We get the government we deserve

Nick Troiano
Posted 8/21/12

Late Thursday night, Congress passed a $1.01 trillion spending package—less than 72 hours after the 1,603-page bill was released and less than three hours before government funding was set to …

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We get the government we deserve

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Late Thursday night, Congress passed a $1.01 trillion spending package—less than 72 hours after the 1,603-page bill was released and less than three hours before government funding was set to expire. Could there have been a more fitting way to end the most dysfunctional and least productive session of Congress in our recent history?

The good news is that the 219 to 206 vote averted a government shutdown and will keep most agencies funded through the end of next summer. The bad news is the fact that Congress barely carried out its basic constitutional duties actually qualifies as good news these days. The bill that was passed, known as the “cromnibus,” was a very poor excuse for governing.

On the one hand, it was passed through a bad process. The budgeting process calls for 12 individual appropriations bills to be passed by October 1. Instead, two months after the deadline, Congress approves a single bill that (1) combined 11 appropriations into a single “omnibus” appropriation and (2) included a separate “continuing resolution” (CR) to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded at its same level until March—intentionally setting up a partisan showdown on immigration next year. While the size of the appropriations themselves largely followed the spending caps set by last year’s Bipartisan Budget Act, they also included at least $30 billion of gimmicks that will add to the deficit. (Unfortunately, shoving bills off until next year does not count as actual savings in the real world.)

On the other hand, the cromnibus contained bad policy. The bill included various extraneous measures that were slipped in behind closed doors and without debate. The most egregious provisions included (1) rolling back financial reforms that prohibited big banks from engaging in practices that contributed to the financial crisis and (2) increasing tenfold the sum of money that wealthy donors can contribute to political parties. At the same time, Congress exerted its authority to block a referendum approved by the voters of the District of Columbia to legalize marijuana. It’s as if Congress concluded that the real problem with our political process today is that there’s not enough money and too much democracy in it.

PA Congressman Tom Marino voted in favor of the legislation, even though it represents pretty much everything he campaigned against this year—including fully funding the Affordable Care Act. Marino’s vote could have been a responsible decision to prevent another shutdown, a pragmatic calculation that there was more good than bad in the bill, and an acceptance of the messy legislative process for what it is. Or Marino’s vote could have simply been a result of the pressure from his party leaders (with whom he votes 94% of the time) and his PAC contributors (from whom he’s raised over $1 million in campaign cash) who supported the bill based on their own self-interest. My guess is the latter.

But one can’t know for sure; that’s the real problem here. It’d be easier to give our leaders the benefit of the doubt if they were not but mere pawns in a political game played between both major parties and the special interests on both sides. And it’d be easier for our leaders to actually craft good policy and pass it through a sensible process if they were only beholden to “we, the people” to begin with. Such is not the case today, and it likely won’t be the case in the 114th Congress either. Why? Last month, the voters returned 96% of incumbents to a Congress that only 12% say they approve—Marino among them.

On the bright side, the next election is less than two years away. (Or, maybe, that’s a problem, too.)

[Nick Troiano of Milford, PA was an independent, citizen-funded candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in PA’s 10th Congressional District in 2014.]

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