The Paradox of the 111th Congress

Lily Ledbetter. SCHIP expansion. Biggest stimulus ever. Serve America Act. Credit CARD Act. Tobacco Prevention. Cash for Clunkers. Hate crimes inclusion for LGBT. Pay-Go. Health care reform. Student loan reform. Reform of veterans' care. Financial regulation. Small business jobs. Yet another round of (somewhat suckier) stimulus. DADT repeal. The START treaty. Sound familiar? These are the things the 111th Congress has gotten done. That's the biggest and best list of legislative accomplishments since at least the LBJ days.

But of course, we have the impression that this Congress represented a new step down the road to total gridlock and obstructionism and nothing ever getting done. Why might that be? I dunno, but it could be because...

One party had a 59-41 majority in both Houses of Congress!!!!!

Usually, when that happens, you expect that it will simply do Everything It Wants. And that's how it should be: both Houses of Congress are set up so that getting to that 18% majority is really, really hard. It represents a simply phenomenal victory, usually in multiple consecutive elections, and indeed, that's what the Democrats had. Between 2006 and 2008, 0 Democratic Senate seats changed hands, along with just 5 House seats (2 of which for flagrant corruption), while the Democrats picked up 14 Senate seats and 56 House seats. When that happens, and you have almost three-fifths of both Houses of Congress, the voters have spoken as plainly as voters ever speak that you ought to rule the roost for the next two years. And of course, here's another litany:

Bigger stimulus! Public option! Cap and trade! Stricter financial regulation! Ending the Bush tax cuts! Immigration reform! The DREAM ACt! Letting Guantanamo close! Employee free choice act! Repeal of DOMA!

That's an awfully long list of things that didn't get done in this Congress, despite the fact that most of them probably had 50 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House for the entire time. This is what we call a FAIL. And these are just the things that Congress considered doing, not the things it would've been nice if it had managed to do but it was clear from the beginning that it wasn't going to have the time to think about it.

And more to the point, I think it's instructive not just to look at legislative victories on paper but on the substance of the policies. Again, 59-41 majorities in both Houses, with some of the most liberal Democrats the Congress has ever seen. So, what were their Big Legislative Victories? A one-third tax cuts stimulus. Health-care reform that bent over backwards to keep the private insurers running the show. Financial regulation that didn't place any particularly hard-and-fast rules on banks. Tax cuts for the rich! A nuclear arms treaty with Russia. For god's sake, a small business jobs bill! These are not the priorities of liberal Democrats. Most of them were the priorities of mainstream Republicans fifteen years ago, and some of them were John McCain's priorities as recently as the day before he lost the election.

Now, some may look at this and say, yes, wonderful, so a lot got done but it was bipartisan! But if everything is always to be bipartisan no matter how resounding the electoral victories, then elections no longer matter. And if elections no longer matter, then we don't have a democracy. Maybe we have something else that is working for the time being, but it ain't democracy. Elections ought to matter, and the election of 2008 had a pretty resounding message. Voters elected a guy promising health-care reform with a strong public option, a cap-and-trade system to put a price on carbon emissions, and education reforms, and ideally comprehensive immigration reform if there was time left over. And they gave him the biggest legislative majorities anyone's seen in this country since Jimmy Carter (yeah, that Jimmy Carter). And he got... well, none of those things, really: he compromised out a debatably essential part of one of them, and just plain didn't get the other three.

This is how you reconcile the appearance of gridlock with the reality of accomplishment: in a sane legislative chamber with this kind of majority, we would have had a lot more get done. Something like what the 111th House of Representatives got done, and mind you, essentially none of the changes made to accommodate the Senate were because the median Senator wasn't on board with what the House passed.