Jul/09©Chris Farley
No Compromises
Someone told me once that a compromise results in agreement that no one is happy with. I don’t think that’s always true, but it’s becoming increasingly true with legislation. The problem with legislation is that the not-happy parties aren’t just the two people who broker the agreements; it’s everyone impacted by the legislation.
Let’s take, for example, the stimulus package. At $800 billion dollars, it is far, far, far, far above what the fiscal conservatives in Congress and elsewhere want. It is positively apocalyptic for conservative economists (or at least those who write on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal). At $800 billion, it is also significantly under the over-$1 trillion that the President and more liberal economists had been hoping for.
So each side is convinced that their way is the best, so when the bill is actually written, neither side is happy. Perhaps the liberal economists and politicians are correct; perhaps the conservatives are. But what certainly does not work is creating a bill that is entirely inconsistent with any existing ideology. What we got was a bill that was packed with compromises. The President compromised on the bill’s total, and its content. In order to compromise with the Blue Dogs and Republicans, all sorts of additions of dubious stimulative effect were added. Instead of a bill run by a sound economic ideology, every representative wanted a piece of the pie.
Unfortunately, health care seems to be going down a similar path. The President wants universal health care, and a growing chorus of respected medical voices are saying that this plan is not viable. Why? This bill compromises what the President wanted to make it more appealing to conservatives. And now we have a bill that everyone hates.
The President needs to stop compromising. He needs to abandon partisanship, and abandon bi-partisanship. I’m looking for the White House to be very involved in writing bills the way they should be. Bills need to be written with some sort of higher theory or logic at work. Politicians haven’t been doing a good job of this lately. So the President should write the bill the way he thinks it should be, and get approval from the best and the brightest. Then the President should make his case to America, and do his best to get the best bill passed. Doing your best to get a mediocre bill past just isn’t worth the effort.
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10:24 am on July 23rd, 2009
Ah, since we cannot tell the future until it is the present, it is impossible to say whether compromising pays off for the best.
I would like to see universal health care. However, since it is difficult to know if such a bill would pass Congress, does compromise pay if it winds up with many more people being able to have improved health care, versus the possibility that no bill would come to fruition?
3:50 am on July 31st, 2009
I'd agree with your argument in the event that a) President Obama has a single priority and is willing to spend all of his political capital ramming that priority down the Congress's collective throat and b) President Obama has the votes to get his version of a bill through the Congress, and these votes will be loyal and stick with him throughout a long debate. Since both of these would need to be true and neither of them are, he has to compromise, so the question becomes how and when.
Since the end product of the legislative process is always a compromise, the President could operate on the theory that if he articulates the core principles of what he's looking for at the start, he can share authorship and ownership of the resulting product and take a role in shaping it while it's still being baked, and can sign it so long as his core principles (the non-negotiable elements) are maintained. If he can't shepherd a bill through in this way, he's not a good enough politician, which modern Presidents must be if they want to be successful.
The more important of my conditions is actually the first. Improving access to quality medical care in this country is a huge priority, perhaps even the most important priority, for Mr. Obama, but it is not the only one. If his team burns bridges to the other party and spurns members of his own to get his healthcare bill passed, it's going to be much harder for him to tackle some of the other big issues he'd like to take up– education, entitlement reform, environmental policy, and the like.
Will the outcome be what President Obama envisioned? No. Will it be what you or I would put together if we were tasked with building a reform package? No. But if the compromise gets passed–ugly as it may be– as long as it's a step in the right direction, it's a step farther than Obama's Democratic predecessor managed to travel.
One last thought–The approval of the best and the brightest stopped mattering in the governing process before the two of us were born, and I don't see it coming back into fashion for a long, long time, if ever.
3:41 am on August 18th, 2009
I think that you have singled out the one biggest flaw in our political system: biased legislation. Congress is currently unable to pass bills without lobbying, earmarks, and embarrassment. This is a problem which has full come to fruition in the current legislative and political debacle which is healthcare reform.
On the other hand, I dissent on the means by which we correct this corrupted system. Compromise was one of the principles on which this nation was built and much of the success our country has enjoyed is due to compromised made by those who first wrote our laws. Compromises, which allow the benefits of two divergent ideas to both be implied, are one of the distinguish characteristics between representative government and single party or majority rule. If a majority dictates to a minority, then we are taking a moral step backwards, regardless of any civil, social, or political advance we may make in the process.
On the contrary, I suggest we ratify a constitutional amendment, which, without modifying the quanity or quality of power awards to Congress, alters the assembly in a way which facilitates a progressive and efficient legislative system.
Just food for thought.