It’s amazing how much a year can change. Our nation’s constantly vacillating attention can shift from India and Copenhagen to Chile and Haiti. The theory of global warming can suddenly change from consensus science to a carefully fabricated hoax. A record-setting quarterback (who will remain nameless) can go from respected Southern gentleman to perverted grandpa. And, in one short year, the tumultuous political theater that is the U.S. Congress can swing from a tooth-and-nail battleground dominated by the left to a proverbial Circus Vargas, a motley crew of tea-partiers, isolationists, hard-line Republicans, and liberal Democrats (with a few moderates thrown in for good measure), the fallout of a Republican blacktopping.
Leading up to November’s election, hand wringing pundits from both sides of the aisle hypothesized and theorized about what changes the midterms would bring to Congress. And, with concerns including the funding of Obamacare, two wars, and a pesky recession (not to mention the ballooning federal deficit that has outgrown its place as the perpetual “elephant in the room”) bearing down on the incoming 112th Congress, political analysts had good reason to spend their valuable time on pre-election scrutiny.
Most pundits (correctly) predicted a backlash against the past two years of Democrat-controlled Washington. Heck, even the word “revolution” was thrown around a few times during election lead up, albeit mostly on Fox News. DNC head Tim Kaine saw Republicans gaining 4 senate seats and 30 House spots; veteran Republican strategist Dick Morris anticipated the GOP picking up 10 and 70 seats, respectively.
The actual election was closer to Morris’ prediction: Democrats were pummeled at the polls, crushed under the weight of the Obama agenda. When the dust settled, Democrats had lost 6 senate seats and a whopping 63 house seats, a whitewashing not seen since the Depression. And, while Tea Party darlings Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell of Nevada and Delaware, respectively, lost to powerful incumbents, the Tea Party movement made its power as a mainstream force evident, unseating big-government liberals at the local, state, and national level.
Now, as much as I love reveling in a good old-fashioned smack down, there are more pressing issues on the table for the incoming congress. The newest influx of fresh, hopefully uncorrupted freshman Congressmen in Washington is charged as a collective to change the status quo (spend and talk and spend and talk, etc.) of the past two years. They will not be allowed the same honeymoon period afforded to the Obama administration; as is the beauty of American politics, the new Congressmen can just as easily be thrown to the curb in two years if they don’t answer the call(s) of their respective constituencies.
Saying the next Congress faces a full plate is a gross understatement. The previous legislative session, “fundamentally groundbreaking” in the eyes of the president, left a gaping hole of unfulfilled promises and fragmentary legislation for the next Congress. Well, that and two trillion, yes trillion, dollars of new debt. If the reader wants to get a sense of the expanses of our national debt, I invite you to visit www.usdebtclock.org. Just don’t expect to get much sleep after checking it out.
However this gargantuan debt, a debt that largely facilitated the unprecedented Congressional turnover, doesn’t even top the to-do list of the 112th Congress. With a sense of urgency, the last Congress jammed through President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill in 2009, a stimulus the president advertised as necessary to keep unemployment below 8%. A year and a half later, with unemployment hovering around 9.8%, Americans demand from the next Congress new job creation above all things.
And, as if creating a few million jobs isn’t a big enough mandate, the incoming Congress has the quagmires of two wars to deal with. The spike in militant activity in the isolated northern provinces of Afghanistan poses a huge problem to the U.S. military. And even with the recent troop surge, there is still a good amount of grunt work necessary to eradicating the Taliban presence from Afghanistan.
On top of that, the US-backed prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, has recently called for all U.S. troops to leave the nation by the end of 2011 as scheduled, reflecting the Iraqi backlash against continued American presence in the region. And, regardless of individual Congressmen’s respective opinions on the war, it is Congress’ job to make sure Iraqi forces can maintain reasonable order after the last American battalion has left.
So how can a newly split Congress, with a slight Republican majority in the House and a marginally Democrat Senate, effectively bring positive change in the next session? Well, lucky for the next Congress, the best legislative action pertaining to the economy has historically proven to be inaction. Members of both parties can generally agree that strong consumerism is the best deterrent of a “double dip” recession. In other words, if people can return to investing and spending their money, the markets can preserve and add to their tentative gains in the past 18 months. And new jobs will inevitably follow the improved economic health.
The past two years of political upheaval brought on by the big government agenda of President Obama and his lackeys in both chambers of Congress have brought uncertainty to the markets. The prospect of, among other things, a cap-and-tax bill has made consumers and investors unwilling to spend their money, and employers unwilling to hire. Citizens are most willing to invest their money in a stable economic environment, and nothing throws off the delicate balance of the economy more than rapid government intervention. The federal government dabbling in the economy has never shown positive results, and with a split Congress most proposed legislation to intervene in the markets will end in stalemate. And right now, with low interest rates conducive to investment, no news from the federal government is good news.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, effective dialogue between policy makers and military contingencies should result in at least a smarter approach to both wars. When General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, spoke out in a Rolling Stone interview against the Obama administration’s approach to the war in Afghanistan, it was less a comment on the president’s foreign policy agenda than it was a critique of how he formed those policies.
He was disappointed that the policy makers in Washington acted on political impulse rather than focusing on ways to win the war. He expressed anger over the lack of discourse between the administration and the troops on the ground. Hopefully the influx of Republican legislators will force more dialogue between the architects of the war and the Army personnel carrying out their orders.
In a greater sense, though, both Republicans and Democrats need to shed their roles of the last session and embrace compromise to get effective legislation passed. Democrats need to lose their attitudes of sticking it to conservatives who controlled Washington during the Bush administration and open dialogue with their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. And Republicans, in turn, must abandon their “party of no” mantra and make the most of their resurgence in Congress. Only when concordance replaces partisanship can the next Congress address the problems listed above and effectively bring the long awaited change we can believe in.
SOURCES:
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/hacked-climate-science-emails
2. http://www.merinews.com/article/2009-roundup-flashback-major-events-and-happenings/15792847.shtml
3. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000576-503544.html
4. http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/stimulus-obama-unemployment-deficit/2010/02/17/id/350158
6. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204685004576045700275218580.html
7. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-general-20100622
8. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/default.htm?refresh=1
