The world would be a much better place if Larry Haas's prediction that important progress will come from compromise policies with congressional Republicans were true. It would not only mean that we are making headway on a long list of problems that are in urgent need of fixing but that Washington is finally starting to return to an era in which both parties accept responsibility for tackling tough problems and both parties believe that they will be judged harshly if they don't make a reasonable good-faith effort to be constructive.
Regrettably, that is not the city we now live in. President Obama offered the minority party an open invitation to be part of the process more than a year ago. The Republicans rejected that offer then and they show no signs of reversing course. In fact, they correctly see their strategy of obstruction and unbending dissent as being highly successful. One might argue that it has fostered one of the great near-term turnarounds in modern political history--contributing to a dramatic decline in the president's public approval and raising dissatisfaction with congressional Democrats to the historic levels that Republicans themselves have suffered.
They are still not well-liked, but they have energized their base, destroyed confidence in the opposition and headed toward substantial gains in the off-year elections. As long as generating public disgust and turning that disgust against the opposition is working, why change?
Look at the ground they have staked out for themselves in the past year. They said that the stimulus package was larded up with billions for slow spend-out programs that would create too few jobs in the near term and force high deficits long after the country was in economic recovery. The Republicans then offered a motion to recommit the entire stimulus package and amend it by adding a mammoth $36 billion for highway spending (among the slowest-spending programs in the package).
They have railed incessantly about uncontrollable entitlement outlays, but when the majority put forward a proposal that was intended to cut the real growth of the fastest growing entitlement, Medicare, from 80 percent over 10 years to merely 60 percent -- a proposal that was not designed to reduce benefits -- they launched a national crusade to protect Medicare from the unacceptable cuts that they argued would include creation of "death panels."
Before Obama could compromise with these legislators, he would have to know which of their two positions they are willing to negotiate from.
But there is another problem. Larry is correct in saying that we have become a nation of "raging incrementalists." That is another way of saying that for a long time we have not been able to make needed changes even in the face of serious and growing challenges to our future well-being. That was what the last election was about. The American people decided by a larger majority than had been given to any candidate or any party in 28 years that they wanted change.
The fact that obstructionists have found parliamentary tactics to overturn that mandate is not a good thing. The policies that will result will not offer us an opportunity to move forward in dealing with our deficit, our security or our competitive posture in the world economy. We are not headed toward a new era of cooperation between the parties; we are headed toward an era in which the entire world is rightly questioning whether we have lost the capacity to govern ourselves.
Scott Lilly is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former Democratic clerk and staff director of the House Appropriations Committee.
