As Congress rushes to wrap up business before the Christmas holidays, it traditionally dangles pricy ornaments — favors to rich donors — on an omnibus bill called a “Christmas tree,” one activity that has survived the current legislative dysfunction, writes Michael Winship.
By Michael Winship
I was planning to write a festive poem to Congress as they approach their merry holiday recess but couldn’t come up with a rhyme for “dysfunctional.”
Writing in Monday’s Washington Post, Greg Sargent noted that all that inertia on Capitol Hill has been caused “less by a roughly equivalent failure by both major parties to make the incremental concessions needed to reach common ground, and more by a searing intra-GOP argument over whether the Republican Party should make such concessions to reach the common ground that has always been sitting right there in plain sight.”
Citing Ryan Lizza’s superb analysis of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus in The New Yorker this week, Sargent writes that the radical caucus members believe, “Republicans lose ground when they govern along with Democrats, because achieving bipartisan governing compromise inherently represents capitulation to Dems, in the sense that when government functions, it affirms the Dem vision.”
It’s really a profound pity – tragic, in fact, and deadly dangerous to democracy. In an alternative universe, I could see senators and House members racing home to spend holiday time with friends and family, drinking hot cocoa with peppermint sticks, making snow angels and redistributing their campaign contributions to the poor.