, and infrastructure, and who isn’t being bombed to smithereens. But then, much of what Our Only President does is only affecting Your Humble Blogger slightly, in pieces, reflections and indirections. It isn’t my job.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
I’m a little unclear on which part of what you describe isn’t the way the Senate works. (Feel free to tell me to go read or listen to the piece if he describes it in more detail.) Isn’t it pretty common for congresspeople to spend a lot of time coming to a compromise that nobody on any side feels is entirely adequate for what they want, only to see the President veto in the end? This is an honest question, not rhetorical; I only have the vaguest of grasps on how often that sort of thing happens.
Well, my first response is that if Sen. Kennedy says it isn’t how the Senate works, he should know.
Seriously, the impression I got was that whereas normally you know more or less what everybody’s going to do, and the negotiating is done in good faith, in this case as with other recent negotiations it was not. I don’t think that the President often surprised Congress with a veto (certainly Our Only President doesn’t, as he hasn’t sent back his first veto yet). The President makes known to the negotiators what will be acceptable and what won’t; the Congress then decides what to do about that. Under Our Only President’s father, the Dems in the House and Senate liked to send him stuff to be vetoed, to get everybody’s stand on record. That doesn’t mean that they thought the legislation in question would succeed, or that they spent much time in negotiating it. The real negotiations were on other bills.
My impression, from watching Sen. Kennedy speak as well as the reading I’ve been doing over the last two years, is that there really is a difference, and a substantial one, between normal Senate hardball and the bad faith that is currently in DC. But I can’t say I know for sure.
R.I.
-V.
For some perhaps surprising numbers on presidential vetoes, see http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0801767.html.
No, it’s not common for Congress to pass legislation, only to see it vetoed after it has been passed. And it’s not usually a surprise when it happens, since the White House participates in the negotiations.
It’s the negotiations (or lack thereof) that are the problem.