FIVE POINTS: The Worst Job in Washington
1. It's less and less fun being a Congressman. A few very good pieces were written this week about how being a member of Congress is more of a grind than ever.The basic premise is both true and pretty simple: the fun and interesting things are becoming a much smaller part of the job, while the tedious and soul-crushing aspects are increasingly occupying members' time. John Bresnahan at Politico looked at the declining power and influence of the committee chairs, traditionally the most sought after jobs in the House. And Lee Drutman connected the grind to the high level of retirements this year.
The examples are almost endless, but can be pretty quickly summed up. In the past, most members participated substantively in the policy process via the committee system. But the process is now tightly controlled by the leadership, reducing the opportunities for most members to influence legislation. Hard work in a policy area is often unrewarded, reducing the incentive to dig into an issue, nevermind develop real expertise. Conversely, members face increased uncertainty about their own re-elections, as national partisan winds control more and more of their fate regardless of how well they represent their districts, and well-funded primary challengers threaten even general-election safe districts. Which means more time than ever is spent raising money and preparing for campaign season.
I'd add one large point to this analysis: there's an equilibrium to all this, and it's not a good one: the types of people who run for Congress will tend to be people who don't find the job miserable. That is, over time, people who retire because they wanted to engage in policy but ended up just dialing for dollars will be replaced by people who don't really care about making policy and don't mind dialing for dollars. Now, some people might just be fooled, thinking the job will be fun. But those people won't last long. The people who thrive in this environment will be people who don't mind the grind, and don't really wish it was any different. If all you ever wanted to be was a foot-soldier for a party who got some free lunches and a little bit of respect in DC, you probably won't be too miserable here.
Now, whether that's good or bad hinges on a normative assessment of how Congress should operate. I'm of the mind that a transformative legislature that develops policy and plays a serious role within the separation of powers system is a good thing. But there are plenty of people who would just as soon hollow out out the legislature, move policy development to the executive branch and the parties, and be done with it. So your mileage may vary. But my point is more that there's no automatic trigger here that would lead anyone to fix this problem, because as the problem grows, the membership itself is transformed into a body that doesn't really mind the problem. You can already see this in many of the younger members---they have no expectation that they'll be able to propose floor amendments in the House, or that committee drafts will be the bills that come out of the Rules Committee. Why would they? They've never lived in that legislature.
People used to talk about this all the time in regard to the House minority, especially before 1995. It sucked being in the minority, because you didn't really get to do anything. As the famous saying goes, their job was to collect their paycheck and shut up. And every study of the matter showed the same results: the minority had more trouble recruiting high-quality candidates, because on balance, people who were smart, engaged, and energized about politics had little interest in coming to DC to sit in a permanent minority. It was a huge pathology for the GOP during their 40 years in the wilderness in the House. They had trouble recruiting good candidates, they had trouble keeping good people around, and that became a vicious cycle toward losing elections and staying in the minority.
My fear is that the same is now happening for serving in Congress in general, and that the downward spiral will be difficult to counteract.
2. There's talk about the next CR crossing some of the red lines. There's reporting today from CQ ($) that the GOP is talking about going for a six week Continuing Resolution to fund the government through March 22 after the current stopgap expires at the end of next week. In one sense, this would be just another can-kick while everyone tries to square away the impasses over the spending level caps in the Budget Control Act, the disagreements over DACA, and the final appropriations levels for the individual agencies in the eventual FY2018 Omnibus bill.
But a six week CR isn't just buying a few weeks to hammer out those deals. It's buying a lot of time, and it is specifically pushing the deadline out past two important other deadlines: the March 5 deadline when DACA work permits will start expiring at a much higher rate under the announced Trump administration policy, and the date at which we will hit the debt limit, which will likely be now sometime in March (due to less federal revenue being collected under the new tax laws.)
My suspicion is that this plan is not accidental. Pushing the CR past these dates would help the congressional GOP in two ways. First, it might force the Trump Administration to take executive action on DACA, by extending the date out a year and/or making it policy not to deport recipients who are trying to renew their work permits. This would likely please Republicans who are hesitant to take up DACA during primary season or otherwise don't want to deal with it, and Democrats would surely like the combination of a short-term policy fix and the opportunity to use it as as (situational) campaign issue in the Fall.
Second, the debt limit date may give the GOP leadership some leverage in the budget negotiations, or at least some cover. They will be able to tie some things to the debt limit bill that might not be able to fly if attached just to the CR, and they can count on the threat of not passing the debt limit bill to attract a healthy number of votes in the Senate, and enough Dem votes in the House to get it through.
3. The budget process needs reform. But saying that is the easy part. There's reporting today in CQ ($) that new House Budget Chairman Steve Womack is considering skipping a fiscal 2019 budget resolution, in favor of focusing on reforming the overall congressional budget process.
The first half of this is not particularly surprising. A budget resolution this year was always going to be a tough sell in the House, and the razor-thin majority the GOP has in the Senate is unlikely to be able to muster the will or the votes for any partisan policy movement via the reconciliation process. Absent reconciliation instructions, a budget resolution would primarily be setting overall spending limits, but the new BCA will effectively take care of them for the discretionary appropriations, and the gridlock in Congress can well police increases in mandatory spending. So all a budget resolution could do is create tough votes for members in an election year, and it's entirely possible those votes would be tougher for the GOP House members than anyone else.
The second half---budget process reform---is the tricky one. I'm certainly not an expert in this area, but it's one of those congressional topics that is really easy and obvious at the highest level but just a huge mess once you at all get into the details. Pretty much everyone agrees the budget process is broken; at this point it has become little more than a vehicle for reconciliation instructions that can unlock partisan movement of legislation by simple majority in the Senate. But going about fixing it is another whole story. And as James Wallner said on Twitter this morning, "the current mess is the result of the BCA, which itself was a budget process reform designed to force Congress to do the right thing."
4. Infrastructure week is happening. And not happening. There's a running joke in DC right now that this week (or next week, or two weeks from now) will be infrastructure week, as the White House continually announces that they will be presenting their infrastructure plan "soon." The president himself has been saying this regularly for over a year, and the White House did it again this week after touting his plan at the State of the Union address, when his spokesperson said, "more details would be coming a week or two after the speech."
I have no doubt that we will eventually see an actual infrastructure plan from the White House. What I'm wondering now is when they are going to be able to politically fit it onto the schedule. The FY2018 appropriations and the BCA caps and the debt limit and the potential deal on DACA look like they may consume things through March at this point, if not later. That does, in theory, open up a window in February to do the real infrastructure week, but the glitch is that the president needs to roll out his FY2019 budget in February, an it looks like the White House wants to do that roughly around the 12th.
And that's just the short-term scheduled calendar. As any president will tell you, the best laid plans for an agenda routinely get knocked off-course by events out of your control, from natural disasters to foreign policy crises or issues that just become hot and consume two weeks of public time. And in an election year, there's really no point in rolling out an infrastructure plan much after the late spring, since Congress will be gone in August and not interested in doing anything in September/October except passing a CR and going home to campaign.
I don't think an infrastructure bill has much chance of passing this year. And maybe the White House is just looking at a messaging bill for this year and hoping to put it on the agenda in 2019. If that's the case, whatever, do it in August if you want. But if the White House wants to actually take a shot at it in any sort of semi-serious way, they really need to get on the ball soon. There just isn't that much time left.
5. What's the most famous song you've never heard on the radio? I heard Happiness is a Warm Gun on a classic rock station last week, and I'm confident it was the first time I ever heard that played over the air. What other super-famous songs have you never heard on the radio? And I don't mean Spotify. I mean the actual radio. Don't @ me, millenialls.
Obviously, things like the Beatles back-catalog are prime candidates for this sort of question, although I'm hard pressed to think of a Beatles song more famous than Happiness is a Warm Gun that I've never heard on the radio (though, of course, I now have heard it). Maybe something off Revolver, perhaps And Your Bird Can Sing. I've never heard the Stones' Little T&A on the radio. The jam bands are another place to look. I don't think I've ever heard Phish's Bouncing Around the Room or The Grateful Dead's Friend of the Devil on the radio. And so are some of the lengthy Dylan epics, like Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts. I have heard Alice's Restaurant on the radio, several times.
This, in turn, raises another question: can you name a rock album for which every song on the album gets at least occasional airplay on classic rock radio? I can name one: Boston's self-titled first album. The songs are: More Than a Feeling, Peace of Mind, Foreplay/Longtime, Rock and Roll Band, Let me Take You Home Tonight, Smokin', Something About You, and Hitch A Ride. I have heard all of them on FM100.3 in DC in the last year. The only other album I can think of that comes close is Led Zeppelin IV, but you never really hear Four Sticks or The Battle of Evermore on the radio. Thoughts?
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!