Comment: Surprise! Congress is actually getting things done

Published 1:30 am Monday, March 14, 2022

By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion

There’s been a lot of major news lately, between the war in Ukraine and inflation still rising and the return of baseball (hurrah!) with a depressingly bad new playoff structure (ugh), but meanwhile, the U.S. Congress keeps governing.

A shift toward getting lots of legislative work done is now paying off. I can’t give the senators and representatives too high a grade for finishing the job on yearly spending bills this week, because it happened more than five months into the fiscal year, but at least they did it; which not every Congress has managed. The spending legislation was folded into an aid package for Ukraine and the Violence Against Women Act, finally re-authorized after years of partisan stalemate. The Senate also gave final approval to a bill to reform the U.S. Postal Service, another measure that had been been around for awhile without going anywhere. Last week, it was a bill about arbitration in cases of sexual assault. It seems likely that a few more important things will pass at some point this year.

With two mega-sized bills enacted last year, the pandemic relief measure and the infrastructure spending law, along with a few others, this Congress is becoming an increasingly productive one, even though Democrats are disappointed that they couldn’t enact more of their agenda. Still, Democrats deserve credit for pragmatism and for being ready to legislate on a range of topics.

Republicans, too, have turned out to be quite a bit more open to bargaining and compromise than I (and many other observers) expected. Or at least enough of them to reach 60 votes in the Senate and overcome the still-omnipresent Republican filibusters. And while the filibusters on nominations are still forcing too many positions to remain vacant for too long and for no good reason, the Republicans really have let up on confirmations of ambassadors. Indeed, five more passed by voice vote Thursday night before Congress left for the weekend.

Not everything is moving smoothly. I suppose we could argue about whether the fight over President Joe Biden’s nominees for the Federal Reserve Board has gotten “crazy” enough to compel to admit that I was wrong to predict that wouldn’t happen, but close enough. Republicans have found a way to tie up the one they don’t like, Sarah Bloom Raskin, by boycotting a committee vote, and in doing so they’ve also stalled the other four nominees; and so far, Democrats have neither agreed to separate those four from Raskin nor to find procedures to fight back.

Of course, this is hardly the first fight over Fed selections; former President Donald Trump had a handful of choices derailed at various stages, generally by bipartisan opposition, and other presidents, too, have faced rejection. Even at this point, the fight over these confirmations is nowhere near the circus that quite a few Supreme Court confirmations have turned into.

One note on the spending bills: I’m pretty sure, even though I’ve seen no reporting on it, that one of my favorite examples of the importance of persuasion happened along the way to the 68-31 Senate vote and Wednesday’s passage in the House of Representatives. (The House vote was complicated, but the key vote passed by a relatively narrow 260-171 margin). What I suspect happened involved persuading key interest groups to … do nothing. To stay quiet.

The spending bills carry a whole bunch of “riders,” rules imposing restrictions on the spending and on the actions of federal agencies. Many of those, most famously the prohibitions against spending federal money on abortion, are strongly opposed by Democrat-aligned interest groups. Democrats knew, however, that they didn’t have the votes to remove them. Had the interest groups put up a fight, it would have created a tough vote for many House and Senate Democrats, and it’s quite possible that the whole package could have collapsed.

I don’t know whether the White House or Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office actively worked to keep interest groups from kicking up controversy over the bills, or whether those groups were simply realistic about what they could win, but a president with weaker ties to and less respect from organized interests allied to the party could easily have run into trouble. The best kind of persuasion by presidents and congressional leaders is the kind that is so effective that it isn’t even necessary to communicate at all. And so it’s quite possible that a whole lot of nothing — interest groups choosing to stay quiet even without the need for anyone to ask them to or to offer them anything in return — could have been the something that allowed a $1.5 trillion spending bill to pass.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.