Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Congress | Featured Stories — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Despite all of the style and novelty of the new Congress--Democrats in power for the first time in 12 years, a female Speaker of the House of Representatives--it is increasingly clear that when it comes to actually producing legislative results, this Congress does not appear to be up to the task.

Read on . . .

In the heady opening weeks of the 110th Congress, the Democrats' domestic agenda appeared to be flying through the Capitol: Homeland security upgrades, a higher minimum wage and student loan interest rate cuts all passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

But now that initial progress has foundered as Washington policymakers have been consumed with the debate over the Iraq war. Not a single priority on the Democrats' agenda has been enacted, and some in the party are growing nervous that the "do nothing" tag they slapped on Republicans last year could come back to haunt them.

"We cannot be a one-trick pony," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who helped engineer his party's takeover of Congress as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "People voted for change, but Iraq, the economy and Washington, D.C., [corruption] all tied for first place. We need to do them all."

The "Six for '06" policy agenda on which Democrats campaigned last year was supposed to consist of low-hanging fruit, plucked and put in the basket to allow Congress to move on to tougher targets. House Democrats took just 10 days to pass a minimum-wage increase, a bill to implement most of the homeland security recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, a measure allowing federal funding for stem cell research, another to cut student-loan rates, a bill allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices under Medicare, and a rollback of tax breaks for oil and gas companies to finance alternative-energy research.

The Senate struck out on its own, with a broad overhaul of the rules on lobbying Congress.

Not one of those bills has been signed into law. President Bush signed 16 measures into law through April, six more than were signed by this time in the previous Congress. But beyond a huge domestic spending bill that wrapped up work left undone by Republicans last year, the list of achievements is modest: a beefed-up board to oversee congressional pages in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, and the renaming of six post offices, including one for Gerald R. Ford in Vail, Colo., as well as two courthouses, including one for Rush Limbaugh Sr. in Cape Girardeau, Mo.

As one who believes in limited government, the sparse amount of legislation emanating from Capitol Hill doesn't exactly keep me up and sleepless at nights. I am more than pleased to see that government is not acting as a Leviathan on the national stage. The more it is kept circumscribed, the better.

But as the story references, Democrats will thrive if they are able to show that they can govern. They promised a significant substantive change from the GOP and they have yet to deliver on that change. To the extent that Democrats are unable to fulfill their promises to their base and follow through with legislation like the completely unworkable minimum wage increase they have planned, they will disillusion their base and leave them less enthusiastic about the 2008 elections--with that lack of enthusiasm potentially even reaching the Presidential level.

So there are problems afoot for the once-happy and thriving 110th Congress. We shall see if the Congressional majority can address those problems. Thus far, to say the least, I have my doubts that they can.