Bipartisanship a mixed blessing

By:  LeRoy Goldman

Columniust

BlueRidgeNow Online

Times-News

February 18, 2018

In case you haven’t noticed, bipartisanship has broken out in Congress. It recently passed a two-year budget deal that was the product of weeks of intensive negotiations among congressional Republicans and Democrats.

The compromise was the antithesis of what we witnessed earlier in the failed efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, and the successful effort to cut taxes. Both of those efforts were the handiwork of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Not only were the Democrats excluded from the process, so, too, were most rank-and-file Republican members of Congress.

In both cases, McConnell used the arcane budget reconciliation process in order to attempt to pass the bills in the Senate without having to achieve the 60-vote supermajority. His effort failed on Obamacare when Sen. John McCain voted to kill the bill.

McConnell’s effort succeeded on the tax bill, but at a terrible price. The measure is tilted too heavily toward the super wealthy and corporations. Moreover, it will add $1 trillion to the national debt. No Democrat voted for it.

But having used up the once-each-fiscal-year chance to pass bills with only 51 votes in the Senate under budget reconciliation, McConnell had only two choices for anything else: Do nothing or work with the Democrats. Wisely, he chose the latter with respect to the recently passed budget deal as well as the open-process immigration legislation now being debated in the Senate.

Doing that is a big-time change for the better. The budget deal passed 71-28, way more than the 60-vote threshold for the required supermajority. But more important than the fact that the bill passed is how it passed.

Both those who voted for the bill and against it were made up of significant numbers of both Republicans and Democrats. More importantly, most of the bipartisan group who voted against the budget deal were the extremists in both parties, including Democrats like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republicans like Mike Lee of Utah.

The measure passed the House in the same way. The final vote was 240-186. Both groups were made up of significant numbers from each political party. And, like the Senate vote, it was the extremists who were on the losing side, like Black Caucus Democrat Maxine Waters of California and Republican Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

You don’t have to be a congressional savant or clairvoyant to understand that the way to marginalize the extremists in both parties, and thus enable Congress to do the nation’s business, is for the two leaders in each chamber to work together. Bipartisan majorities are built from the middle out, not from the extremes in.

But, as heartening as it is to see the fruits of bipartisanship, that doesn’t necessarily mean the results are always in the national interest. Bipartisan majorities can sometimes get things wrong or leave vital work unaddressed.

The budget deal, and to a much larger extent the recently passed tax cut, have the same problem — red ink. The budget deal is projected to increase the deficit by $320 billion and the tax cut is projected to increase the national debt by $1 trillion.

That’s not to say the budget deal and the tax cut should not have been enacted. It is to say the nation’s escalating deficit and debt are way too high and out of control.

Moreover, there is no mystery surrounding why this is so and why Washington won’t fix it. The “why” is found in the uncontrolled escalation of four federal mandatory programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest payments on the debt.

Every president and every Congress since Lyndon Johnson has recognized this growing clear and present danger to the American economy and way of life. None has had the courage to confront the American people with the pain involved in reining in these entitlement programs.

Remember the Simpson-Bowles Commission? Its purpose was to propose ways to solve this problem. Its 2010 report did just that. Before its ink was dry, President Barack Obama and most members of Congress, regardless of political stripe, ran from it like scalded dogs.

Donald Trump’s no different. On June 16, 2015, he said, “Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts.” That’s political legerdemain.

A good barometer of the current over-stimulation of a full-employment, low-inflation economy is the imploding stock market correction. It puts an ominous warning shot across the bow of America’s burgeoning debt and predicts punishing interest rate hikes.

Washington politicians who put their job security ahead of their oath of office deserve the retribution that the ballot box offers.

Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at tks12no12@gmail.com.