Crying Wolf
I must admit that I find it difficult to take the current stand off between the White House and Congress over immigration too seriously. Unfortunately we are all too accustomed to the lunacy of watching as the far right dictates to its erstwhile more centrist brethren, and then has to capitulate at the last moment when the enormity of the imminent calamity they tried to provoke scares the living daylights out of everyone.
It’s a childish and stupid game. But they keep on repeating it. Aren’t we all taught that the repeated crying of wolf ends up badly?
It is one thing to object to Obama’s use of an executive order to start fixing our immigration system, it is another entirely to threaten to shut down swathes of government unless he relents. The two are not related.
It is an especially unique aspect of the American legislative process that any bill passing through the halls of Congress can be laden with amendments that have absolutely nothing at all to do with the original bill’s objective. A transport bill can, for example, be used to defund a social program.
Thus a bill to fund to the Department of Homeland Security’s budget, a perfect try routine activity, and one that seems quite important given the DHS’s mandate, can have an amendment attached to it undoing Obama’s executive order on immigration.
What is extra galling about the problem is that legislation to fix the immigration system has been pending in the House for months. It has already passed the Senate. Further: by all accounts it would pass in the House with some ease. Why? Because the Democrats would support it along with enough Republicans. It would, in other words, be a genuine piece of that very rare artifact: bipartisan legislation.
Which is what offends the Republican leadership and thus they refuse to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote. They want to focus only on bills that garner votes from their entire caucus. They don’t want to appear to have to rely on the Democrats to fend off the objections of far right.
So the country is plunged every so often into these absurd and childish last minute panics.
This time we have the prospect of one of our primary government departments grinding to a halt because the Republicans cannot persuade their own far right to debate immigration on its merits rather than through this backdoor blackmail process.
We have been here so many times in the last few years that I have stopped paying attention. Every repetition of the circus undermines the standing of Congress with the public. It accelerates our loss of confidence in our government. It underlines just how deep the divisions in Congress go, and how dysfunctional the entire system of government has become.
Anyway, I read today that Mitch McConnell is trying to call time on his own party’s blackmail efforts. Don’t forget he boldly stipulated, in the afterglow of the Republican’s big win in the last elections, that the days of blackmail were now over. The Republicans, he said, would now govern.
Alas, nothing has changed. The Republicans have launched no new major legislation, and don’t seem to be in a hurry to get going on any either. And now they have reverted to their silly games.
I suppose we ought to give them time to grow up.
Meanwhile we just have to hope that these days of crying wolf don’t end with a real wolf rampaging through our economy. Because, frankly, we probably wouldn’t notice.
After all, when was the last time Congress paid attention to anyone but the big donors who pay for the elections, and the lobbyists who control the writing of the legislation they all vote on down there?
