POLITICS
Step 1: Change Congressmen
Step 2: Change Congress
By Stump Connolly
For whatever reason, and probably because one guy’s political commercials were not as offensive as the other’s, America has voted in a new set of characters in Washington that give Democrats control of the House of Representatives and probably the Senate.
It would be nice to think a change in leadership means the winds of political reform will blow through Congress. After all, Americans went to the polls with only 27% approving the job Congress is doing and swept more than 47 new members into office, the largest freshman class since 1994.
Most of these new members (and many incumbents who held onto their seats by a hair’s breadth) are beholden to congressional campaign committees who poured millions of dollars into targeted districts. But it would be a shame if they came away thinking their victory belonged to their political sponsors, not the people who want to see fundamental changes in the way Congress does business.
With a Republican president, a Democratic house and a split Senate, it’s hard to imagine that bold new policy initiatives will come from either party over the next two years. President Bush will play out his lame duck term. Congressional committees now under Democratic control will investigate, and unearth, various mistakes made by the Bush administration. And pundits will treat it all as a prelude to the 2008 presidential election.
But the 2006 mid-term elections provide a mandate for reform of Congressional procedures that can have a far-reaching effect. People obviously don’t like what’s going on in Washington. The good news is the dissatisfaction crosses party lines. The bad news is that the divide isn’t between Republicans and Democrats, but between the entrenched powers and the newly elected “reformers."
Here are some areas where the newly-elected can flex their muscles:
Earmarks
Last year, without any public debate, individual congressmen inserted some 15,000 “earmarked” public funds as line items in omnibus bills that will cost taxpayers $64 billion. These range from the famous $223 million bridge to nowhere in Alaska championed by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to $500,000 for a teapot museum in Sparta, North Carolina.
Most of the newly-elected Congressmen ran against earmarks (while many of the re-elected congressmen championed them as a sign of their power to get federal funds for local projects in their district.) But “earmarks” are essentially congressional “pork”. Congressmen use them to reward political contributors, feather their own nest and, most importantly, swap votes under the radar of political scrutiny.
There are two approaches to reforming “earmarks”: eliminate them or make congressmen attach their names to them. The first is a reform. The second the sort of a reform that won’t ruffle any feathers.
Why not ruffle feathers? Because, if you are a newly-elected member of the House Democratic majority, you’ll have to tell Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa), the 17-term congressman who won hero status by telling President Bush to get out of Iraq, that his stock in trade is dead. And you’ll have to do it soon because Murtha has already announced his bid to become House majority leader.
If you are a Republican, you’ll have to tell Sen. Stevens, a 37-year veteran himself and former Senate appropriations committee chairman, that the day when he could wield power that way are over.
It’s a tough job for a new member of either party, but isn’t that what you told us you would do in your commercials? Make the tough decisions.
Budget Reform
You can like President Bush’s tax cuts or hate them (depending on what you pay) but the net-net of Bush’s six years in office is a rising federal deficit and a projected $248 billion revenue shortfall this year. Over the last six years, Congress has approved tax cuts and unfunded initiatives that added $1.5 trillion to the national debt.
With a federal spending now hovering around $2.7 trillion annually, there are plenty of opportunities to cut back. Do you start with defense spending that’s doubled since President Bush came into office? Attack health care costs, now the second-largest item in the federal budget? (interest costs on our debt is third.) Eliminate corporate tax loopholes, cut agricultural subsidies, abolish the National Endowment for the Arts? Every single candidate who ran for Congress this year promised to eliminate government “waste.” But few have a chance to do anything but vote up or down on large package bills.
Budget making should be a cumulative process: the sum total of all the little decisions made in congressional committees. By focusing on the process, there are a number of small changes that could have big impact. Besides eliminating earmarks, these include:
* Requiring that any proposed new expenditure have
a corresponding funding source attached;
* Repealing the provisions in the 1974 budget act that prohibit the president
from impounding funds for wasteful pet projects;
* Passing a Constitutional amendment giving the President a line-item veto
on appropriation bills.
Forty-three states now give their governors similar line-item veto authority. Until the Supreme Court struck down Congress’s first line-item veto legislation, President Clinton used it 82 times over five years to eliminate $2 billion in useless projects.
As the late Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen said, “A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money.”
Lobbyist Rules
In 1968, there were 62 registered lobbyists in Washington. Today, there are nearly 35,000. There’s no better barometer of what’s gone wrong with Congress than this. Since 1998, 43% of former congressmen who did not retire or die took jobs as lobbyists in Washington, according to Public Citizen.
In most cases, their $165,000 a year Congressional salary doubles or triples the minute they set up shop on K Street. But because they are former members of Congress, they can still work out with their fellow colleagues in the congressional gym and mill about the actual lobby of the House or Senate chambers during those late night sessions where the actual deals are cut.
The most obvious example of lobbying gone wrong are former drug company regulators in Congress who immediately turn into drug company lobbyists. At this very moment, there are over 40 former members of Congress working for drug companies, including one former representative earning a reported $2 million a year as an industry lobbyist.
Their greatest achievement was the Bush Medicare Reform Act, a hodge-podge of special interest tradeoffs passed in the dark of night in 2003 for which we are still paying – see Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit D.
Lobbyists write the language of legislation and regulations governing their industry; provide research and witnesses for congressional hearings; take congressmen and senators on “fact finding” trips (over $50 million worth in the last five years) and, of course, donate campaign funds and workers to congressmen they favor through their political action committees.
Get the lobbyists out of Congress. As soon as possible. Knowing it is probably too late.
Open Debate
The administration of the House is handled by the House Rules Committee, which determines the procedures governing how legislation becomes law.
As we’ve been taught in our high school civics class, representatives introduce bills, debate them in committee, amend them along the way and present them to the full chamber for passage. Starting in the late Seventies, this process began to change when the democratic-controlled committee instituted a “closed rule” to expedite the flow of certain legislation to the floor without amendment.
By the time Republicans took control of the House in 1994, Democrats were using the “closed rule” on 70% of all legislation. The Republicans vowed reform. But as Matt Taibbi points out in a recent Rolling Stone article, the situation only got worse. In the last session of Congress, except for 11 appropriations bills where use is restricted, the “closed rule” was invoked on all but one bill in the House.
The “closed rule” works hand-in-hand with a second rule -- “Don’t work too hard” -- to create an ineffectual Congress. Because committee debate is so limited, congressmen can limit their time in Washington to a three-day workweek (Tuesday to Thursday), leaving more time to attend fund-raisers for their re-election. By the end of this year, the House of Representatives will have been in session only 99 actual days, nine less than the 1947-48 Congress known in history as the “Do Nothing Congress.”
How about an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?
Campaign Reform
Now let’s get to the nut of the issue.
This year’s political campaigns are an embarrassment to the candidates and, by extension, to the intelligence of the voters. They generate a toxic mix of televised mudslinging that dominates the airwaves. Why did Peter Roskam and Tammy Duckworth spend $5 million for political commercials on Chicago TV stations when 80% of the viewers don’t even live in their suburban district? Because they can. How did Gov. Blagojevich choose to defend his record in office? By drumming into our brains the happy jingle “What is she thinking?”
The McCain-Feingold campaign reform act passed in 2002 did not come easy. It took six years of behind-the-scenes maneuvering in Congress to get it to the floor. Along the way, the sponsors were forced into many compromises, the most egregious being the exception for spending by so-called independent 527 campaign committees. And it has proven to be an abject failure.
In the first presidential election after its passage, 2004 campaign spending rose 30% over the previous election. In this first midterm election following McCain-Feingold, spending on congressional races rose another 25% over 2004, according to Campaign Media Analysis.
The one triumph of the McCain-Feingold act was that it forced The Supreme Court to rule, 5-4, that Congress has the right to regulate political fund-raising to prevent real or perceived corruption, and that right outweighs the claim political commercials are just another exercise in free speech. This is an important first step now that political spots have become the equivalent of shouting "Fire!" in a theater.
As Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority, "We are under no illusion that (the law) will be the last congressional statement on the matter. Money, like water, will always find an outlet. What problems will arise, and how Congress will respond, are concerns for another day."
That day has clearly arrived. But let’s try a different approach this time. Instead of negotiating how much donors can give money to campaigns, let’s take away the primary motivation for raising it – the need to buy commercial time on what are federally-licensed public airwaves.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) already sets a variety of rules governing free speech on commercial radio and television stations. The commissioners ban obscenity, demand stations provide public service time, and mandate low rates for political commercials – all in exchange a license to broadcast over the public airwaves. Why can’t the FCC bar all political commercials – or confine them to a narrow three-week period prior to elections – offering instead a set amount of free airtime (as does WTTW-Channel 11) to all the candidates?
This is not a new idea, nor is it mine. It was first proposed by President Clinton in his 1998 State of the Union address. At the time, Clinton had just appointed William Kinnard as FCC chairman and was poised to name a new commissioner who would have given him a majority vote on the commission to do just that. But for his little indiscretion with intern Monica Lewinsky (discovered two weeks later), this reform might already be in place.
If political money, like water, will always find an outlet, we can at least shore up the dam around the public airwaves; and while they are at it, why don’t they use their authority over the phone networks to add those irritating political robocalls to the Do Not Call list? This will not stem the flow of money into politics, but merely force it to find new ways of polluting our national discussion, probably on the internet – which it is doing already.
Who Will Lead
Here’s the funny part. The man who has the most to gain from these reforms is the man who probably brought them on, George Bush.
Illinois has two members of Congress, Rep Rahm Emanuel in the House and Sen. Barack Obama in the Senate, who are uniquely positioned to lead the movement for reform.
Emanuel is an experienced congressional in-fighter who also has his eye on the House majority whip position. He comes out of the midterm elections with many freshmen grateful for his assistance as chairman of the democratic campaign committee. But he is smart enough to know the victory will be short-lived if Congress can’t demonstrate some positive gain from this sea change in leadership.
Obama is contemplating a 2008 presidential run, but in a Senate divided by a single vote, he will have few opportunities to put his name on significant health, education or other legislation to bolster his chances. Reforming the way Congress does business, however, is an issue he can preach from the bully pulpit, and he will quickly find an audience of moderates in both parties willing to follow his lead.
But the benefit of pushing congressional reform – and particularly new ways of regulating political commercials on TV and radio – fall most significantly on Bush.
Having come into office as “a uniter not a divider”, Bush has spent most of his first six years well off course in a war on terrorism that has mired the country in Iraq. At this point, he has little choice but to play out his hand in Iraq. He’s not going to get any major legislation through the new Congress. And with a 2008 presidential race about to kick off without him, none of the party leaders are going to be particularly interested in salvaging his reputation.
What if the man who set all modern day records for political fundraising now turns around and decries its debilitating influence on elections? Maybe his legacy needn’t be defined by his blundering war through the Middle East.
He’s the man to do it. He appoints the FCC commissioners. He controls the Republican campaign apparatus; and he has much to resent in the way Republican lobbyists have subverted his party’s efforts this year. As a businessman, I also suspect he is as appalled at the waste of money that goes into TV spots as the rest of us.
Imagine what history will say: George Bush, the president who saved politics from the politicians.
