This is another great piece from my friend Winslow Wheeler.
Don’t think the fiasco in the House of Representatives on Monday when it voted down the financial bail out package was out of the norm for congressional behavior. Expect more. I explain in a piece that ran in the October 1 “Politico.” Find the piece at here or read it below.
Bailout failure is par for the course with this Congress
By: Winslow T. Wheeler
October 1, 2008 05:56 PM EST The dysfunctional mess that the world witnessed on Monday as the House of Representatives voted down the $700 billion financial bailout bill was Congress not at its worst but, rather, as it is.
Consider what you saw: The president, secretary of the Treasury, speaker of the House, majority leader of the Senate and minority leaders of the House and Senate all agreed the nation was in real peril, even if “only” of the financial sort. With genuine fear overriding their usually ultrapartisan impulses, they put together a bipartisan proposal that not a single member of Congress who has been a regular on the Sunday morning talk shows tried to oppose. The elite of Washington from both parties, the heart of America’s political establishment, were united.
And they screwed it up. If one is to believe The Washington Post, both the Republican and Democratic caucuses in the House knew, or certainly should have known, that the Republicans couldn’t round up enough votes to compensate for defecting Democrats. For reasons no one on Capitol Hill has explained, the House “elite” went ahead with the vote anyway and lost by a not particularly close 205-228 tally. With Wall Street collapsing around their ears, the shocked members then disclosed that they had no backup plan – parliamentary or political – and proceeded to huddle in separate party caucuses to poke about the wreckage. Predictably, Democrats and Republicans alike emerged to point fingers at everyone but themselves.
People who know how to herd cats on Capitol Hill and how to make things happen when they have to are no longer sitting members of Congress. The historically proclaimed “Master of the Senate,” Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas), and any of several House speakers who knew how to stand a member in front of an open political grave to get the “right” vote, would be shaking their heads in dismay.
In hindsight, this collapse in leadership was easy to see coming. Having promised to end the war in Iraq if elected speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) showed instead that she was either unwilling or unable to put together a political coalition to keep her word. The U.S. Senate can be described only as a complete shambles. Enacted appropriations bills are as rare as hens’ teeth, and those appropriations that do finally become law require crude parliamentary gimmicks to ensure their passage. Oversight, while feeble in the House, is nonexistent in the Senate. Hearings are platforms for speeches and announcements; witnesses sweating out interrogation by a well-informed questioner are seen only in old news clips.
And now for the bad news: The same crew will likely cobble together a package that President Bush will eventually sign into law after a Senate “debate,” characterized by staff-scripted speeches and parliamentary maneuvers that will avoid, not produce, real exchange. And a different sideshow in the House will feature only a temporary show of bipartisanship, the members from both sides hot to get back to finger-pointing and narrowness of spirit.
This crisis will pass. But the bunch that authored it will be back next year. House Republican leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) may not survive a leadership challenge, and other new bodies will populate the House benches and Senate desks after the elections. But nothing will change.
In the face of leaders who don’t lead, the extremes of both parties – the far right and loony left that together voted down Monday’s bailout package – will be the ones who are really in charge on Capitol Hill.
It will be a horror show as the spineless political center and the mindless fringes of both parties tackle the issues in 2009. Imagine this bunch trying to fix Washington: repairing the broken economy, enacting sensible legislation to give affordable health care to all citizens, making sense of our tax code, bringing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to reasonable ends, reforming our bloated defense budget and broken military, and helping America survive on favorable terms in a complicated – and not particularly appreciative – world.
The good news is that probably nothing will pass. A dysfunctional Congress surely will lock down the entire system, except for the parts that produce press releases, overheated speeches and blame.
Perversely, this presents a golden opportunity. The absence of courage, ethics and competence on Capitol Hill is a vacuum ready to be filled by the new president. But he will have to demonstrate that he has more of those characteristics than the Capitol Hill collective, which should not be hard.
Recognizing that challenge, both John McCain and Barack Obama have promised reform of – or change in (pick your term) – business as usual in Washington. And yet, all we have so far is talk. Unless one of these two candidates moves to distinguish himself before the elections as someone who can lead Congress and the nation out of this mess, it’s possible that talk is all we will get after Nov. 4, as well.
As our soldiers and Marines on their third and fourth deployments in Iraq say, embrace the suck.
Winslow T. Wheeler worked on Capitol Hill for 31 years for Republican and Democratic senators and for the Government Accountability Office. Currently, he is the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC
[…] Don’t think the fiasco in the House of Representatives on Monday when it voted down the financial bail out package was out of the norm for congressional behavior. Expect more. I explain in a piece that ran in the October 1 “Politico. …[Continue Reading] […]
Always great to hear from Windslow.
The bail out has apparently passed.
10-3-08 / 1:20pm EDT
Meanwhile,
http://tinyurl.com/3wc9na
California may seek Treasury financing
6 minutes ago
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has told Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the most populous U.S. state may need to turn to the federal government for short-term financing because a $7 billion sale of notes may be foiled by weak credit markets.
M
Thanks for that update Max.
Don
Ja, we only need send Conan to clobber all those evil hordes from Russian Empire, china, Persia, et al. Then sack their cities & carry their nubile women back with us.
For those who missed this on LWJF or DNI.
Max
on 03 Oct 2008 at 8:40 pm 3
700 billion !
Just how much are we talking about ?
Chet understands, I’m sure, that’s what he does.
I turn to astronomy & cosmology as a hobby of mine
on a scale to relate to such numbers.
Here’s a link that gives some perspective.
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/localgr.html
Number of large galaxies within 5 million light years = 3
* Number of dwarf galaxies within 5 million light years = 46
* Number of stars within 5 million light years = 700 billion
Now, the combined cumulative US national debt is
now over $10 trillion, again, Chet understands such numbers.
I make that 10 raised to something like the 12th power.
http://zfacts.com/p/461.html
Bush Budget
Busts the
$10 Trillion
Barrier
on Sept. 30,
2008.
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm
http://www.ehd.org/science_technology_largenumbers.php
The height of a stack of 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) one dollar bills measures 6,786.6 miles. A column of bills this high would extend 28 times higher than the orbiting International Space Station.
The height of a stack of 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) one dollar bills measures 67,866 miles. This would reach more than one fourth the way from the earth to the moon.
The height of a stack of 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) one dollar bills measures 6,786,616 miles. This would reach from the earth to the moon and back 14 times.
Researched and Brought to you by Maximillian.
I wish there was an organization that would give Winslow an award to citizen and leadership? They give the Presidental Medal of Freedom to a bunch of liers.
Why is not Winslow on Larry King or Lou Dobbs? I like Lou Dobbs but he still puts establishment people on.
Don
Don : Major, methinks it’s ‘coz Mr. Wheeler ain’t exactly “politically correct” in the eyes of these talkshow hosts or the goons who own the TV stations.
“Why is not Winslow on Larry King or Lou Dobbs?”
John Stewart or Bill Mayer might put him on ?
Jon Stewart had Eugene Jerecki of “why we fight”
as a guest.
MaX