Category Archives: U.S. Congress

That letter to Iran

Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

We may have reached the point where the U.S. government has moved past “does not work” to “cannot work” – not in the current environment, anyway, and we need to decide what to do about that.

A couple of recent examples illustrate.

One is Congress’ inability to respond to President Obama’s decision not to enforce part of immigration law. When that kind of thing happens, Congress must reassert itself. Instead, it did nothing because congressional Democrats placed party loyalty over their branch of government’s responsibility.

The second is that letter sent to Iran’s leaders by 47 Senate Republicans that was initiated by Sen. Tom Cotton and signed by Sen. John Boozman. The letter said that any nuclear arms deal will constitute only an executive agreement unless it is approved by Congress, and that it can be rescinded by the next president, anyway. “President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then – perhaps decades,” wrote the party that used to be for term limits.

The Constitution in Article II says, “The President… shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur …” Obama says this is not a treaty, but whatever you call the paper that eventually is signed, the Senate is supposed to have a major role in determining foreign policy.

The president has not successfully sought the advice and consent of the Senate. He should. But if he did, nothing short of killing Osama bin Laden would get two-thirds agreement these days – another reason to wonder if we’re moving from “does not work” to “cannot work.”

Traditionally, politics has stopped at the water’s edge, but then, traditionally, the parties have seen each other merely as opponents. The real enemies were only outside the border, like the Soviet Union. Surely there are other ways for our system to work than for one branch of government to be communicating one message to a dangerous foreign power while another branch communicates something else. Can you imagine any other walk of life where this kind of squabbling would lead to a good result?

There are other ways of doing democracy. In a British parliamentary system, the prime minister is always a member of Parliament’s ruling party. That party calls all the shots, and it’s the loyal opposition’s job to loyally oppose. If the prime minister loses the support of the party, Britain gets a new prime minister.

Great Britain’s system is not necessarily better, but it is different, and our system does not work/cannot work if our elected officials act like we’re British. Their system is designed with parties in mind, Ours is based on a system of checks and balances where party loyalty is second to branch responsibility, and where the parties govern together when possible.

Some members in Congress are trying to pass a bill that would require congressional approval of any nuclear deal with Iran. The sponsor, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, is a Republican who did not sign the letter. Obama says he will veto the bill if it ever makes it to his desk. If he does, that veto should be overridden by congressional Republicans and Democrats fulfilling their duty – by writing legislation as a body, not letters to the ayatollah as a party. That bipartisan legislation is now less likely because of this letter.

Can that kind of responsible governance happen these days? The writers of the Constitution could not have anticipated how democracy and technology would evolve – that billions of dollars would be spent on campaigns, that 24-hour news stations and the internet would let normal people obsess over politics nonstop, and that our personal data would be used to manipulate us. Meanwhile, other things they did fear – a semi-permanent ruling class, a large federal government – have not been prevented.

In other words, is it that the system does not work, or that it cannot work? Can American democracy function in its current form, or does it need a tweak, or does it need a complete overhaul? Have times changed, or have flaws in the foundation been revealed, or can we work with what we have?

We’d better decide, because we really must fix our immigration system, and we certainly can’t let Iran get a nuclear bomb.

Is America governable?

Debt and deficits, Education, Health care, Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

U.S. Capitol for blogThe American republic has limped past being dysfunctional and stumbled into being ungovernable. Even if you hate the government, this situation should concern you because it means big problems aren’t being addressed, while new ones are being created.

Two current legislative fights illustrate this reality – No Child Left Behind and the broken immigration system.

Congress has yet again stalled on its long overdue reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. That’s bad, because this law is completely unworkable. Signed by President George W. Bush in 2002 and passed with bipartisan support, it required that 100 percent of American students in grades 3-12 test at their grade level by the end of the 2014 school year, or the federal government would punish the schools where they didn’t. That’s every single child, regardless of language difficulty or intellectual challenge – a requirement so ridiculous that Congress ought to fix it, but it can’t. As a result, the Obama administration has been granting waivers to states telling them how they can disobey the law.

The president is supposed to enforce the law, and Congress is supposed to write laws that make sense, right?

The same applies to immigration. The president wants to ignore the laws Congress has passed, and Congress can’t agree on how to fund the Department of Homeland Security in response. Meanwhile, the border remains porous, and millions of people live in the shadows among us. Children brought here by their parents basically have no home country. Meanwhile, the United States quite effectively limits the influx of skilled overseas workers – exactly the people we need.

If these two issues were outliers, we could deal with them. Unfortunately, they’re the norm. A few other examples …

The national debt. Uncle Sam now owes $18 trillion, or the equivalent of $57,000 for each American. The debt has doubled since 2007 and tripled since 2001, and it’s still rising. The only possible solution is to reduce spending substantially while collecting more revenues somehow. There’s not a remote possibility that Republicans and Democrats in Washington will agree to do that.

Health care. Prior to the Obama administration, the United States already had the world’s most expensive health care system. It denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions and stopped paying for patient claims if they became too expensive. Then the Affordable Care Act was rushed through Congress, causing its own problems and leading to who-knows-what. Now the act faces a serious Supreme Court challenge over its wording regarding federal exchange subsidies. Pulling this leg from the stool could cause Obamacare to collapse. Lots of people would be happy about that, but … what’s the plan after that?

Infrastructure. The gas tax, which funds highways, has not been raised at the federal level since 1993. It is destined to produce less and less revenue because cars are becoming more fuel efficient through both market and government demands. Everybody knows the model is unsustainable, but there’s no agreement on its replacement.

It won’t be enough to vote for different people in 2016. Washington simply doesn’t work any more, regardless of who is in office.

That’s because Washington reflects American society, which itself is marked by contradictions and divisions. We simply don’t agree on how to solve problems, or even about what the problems are. We’re deeply divided culturally, morally, about what we want this place to look like, and about what we think it once was. That lack of consensus makes it very hard to solve difficult issues. Moreover, Americans say they don’t trust government but then choose to be profoundly dependent upon it, rarely recognizing the irony. The result is that we grow government without paying for it.

This is a depressing column, so let’s close with solutions. Congressional term limits? A balanced budget amendment? Campaign finance reform? All could help.

Meanwhile, many decisions should be returned to the state level, where democracy still manages to work sometimes. Red, blue and purple states could solve problems in their own ways, often learning from each other. Americans would be free to settle in states where they felt most comfortable.

This could cause its own problems, including irreconcilable legal definitions of discrimination and a race to the bottom on environmental regulations. A poor state like Arkansas might find its niche, or it might just get poorer.

Something big has to happen – bigger than the next election. When a country becomes ungovernable, problems can’t be solved simply by electing different people to that government.

It’s not about whether terrorists should rot

Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“In my opinion the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I’m concerned every last one of them can rot in hell, but as long as they don’t do that then they can rot in Guantanamo Bay.”

That’s what U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton said Feb. 5 during a hearing of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. He got a lot of attention because of that.

Let’s start by pointing out that Cotton, a decorated war veteran who volunteered for duty, has a perspective that those like me who stayed safely at home cannot have.

That said, the issue is not if confirmed terrorists should rot, but where detainees should be held. And it should not be in the government’s little corner of Castro’s island.

According to the New York Times, 780 detainees have been sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison since it opened in 2002. Of those, 122 are still there, 649 have been transferred, and nine have died on the island.

Most of those remaining probably are terrorists, but how do we know? Because the government has told us they are? That’s not the way America is supposed to work.

In America, we’re supposed to be skeptical of the government, but that’s hard to put into practice at Guantanamo Bay because it lacks some of the checks on the government’s power that exist elsewhere – juries, journalists, churches, human rights activists, etc. There has been little that anyone outside of the government could do when the detainees have been sent there – or when they have been sent elsewhere. If President Obama says it’s worth the risk to send them back home, well, should we trust that’s so?

The nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Did you catch that? Our rights aren’t granted by the government, and we don’t have rights because we are Americans. We have rights because we were created. All men are created.

We have to respect that. American citizens can’t just blindly trust the government when it says that every detainee is a terrorist, and it can do with them as it wishes for decades without any oversight by anyone else. If we accept that, then we could be next.

We’ve seen the best of America since the attacks of Sept. 11, including acts of heroism and sacrifice such as those performed by Cotton.

But those attacks also have brought out the less-than-best of America. Osama bin Laden not only succeeded in killing 3,000 people, but he also convinced us to change our way of life and sometimes to ignore our founding principles, all based on fear.

Guantanamo Bay has hurt the country’s standing in the world, which is why the president called it “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.” And by “president,” I mean President George W. Bush, who wrote that comment in his autobiography. He wanted to close the prison and send many of the detainees back to their own countries. “Cold-blooded killers,” on the other hand, should be tried in U.S. courts, he said while in office.

Yes, in U.S. courts, or at least in some kind of legitimate process allowing Americans to keep an eye on the government. First, because it needs to be determined one-by-one that the accused actually are cold-blooded killers. And second, because the nation’s principles include not only the pursuit of happiness but also the pursuit of justice. All men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, and all men should face the consequences of their actions.

Here’s some hopeful news on the national debt

Debt and deficits, Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

If you’re a person who reads this newspaper section or clicks on this column online, you’re probably aware of the national debt and maybe a little concerned, but you’re not crazy about reading 700 words about it.

I get it. The numbers are mind-boggling and the terms confusing. Could there be any more boring words than “federal budget” and “fiscal responsibility”? We’ve been hearing about this bear in the woods for decades, but he never seems to attack.

But a couple of important things happened this past week – one hopeful, one less so – that are worth noting, so let’s cover them. Bear with me. We’re already at 110 words.

Let’s start with the less hopeful news. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its 10-year projections Monday, which told us what we already knew, which is that the debt is growing unsustainably. Already $18 trillion ($57,000 for every American), the debt is expected to grow to $27.3 trillion by 2025.

Each year, the government runs a deficit that adds more to the debt –about $1 trillion every year during the recession, less so in recent years. In 2014, the government added “only” $483 billon to the debt, and the next three years will be about the same. But then the deficit starts rising. By 2025, the government again will spend more than $1 trillion over what it collects that year.

The CBO reports are typically a good information source, but they are based on some rosy scenarios – for example, that Congress won’t extend tax loopholes that it always extends. Forecasters assume there won’t be a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, or a significant economic downturn between now and 2025. On the other hand, unexpected good things can happen as well, such as the United States’ increasing energy independence.

The CBO projections stop at 2025. The picture does not improve moving forward as the baby boomers age and as spending increases for Social Security and Medicare.

And Medicare is where we get to the hopeful news. The federal Department of Health and Human Services announced this week that it will rely less on the “fee for service” model that has helped create runaway health care costs. Under that model, doctors and hospitals are paid for whatever services they render. They bill, and taxpayers pay, few questions asked, creating an incentive for unnecessary tests and procedures.

In the future, alternative models more often will pay medical providers based on quality of care. This is very hard to do, but it has been tested. Little Rock’s CHI-St. Vincent has been involved in a Medicare pilot program where the hospital and doctors were paid a set amount for joint replacement procedures, and it was up to them to control costs to make a profit. I know we don’t like to think of health care in terms of profits, but the alternative is a government bureaucracy. The result of the pilot program was that patient hospital readmissions after those procedures were reduced by two-thirds. When I asked the hospital’s reform-minded CEO, Peter Banko, why the changes had not been made earlier, he said, honestly defining the problem, “There was no financial incentive to.”

“Until you change how we’re being paid, you’re not going to see changes in the system,” he also said.

At the state level, Arkansas has been involved in a similar effort, the Arkansas Health Care Payment Improvement Initiative, which involves Medicaid, insurance companies and others. As part of the initiative, medical providers have financial incentives to keep costs at certain levels for particular “episodes of care.” One result, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, is that unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions for certain respiratory infections have decreased 17 percent. Doctors now have a financial incentive not to prescribe medicines that serve no purpose other than making patients feel like something is being done.

These are not perfect solutions. They’re very top-down in a health system that has been becoming increasingly top-down for decades.

But they are hopeful. It is impossible to balance the budget without controlling health care costs. If that could happen, it would be one of those unexpected good things that might mess up CBO’s numbers, in a good way.