The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

Those of you who listened to Handel's Messiah this Christmas may remember this aria and chorus, taken from Malachi 3:

For He is like a refiner's fire.
And He shall purify...

The same harsh, Old Testament worldview dominated this year's session of Congress.  The combination of Republican unity in the House, and an unprecedented use of the filibuster by the Republican minority in the Senate, served as a refiner's fire, removing whatever Republicans considered impure from Democratic bills. 

This was most evident in the last-minute pre-Christmas swarm of legislation approved by Congress.  It contained a mix of concessions and conglomerations, all driven by the Republican stall and the Democrat's inability to offer compromises that would find fault lines in the Republican minority. Politically, perhaps the biggest concession was the stake driven through the heart of S-CHIP expansion.  Remember last month when the press was predicting that the Democrats would extend S-CHIP until September, 2008 to force a funding showdown before the election?  So much for that idea: the new S-CHIP extension, passed on the last day of the session, extends S-CHIP as-is until March, 2009.  The NPR headline, "Democrats Suffer Loss as House Extends SCHIP" says it all.  The 2009 compromise is a white flag on an issue that was supposed to be bread-and-butter for Democrats in the next election. 

The S-CHIP cave-in offers two lessons in politics.  First, and as usual, it shows that money donated to "Progressive" issue-oriented groups is generally wasted.  Take a look at the Americans United for Change blog, which makes no mention of the total loss suffered by an organization that spent millions for S-CHIP ads this year.  Instead, Americans United has picked a new issue, the mortgage crisis, which I'm sure will yield more donations from angry contributors.   Just don't ask them for results.

Second, S-CHIP shows House and Senate Republicans that short-term pain can yield long-term gain.  Randy Kuhl and his colleagues took an incredible pounding in the media, yet that sound and fury signified nothing in the end.  The Republicans knew that the Democrats could not abide a lapse in S-CHIP funding, so they stuck together until the day of reckoning and got what they wanted.  Kuhl can argue, as he does in his most recent blog post, that he "voted for S-CHIP", and he has plenty of time before the 2008 campaign for voters to forget what happened this year.

Another major political concession was the cut in the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).  Unlike the original proposal, the version passed has no pay-as-you-go provision.  It simply cuts the AMT and adds the $50 billion shortfall to the deficit.  This abandonment of pay-go is another Democratic cave-in motivated by a deadline.  If some kind of AMT cut was not approved by the end of the year, next year's tax refunds would be at stake.  As it stands, the refunds might be delayed by seven weeks. 

The big conglomeration at the end of the session was the Omnibus Budget Bill, which began life as the State Department and Foreign Aid appropriation.  Faced with the specter of failing to pass a budget bill, the Democrats took the State bill and tacked on every appropriation bill but Defense (which had already passed).  To understand how the Republicans used the refining fire of the Senate, I've added a bill history feature to Congressdb.  The history for the State and Foreign Aid appropriation illustrates the refining process nicely.   The original bill was rejected by Randy Kuhl and the majority of Republicans.  It went through the refining fire of the Senate, and came back as a bill that was approved by the Congress, including Kuhl.   The Washington Post has a good run-down of the merits (few) and excesses (many) of the resulting bill.

An even better example of the filibuster stall is the energy bill, which was supported by 36 Republicans (Kuhl among them) when passed by the House in January.  When the bill hit the Senate, it went through a "purification"  that included a half-dozen cloture votes.  The resulting bill lost one provision that taxed producers to finance renewable energy, and another that would have required the use of renewable sources by electric providers.  The new version gained almost 60 more Republican House votes.  The Oil & Gas journal has a full run-down of the final bill.

In the world of customer service, the mantra is "under-promise and over-deliver".  In this session of Congress, the Democratic leadership did the opposite.  They were mainly unable to deliver on the really significant expectations raised, such as a possible withdrawal from Iraq and re-instituting pay-go.  Now it's up to the Democrats to sell this as the product of Republican obstinacy rather than Democratic impotence.  There's some justification for that view, but the Democrats would have an easier job selling it to the general public if they had set lower expectations at the beginning of the session.

For those of you who've read this far, you might be interested in two snippets from the Messiah mentioned at the top of this post.

For He is like a refining fire:

Download Messiah_Refiners_Fire.mp3 (624K)

And He shall purify:

Download Messiah_And_He_Shall_Purify.mp3 (787K)