[Vision2020] The Senate Overachieves

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>



------------------------------
March 14, 2012
The Senate Overachieves By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Good news, frustrated American citizens! Congress is not a clogged up,
hidebound legislative slug after all.

Bills were flying through the Senate on Wednesday like great flocks of
geese soaring into the turbines of a passenger jet.

First, the senators passed legislation that would keep all the federally
financed highway programs from coming to a screeching halt when money runs
out at the end of this month. (Completely unnecessary disaster averted!)

Then, the party leaders came to an agreement on easing a bottleneck of
uncontroversial judicial nominations. (People with no enemies cleared for
hiring!)

Some of you may be wondering how the judges got bottlenecked in the first
place if they were uncontroversial. It’s a long story. But, basically, the
Republicans, irritated about totally unrelated matters, vented their
frustration by putting their feet on the necks of helpless judicial
nominees, people without an enemy in the world, who just wanted to go in
and help clear up the critical case backload in the nation’s federal
courts.

“It’s easy to make Republicans look bad,” complained Senator Charles
Grassley of Iowa, accurately.

Senator Charles Schumer of New York dared to hope that “an idea of a moment
of greater comity that we’ve seen this week is not just momentary, but will
last on into the future.” It was possibly not the most stirring prose ever,
but it was hard to talk coherently with all the emotion in the air.

One of the great challenges for citizens in an era of partisan rancor is
figuring out whether to applaud whenever our elected representatives manage
to accomplish anything whatsoever. The bar is getting pretty low. Are we
supposed to be thrilled that Congress managed to reauthorize the Federal
Aviation Administration? Doesn’t really seem much to ask. On the other
hand, if you have seen this crowd in action, you know it’s a wonder that
they’ve managed to keep paying the air traffic controllers’ salaries.

The transportation bill could actually have some trouble in the House,
since the Republicans there were talking about slashing away at the
spending and tying the whole thing to drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. It used to be that, if nothing else, you could count on
our men and women in Washington to work together when it came to passing
lots and lots of highway projects. But no more, apparently. I think I speak
for many Americans when I say that I miss the Bridge to Nowhere.

Still, we have not seen so much positive action since the House and Senate
each passed a bill making it illegal for members of Congress to engage in
insider trading. Although that one has not actually made it into law
because of a disagreement between the two chambers on the definition of a
lobbyist.

And, yeah, I know you thought it was illegal already.

After its run of accomplishment, the Senate did not rest on its laurels.
No, it moved right on to begin consideration of a bipartisan bill — passed
in the House by an enormous margin — that would remove investor protections
in the financial marketplace.

Say what?

Ah, yes, the JOBS Act. JOBS stands for Jump-start Our Business Start-ups.
Basically, it relieves businesses that are preparing to go public from some
of the most important auditing regulations that Congress passed after the
Enron debacle. Also, new public companies could delay following the rules
on disclosing executive compensation that were passed after the 2008 Wall
Street implosion. And salesmen could market stock in new companies to small
investors on the Internet.

You could also call it the Just Open Bucket Shops Act.

But it’s for small businesses! Small business is the heartbeat of the
American economy, partly because the way politicians define it, the term
includes virtually everyone. Enterprises so tiny that they are hardly a
business. Endeavors so big that Republicans can argue that raising taxes on
the richest 1 percent would be a terrible blow to small business owners.

These days, we are all small businesses.

And it was bipartisan! “Democrats are eager to move this bill forward,”
said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. One of the biggest complaints
about the bill in the House was from Democrats who claimed the Republicans
had stolen it from them.

When it comes to deregulating business, all of the worst ideas in the
modern history of Congress have been bipartisan to the core. People, when
you see Republicans and Democrats together, holding hands and talking about
unleashing the magic of the marketplace, hide your wallets.

Maybe we’ve had too much legislative achievement already.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120315/1b14585e/attachment.html>