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The current Congress deserves a special place in history for what is either an inability to read public opinion or a thinly-veiled contempt for it.
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| Thank God for forsaking Washington D.C. If our nation’s capital were blessed with the summertime climate of San Diego, we might never get Congress to go home. But such is the benevolence of God and the foresight of George Washington that the country’s seat of government is built upon a humid swamp that becomes nigh uninhabitable come summer. The dividend that results is the August recess, congressional members’ annual flight from Washington to the districts they ostensibly represent.
Because it is the genetic imperative of liberal Democrats to meddle with serenity, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have decided that this year’s recess should be cut short. On the theory that that government is best which governs incessantly and incontinently, Pelosi and Reid have apparently concluded that what the public really wants from a Congress with record low approval ratings is more of the same. God save us from our friends.
In the case of the House, Pelosi summoned her minions to pass a $26 billion bailout of state governments, with the money going primarily to education and Medicaid funding. The caterwauling that Democrats substituted for argument was equal parts predictable and fictitious. In a Rose Garden signing ceremony, President Obama said "We can't stand by and do nothing while pink slips are given to the men and women who educate our children and keep our communities safe." In this, Obama displayed an ignorance of Bob Wells’ modification of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.”
States looking to fiscally manipulate the federal government will often short their most emotionally appealing programs in times of economic distress. Then, when they bring their tin cups to Washington, they can claim that the only way they can balance their books is on the backs of teachers, police, firefighters, the elderly and the indigent. Since politics, like prostitution, is the art of knowing the dollar value of “yes,” Congress invariably accedes. But saying no – especially when the price tag is $26 billion – might convince the states to clean house instead of kicking their fiscal problems to Washington.
In the Senate, where only a handful of members will actually have to return to chambers, Harry Reid is tending to an arguably more meritorious task: passing a border security bill that will put 1,500 more personnel and increased surveillance drones to the task of reducing illegal immigration. But whatever virtues the bill may have are undermined by its transparently strategic nature. Coming in the wake of recent Obama Administration boasts that more resources are being dedicated to the border than ever before (true enough, though irrelevant), Reid’s efforts are an obvious prelude to an amnesty package that Democrats believe they can only pass after establishing nominal credibility on border security.
The current Congress deserves a special place in history for what is either an inability to read public opinion or a thinly-veiled contempt for it. That further bailouts or increased talk of amnesty are even on the table in August 2010 shows halting misjudgment. But the political miscalculation supersedes any foolishness on policy. Democrats in Congress somehow came to the conclusion that what the public most wanted from them was bold, strategic action – thus the decision to meet over the August recess. They thought that propping up union jobs would be seen as being aggressive on unemployment. They thought a head fake on border security would anaesthetize the public for amnesty. If they wanted to prop up their sagging poll numbers, they were trying too hard. The most popular action they could have taken was to stay at home.
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