Re-arranging the Deck Chairs

            The nation’s mid-term elections have swept Republicans into power in the Senate, added to their already significant majority in the House, and chastened President Obama to announce that he has heard the voters and will work with the GOP to break the years of gridlock in Washington.

            Outgoing Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has, as the presumptive new majority leader, pledged to work with Obama. The president said he’d “enjoy a Kentucky bourbon” with the man who has spent 30 years in Congress. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), 31 years in Congress and the presumptive new minority leader, has promised to work with McConnell.

            Hopeful as it all sounds – and hope appears at the moment to be the only thing to hold onto – the reality is that the same people that created the gridlock are still in Washington, only their seats have changed.

            So, will the Republican Congress and the Democratic president finally get down to such pressing issues as immigration reform, tax code overhaul, foreign policy in the Middle East, Ebola, energy, transportation, climate change, agriculture, education funding, banking reform?

One day after the election GOP House Speaker John Boehner fired a shot across the presidential bow, warning Obama not to take unilateral action on immigration reform. He and McConnell have promised to repeal Obamacare, but the Republicans don’t have veto-proof majorities in either congressional chamber. The votes, if they occur, will largely be symbolic and counter-productive. None of these sounds like a good start, but they could be, and may actually lead to the negotiating and compromising that can produce good legislation.

 

The S.S. United States

The real test of bipartisan cooperation will come when a vacancy occurs on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nothing brings out partisan fighting like a nominee for the highest court in the land. Will they still work together then?

                It used to be, and perhaps this is wishful thinking, that politics ended when it came time to hammer out agreements on policy.  Politics now seems to always trump policy. Our system of government is set up in such a way that the majority and minority have to deal with one another, but in recent years the two parties have seen ways around this by either not holding legislative sessions or shutting down the government. Neither tactic has proven constructive or productive.

                We have a tendency in this country to exaggerate the policies of the party we oppose as destructive to the country. Certainly, some of those policies are, but that’s why we have a deliberative process, publically and legislatively, to determine whether a policy is good or bad. Democracy is supposed to be about finding common ground on issues that everyone can agree, though not necessarily like. That ideal seems to have been lost.

                It’s not that the nation doesn’t have good leaders. It does, and in both parties. What the nation needs is a different approach to leadership; an approach that is innovative and inclusive, not combative and exclusive. Maybe now that will occur. We have three test cases to see whether divided government can work in our democracy: Washington, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

                Obama et al, and McConnell and Boehner et al, may have to re-think strategies that move the country forward while keeping their members and voters, well, if not happy, at least grateful the country isn’t going to hell in a hand basket.

 Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov.-elect Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled general assembly, and Maryland’s Republican Gov.-elect Larry Hogan and the Democratic-controlled state legislature, must craft  creative ways to move their agendas, if they, and their states, are to succeed.

Six months should tell us whether the election heralded in a new era of substantive cooperation and robust leadership or just re-arranged the deck chairs on a sinking ship.