OPINION:
President Obama likes to kick Congress when it’s down. Who would defend a body with a 14 percent approval rating? Only the Ebola virus may be less popular than Congress, but it’s Mr. Obama who has imposed the gridlock.
Speaking at a fundraising dinner in Chicago, Mr. Obama feigned frustration. “You remember Harry Truman with the do-nothing Congress? This is a less productive Congress than the do-nothing Congress. This Congress makes the do-nothing Congress look like the New Deal.”
The deals that Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party are eager to impose include a comprehensive amnesty bill, gun control, a declaration of war on coal and billions of dollars more in subsidies for windmills and solar panels. Many of these proposals aren’t popular with the public. In fact, Mr. Obama’s program could rightly be called the Raw Deal.
A two-party system guarantees that one party can’t dominate the agenda to the exclusion of the other. The Founders didn’t intend for Congress to bend to every whim of a president. The system is designed to demand debate and encourage compromise. Alas, Mr. Obama’s idea of debate, negotiation and compromise is to seize the nearest microphone to demand, like a truculent child, that “it’s my way or the highway.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, follows the president’s lead. She tells voters to keep one word in mind on their way to the November polls. The word, she says, is “bipartisanship,” and the need for reasonable elected officials to work together in the spirit of compromise. “It’s about progress versus obstruction,” she says. “It’s about bipartisanship versus obstruction.” Just not when Mrs. Pelosi wields the speaker’s gavel. She helped stuff Obamacare down the throats of her colleagues, a poisonous scheme enacted without even a fragment of compromise offered to Republicans. That’s the Democratic idea of bipartisanship.
Several Democratic Senate incumbents running for their lives have reluctantly acknowledged that the blame for congressional inaction lies with their own leader. Sen. Mark L. Pryor conceded the other day, as reported by The Washington Free Beacon, a website, that he wouldn’t mind if Sen. Harry Reid were replaced. Not so coincidentally, he’s trailing Rep. Tom Cotton in their Senate race in Arkansas.
The Senate votes only on bills that Mr. Reid wants enacted and, contrary to Senate tradition, neither Republicans nor Democrats can have much to say about it. Since 2013, Mr. Reid has allowed only 14 amendments to legislation to come to a vote in the Senate. In the House, controlled by the Republicans, 194 Democratic amendments have come to a vote. The House has passed 393 bills, many with bipartisan support. The Senate has passed only 85.
The stack of House-passed bills continues to pile up on Mr. Reid’s desk, and none will get a vote as long as Mr. Reid is in charge. The only way to break the gridlock that plagues Washington is to elect a Senate to act like a Senate, not a cheering section for a president who has lost his way.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.