Congress

In a column last week, Fareed Zakaria asked, "Does America Need a Prime Minister?"  It is a question that often comes up when political gridlock makes it appear that we cannot respond to a crisis.  My answer is no.  Answer yes if you would have rather had the country governed with the Speaker of the House as the chief executive rather than the President over all of the last two decades.  Prime Minister Gingrich.  Prime Minister Pelosi.  Answer yes if you would like to have more and possibly more influential Tea Party movements legitimized as parties of their own, or if you would like Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) to have more company serving in elected office on Capitol Hill.

The results yesterday bring a big change, but not the change observers think when it comes to the defense budget. 

For the defense committees, ideology will rear a powerful head, and the rhetorical and political battles over DADT, Afghanistan, the New START treaty,  missile defense, China, Iran, and the Middle East will all provide powerful headlines and verbal fisticuffs. 

But when it comes to budgets, the departure of Ike Skelton and the arrival of the Republicans at the helm of authorizing and appropriating committees simply mean "business as usual." 

The new leadership in defense supports high defense budgets; the old one did, too.  They will lobby for earmarks for their pet rocks and their districts; the old ones did, too.  Tea Party preferences on earmarks won't be likely to stop the old guard.

But there is a difference.  It is outside the defense world and the defense committees, but very rooted in the policy preferences of the new conservatives.  They want smaller government, and they want it now.  They want lower taxes, and they want them now.  They want a balanced budget, now. 

Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig visited Dartmouth yesterday to deliver a public lecture with the same title as this post.  His topic was the nearly intractable issue of the role of money and lobbying on policy.  He has written extensively about the issue and has a nascent movement to show for it.  See "Fix Congress First," where he advocates for, among other things, the Fair Elections Now Act. 

I had the chance to talk with him over lunch. In the course of that discussion, there seemed to be four approaches, not mutually exclusive, that emerge in trying to reduce the corrupting influence of money on politics:

Today's marathon Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee hearing into Goldman Sachs' role in the financial crisis found Goldman executives and senators talking past each other or driving each other to frustration with non-responses and no responses to loaded questions. Subcommittee Chair Carl Levin (D-IL) quickly expressed frustration that Goldman witnesses wouldn't answer "yes" to his questions on whether Goldman had any obligation to disclose its short positions to clients it was unloading "crap" long positions upon as described in a Goldman email. Similarly, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) kept asking if Goldman had a duty to act in the best interests of its clients, and she didn't get an answer she was satisfied with either. 

I wonder if the Founding Fathers envisioned that this sentence (highlighted in bold, courtesy of Harold Meyerson's column in today's Washington Post) would become so commonplace:

The civil rights leaders who have called this march don't doubt that if Obama could enact immigration reform by executive order, he would. In his meeting with them last Thursday, the president affirmed his commitment to the cause. Whether it will become his legislative priority is another question: Congress is waiting to see what Obama does, even as Obama says he needs to see some GOP willingness to enact reform (and this is certainly a cause that some leading Republicans, most notably John McCain, have supported in the past).

Why should Congress wait to see what Obama does?  Congress should do.  Obama should sign, or not.  When you march on Washington, you should be facing east from the Washington Monument, not north.