The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Worth Remembering

    By Donal on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 2:42pm | Politics



    From Ezra Klein at the Washington Post:

    The end of the 'do-something' Congress

    ...if you see the point of politics as actually getting things done, the last two years, for Democrats, have been a stunning, historic success. Whatever else you can say about the 111th Congress, it got things done.

    There was health-care reform, of course. ... There was financial regulation, too. ... Then there was the stimulus. Too small? Absolutely. Were there votes to make it much bigger? Probably not.

    And those are just the big bills: The 111th Congress also passed Ted Kennedy's national service legislation, and the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program to four million more kids, and new regulations on tobacco, and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

    ... What's been uncommon about the past two years is that the Democrats in Congress managed to put aside enough of their disagreements to get big, important things done, things they really believed would make this country better, things they'd been fighting and working for and trying to do for decades.

    That this has been the most "do-something" Congress we've seen in 40 years hasn't made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That's true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington to do.

     

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    Comments

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    by Doctor Cleveland on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 4:22pm

    They've done things.

    They've even done important things.

    But the objective is to do important things that people like.


    by Michael Maiello on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 5:06pm

    It is tough to do things people like when they say, "Obamacare is fascist" in the same breath as, "The government should get their hands off my Medicare."


    by Donal on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 5:13pm

    Well, see?  A lot of those people like their government services if you can just provide them and do it cheaply.  Why is ACA so unpopular?  Because i don't know about you but my premiums are going up again next year.  To some one less interesting in politics than you or I, that might make the whole ACA thing look a little like a failure.


    by Michael Maiello on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 5:32pm

    "A lot of those people like their government services if you can just provide them and do it cheaply."

     

    Oh, come on, destor.  The opposition to ACA on the right was because it was going to put Grandma in front of a death panel and was a "government takeover of health care" (unlike Medicare, I guess).  The Teabaggers were opposed to health care reform period, not just health care reform that wasn't cheap.  The only opposition to ACA for the "right" reasons came from the left.  There were no "Medicare for All" signs at the Tea Party rallies or the Town Hall riots when the bill was being discussed.  


    by brewmn on Wed, 11/03/2010 - 12:07am