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The System Worked

Authored by Christiane Montuori on Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 11:48 PM | Add the first comment!
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Yes, it was ugly and messy, like watching sausage being made, as the cliché goes.

Nevertheless, not only did the system work, but it worked the way it was designed to work.

With its two year terms, the House of Representatives is designed to be, well, representative, and to reflect popular will. The Senate is designed to be a little more statesmanlike, to take a somewhat longer view. Both performed as scripted.

The deadlock and stalemate that was so painful to watch was reflective of the country as a whole. These are tough issues. Everyone is making their best guess. The country has never been in this spot before and no one knows the right answer. The new debt agreement is just an experiment, not a solution, at best a step forward in addressing the myriad of problems challenging the US and global economies. 

The good news is that the extreme wings of both parties do not like it. The bipartisan centrist majority must have done something right. 

There will always be the know-it-alls, like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who have the enormous advantage of no accountability.

John Boehner, on the other hand, is accountable to mutually exclusive constituencies: his caucus which elected him Speaker, the House as a whole, which he represents to the rest of the country, his district back home which elected him to Congress, and, by the way, his own values and beliefs. He is the most sympathetic character in this whole drama. He said early on that he did not become Speaker to be a “partisan hack.”  He spent untold hours cajoling, begging, convincing, bribing and doing whatever he could to put together a majority of his caucus behind a bill, any bill that had a chance of passing the Senate. If he supported a bill that could pass the House with a coalition of a large majority of Democrats and a minority of his Republican caucus, the vote would have been understood as a repudiation of him, a vote of no confidence in his Speakership and Eric Cantor would have replaced him as Speaker.  He knew from the beginning that there was only a very small space for agreement, since he needed a majority of his caucus to stay in his job plus a significant number of Democrats to create a majority, and that would only happen if the bill was acceptable to a majority of the Democratic-controlled Senate. 

The differences were not primarily about politics, or about the facts. They reflected deeply-held values that were mirror images of the deeply-held values that are alive and well in the country as a whole. When people are faced with giving up on some belief that they care about, the feelings will run high, and the losses will seem agonizing. The far left and the far right both had to be left behind if a bargain was going to be struck.

For Boehner, as well as for Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell, this was a palpable, visible example of leadership as distributing losses and as disappointing your own people at a rate they could absorb. All the ugly foreplay that we witnessed for the past month was a necessary prelude to the harsh reality that there was no overwhelming consensus in the Congress or in the country for a way through this stalemate that would meet everyone’s needs.  The country wanted a resolution. Any resolution had to be bi-partisan. Boehner and his colleagues in leadership in the House and Senate were able to thread the needle, but only after exhausting all other possibilities and using the deadline as an action-forcing event to herd enough cats to enact a law. 

No one, not the stock market nor global big-wigs, nor ordinary folks in the US and around the world could have liked what they saw. No one can feel unqualifiedly enthusiastic about the content of what was finally produced. There will be some electoral defeats, probably mostly in primaries, on both sides of the aisle for people who voted for the bill against the most vocal sentiment in their core constituencies. 

The process was awful to watch because it was like looking in a mirror. The value conflicts that permeate the most diverse country on the face of the earth were on display. In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and they are us.” 

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