BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | JAN 6
Another year is in front of us, and with it the ritualistic adoration of resolutions, promises, and agendas.
In politics, promises are king. They rule the rhetoric, produce prolific, big block headlines, raise expectations, generate motion, and usually, accomplish nothing. It is because they are ritualistic that they survive.
Agendas are similar. They are just something we have to have at the onset of each new day, week, month, year, and millennia.
The country’s political elite are busy setting agendas, with familiar themes and narratives, like foreign policy, terrorism, crime and gun violence, immigration, cyber security, health care, energy, education, and the environment. There will be presidential agendas and congressional agendas from the left and far left, from the right and far right, and moderates in the middle, from the leaders and rank-and-file and an endless stream from interest groups.
Expectations, however, are low. It is an election year and little gets done, especially under a compressed calendar of primaries and conventions, and crowded fields of candidates who take to heart Woody Allen’s observation that one of the most important things in life is sincerity and if you can fake that you’ve got it made. That makes actually governing unnecessary.
So, this year will probably not be one in which major public policy will get enacted, despite the promise of new House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is committed to the restoration of a more performance-based, participatory model of decision-making. Some call it regular order, but there is nothing regular about the ebbs and flows of legislating and nothing orderly about the behavior of legislators.
Ryan also seems committed to a new model of governance that returns us back to a future in which, as the late Jack Kemp preached, it is better to govern by consensus than by a collection of coalitions, focused intently on parochial rather than national interest. If I understood Kemp correctly, and that wasn’t always easy, it is a model that emphasizes inclusion and while exalting individuality does not diminish the importance in our lives of community—local, state, regional, religious, ethnic, recreational, business, social, and political—the commonality in our lives that binds us and obligates us to each other.
New visions and political renaissance take time to realize. They are transformational in nature and challenged today by the stagnating forces of public anger, deep divisions and the destructive, negative nature of social and political interaction. These conditions are only made worse by a multi-media industrial complex that makes a ton of money selling negativity and division and by politicians who insist that their certificate of election authorizes them to represent only their own narrow world view.
What Speaker Ryan and other political leaders can do in the interim is begin creating an environment in which the art of legislating can take place, effectively, efficiently, hopefully insulated from dysfunction and gridlock. They can focus this year not on ambitious political agendas, but practical ways to improve how those agendas will be met in future years.
How we govern has gotten too far afield from what the Founders intended, what our national conscience should dictate and what the country so desperately needs.
How we govern is manifested in both behavior and practice. Political behavior is in good measure an extension of broader public anger, division, and abandonment of any sense of reconciliation. True, bad behavior has been a hallmark of American politics since Burr shot Alexander and then went south to start his own country, but using historical anecdotes as a legitimate explanation for current behavior is ludicrous. At best it is a very lame excuse.
Bad behavior results in bad government and the total tanking of public respect for those in public office who are supposed to protect, not destroy public trust.
Changing behavior requires, as former Republican and Democratic Senate Majority Leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle wrote recently, better human chemistry and a willingness to compromise, two of four key ingredients to preventing a further downward spiral in 2016.
Their leadership colleague, former House Republican Leader Bob Michel said as much 22 years ago: “Political debate in a democracy is often robust and harsh. It is no place for overly-sensitive souls. The clash of ideas can produce an unpleasant sound. And yet in a democracy there is a fundamental need for mutual respect. There is a need for a formal, public recognition of the ultimate dignity of those with whom we disagree—in a word, a need for civility,” which he described earlier as “among the highest of public virtue…raising the level of your voice doesn’t raise the level of discussion….listening with care is better than talking in sound bites and thinking in slogans….”
The second element in good governance is the practice of it, utilizing processes and procedures as they were intended, reshaping them to serve 21st Century realities and creating an environment in which effective governance can actually take place, including the “chemistry” on which Lott and Daschle placed high importance. It is, after all, the main function of Congress to legislate, to write good laws, shape good public policy, and watch over the other two branches. People forget, because too much media attention is focused on the President and political theater.
Just look at how Congress legislates now. Over the last weeks as the first session of the 114th Congress mercifully limped to a conclusion, Congress adopted at the last minute, a huge, monstrous piece of legislation called an omnibus appropriation that created federal spending of $1.1 trillion.
The legislation contained hundreds of provisions, a good share of which had nothing to do with the appropriations process and reflected the inability of the Congress to do its work the right way. The legislation included an entire cyber-security and data breach program, controls on the sale of salmon and how food is labeled, and contained language on the length of trucks and how long a trucker can stay behind the wheel. It extended tax breaks for windmills, and lifted the ban on oil exports. It changed the fees for some work visas and addressed marijuana laws and needle exchange programs, all issues that should be discussed and acted upon individually.
And that performance, based on past performances, was considered an improvement.
The Executive has been worse. The President has made a mockery of the balance between the two branches with imperial executive orders and regulatory overreach. Critical to reforming the process of creating public policy is correcting the relationship between the Legislative and Executive. There’s a clear blueprint for doing so, called the Constitution.
Lott, Daschle, and Michel have endorsed a project that a group of former members of Congress and senior staff have developed over a period of several years that would provide the mechanism for serious reform and restoration of the two branches. It is a special Joint Committee on the Congress of Tomorrow.
The idea is to ensure that reforms are considered, debated, and enacted in a disciplined exercise, utilizing the best expertise available with some inoculation from the partisan extremism and ideological rigidity that prevents Congress from being an effective instrument of public policy.
Congress will have a difficult time reforming its procedures and changing the laws needed to do so in a piecemeal fashion, one reform at a time, separately in the two houses and then in negotiation with the White House, when required. It isn’t realistic.
A Joint Committee is one of the few mechanisms capable of addressing many deficiencies at once. And the deficiencies are considerable–hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal programs not being properly reviewed and reauthorized, the breakdown of the appropriations process, reform of the budget process, members and staff who are not trained and educated properly, a public not educated properly, and the congressional calendar is a mess. Those are the easy ones. Finding ways to make the House and the Senate and Republicans and Democrats work together better and resolving the serious constitutional questions raised in the relationship between the President and Congress make reform tougher.
The Joint Committee of this kind is rarely used—only three times in the previous century– but an effective means of engaging in bipartisan, bicameral, comprehensive, and conclusive reform. It’s one major step the leadership in both houses of Congress can take to make us all feel more confident in our institutions of government and those who serve in them.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.