Just do nothing

The pejorative “do-nothing” has been applied to many congresses in the past, sometimes fittingly, sometimes spitefully. This Congress, now lurching toward frenzied adjournment, does not merely deserve the label, it has set a standard of ineffectiveness it is hoped no future body of lawmakers can match.

The important issues before this Congress were specific and clear – campaign-finance reform, a Medicare drug benefit, managed-care reform, an increase in the minimum wage just for starters. On issue after issue, congressional leadership, particularly in the Senate, has failed, utterly and deliberately, to create the climate of compromise and accommodation that leads to proposed legislation becoming law.

And now, with the election closing fast and members eager to get home to campaign, this do-nothing Congress suddenly wants to do everything. Or, more accurately, to give the impression of having done something.

Three weeks into the new fiscal year, work remains unfinished on appropriations bills for such departments as Commerce, Justice, State, Labor, Education and Health and Human Services, in short on everything from foreign affairs to remedial reading programs. With no time left for lawmakers or the public to fully digest the content of each, it is likely that several will be pureed into one enormous glop of omnibus spending.

That unappetizing prospect is made worse by the garnish – riders included by specific members to benefit specific constituents, from commercial radio stations that want to keep low-power non-profit stations off the public airwaves to snowmobile manufacturers who want to keep Yellowstone buzzing. To see what bad things can happen when special interests are served in a hurry with no public debate or accountability, one need only consider the Interior bill finally passed last week. Just one component of that larded-up bill – the absurd number, staggering cost and dubious value of water projects shoved in at the last minute to please home districts – is an insult to the democratic process.

Both parties are culpable here. Democrats have been far too transparent about their desire to use legislation to make a point about something else. For example, the failure of a minimum wage bill to get to the Senate floor despite bipartisan support in the House may be due in part to the clear intent of Senate Democrats to pair that important issue with a congressional pay raise to embarrass their colleagues across the aisle. As a result, neither got debated.

But as Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle pointed out recently, Republican ladership has used procedural maneuvers to block debate and the expression of dissenting views to an unprecedented degree. Twenty-five percent of all the debate-suppressing cloture votes in Senate history have been cast in the last four years; the number of days this Senate has actually been in session in the lowest in a half-century.

For that, blame Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and his team. Republicans have controlled Congress for nearly six years and still seem unaware that it is the responsibility of the majority party to do more than put up obstacles. Now, however, is not the time to tear down those obstacles and let every local whim pass through, unexamined and without debate. Other than pass basic appropriations bills that keep the government functioning, this is precisely the time for Congress to just do nothing.