Jon Chait on the flurry of congressional activity that closed out the year:
I strongly approve of the ends of the lame duck Congress, but as a small-d democrat, I don’t approve of the means. Why should Congress have a period of time to act in which many members enjoy zero accountability before their constituents? The arrangement is ripe for abuse.
On the other hand, the manic productivity of the lame duck session appears to be a response to another anti-democratic mechanism, the filibuster. Mitch McConnell’s block-everything, grind-down-the-clock method created a pent-up demand among moderate and even mainstream Republicans who waned to govern. So now they have a few frantic weeks to do a lot of things they wanted to do all along, but refrained out of partisan loyalty.
I’d look at this with a little wider lens. Basically, what happened this year is that we’ve finally reached the logical end state of a longtime problem. For as long as I can remember, it’s been a truism that you can’t get anything done in an election year. The out party doesn’t want to give the president a victory and the in party is afraid to take on anything controversial that might hurt at the polls. So legislative progress in even numbered years is generally pretty paltry.
This year that dynamic turned pathological. There were, it turned out, quite a few issues that both sides really did want to address, but party discipline simply trumped everything. It wasn’t just one thing that got held up, it was nearly everything. Republicans didn’t want to hand Democrats a victory on DADT or New START or even a food safety bill, and Democrats were too cowardly to press for progressive tax legislation.
So we finally reached the nonsensical point at which both sides wanted to get things done but the upcoming election allowed none of it to move forward. Even though all of this stuff had supermajority support (hell, New START turned out to have the support of 71 senators), the only time it could get done was during a lame duck session.
I don’t know if this was a one-off occurrence or a harbinger of things to come. I guess we’ll find out in 2012. But until something finally implodes and produces a real groundswell for systemic change, maybe we should all be grateful for the existence of lame duck sessions. It might be the only time that the modern Congress actually works the way it’s supposed to.
