The Trouble with Getting Congress Working Again

The Trouble with Getting Congress Working Again 

Having deprived Congress of regular order for nearly the entire tenure of the current administration, Harry Reid and his cohorts have milked every partisan advantage from this circumstance that they could possibly dream up. The same goes for his shamelessly executed plan to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule, so helpful in ushering committed statists and hardcore political progressives into important appointive federal government posts by depriving the political opposition of their only effective means of applying political leverage during the Senate confirmation process.

Senator Reid now stands ready to take full political advantage of his political opponent’s stated desire to restore Regular Order in the federal budgetary process, and to bring back the filibuster rule. Come January, leaders in the new majority party in the Senate will (or at least should) be torn between two different goals or aspirations, each with its own unique merits:

On the one hand, they will wish to repair the institutional damage done to the Senate and restore its potency as a strong and independent actor in our republican form of government under the U.S. Constitution. This means moving Congress out from underneath the dark cloud of executive branch dominance that has overspread all of Washington D.C. in recent year, as well as re-establishing the unique power of a single senator to stand in the way of ill-advised legislative measures, to the chagrin and consternation of reason-blind ideologues who rely on group-think and public shaming techniques to achieve their public policy goals.

On the other hand, they will wish to make of Congress an even greater and more insurmountable obstacle to the current administration’s stated goal of fundamentally transforming this country. Along the way, they will also be eager to cooperate freely with the House of Representatives to pass a series of clean bills for the president to sign or veto (most likely the latter) that will serve to draw into the starkest possible relief two competing and contrasting visions for how this country should move forward. To be the beneficiary of such an historic mid-term electoral landslide without then seizing and exploiting every available partisan advantage would be to appear naive and unwilling to engage in the largest and most momentous political struggle this country has seen since the Adams versus Jefferson ‘Clash of the Titans’ circa 1797-1800 (culminating, of course, with Jefferson’s historic inauguration, preceded that day by the remarkable scene of a humiliated but still office-holding John Adams emerging from the cavernous new executive mansion in the pre-dawn mist, hailing a ride in a passing public carriage like any other ordinary citizen, and high-tailing it back to New England to enjoy the rest of his life as America’s first one-term president).

So to say that Mitch McConnell could (or at least should) be experiencing mixed feelings about acting in good faith to restore the filibuster rule as it applies to Senate debates, or to plot a return to Regular Order in support of the Constitutionally-required process of preparing and passing an annual budget for federal governmental outlays, is the understatement of this rapidly ending but remarkable year.