By Catherine Rampell
Columnist |
December 6, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EST
It’s time to call foul on a fowl fantasy in our politics.
The legislative window right after an election, known as the lame-duck session, is, for many, a time of hope. Finally, lawmakers can deliver on long-delayed promises or compromise on tough issues they were loath to touch before Election Day.
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As a result there’s a long, and growing, wish list of items for the few remaining weeks on the legislative calendar before Republicans retake control of the House. Advocates and lawmakers see this as the last-best chance to pass virtually every priority for at least two years.
And many of those priorities don’t have two years to spare. To wit:
The Supreme Court might strike down the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “Dreamers” — undocumented immigrants brought here as children — need a legislative fix that grants them a path to legal status (and ideally citizenship) ASAP. If Congress doesn’t act, dreamers could lose authorization to work and protections from deportation.
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Meanwhile, the debt-ceiling time bomb is ticking faster than lawmakers realize. If it detonates, it could cause a global financial crisis, among other undesirable consequences.
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Also: Ukraine needs more aid. Poor kids need assistance. Farmers need more (legal) workers. The federal government might shut down around Christmas. Many clean-energy projects require permitting reform if they are to get off the ground. To curb mass killings, President Biden wants an assault-weapons ban.
And some reforms to the Electoral Count Act — including measures making it harder to overturn the results of a lawful election — should really happen before the next presidential election.
A lot of these priorities have broad bipartisan support. Some are considered “must pass” legislation (such as keeping the federal government’s lights on). Nonetheless, many will end up on the cutting-room floor.
There’s simply not enough time left on the legislative calendar to do everything.
For instance, the procedural hurdles for raising the debt limit with only Democratic votes would consume tons of legislative floor time. This might crowd out Democrats’ ability to pass almost any other legislative priority while they still control both chambers. Other policies, such as permitting reform, would require 60 votes to proceed; this means detailed negotiations will be needed to appease the various members of any bipartisan coalition.
Which brings me to my bigger beef with the lame duck: Why are all these allegedly must-pass, often popular priorities crammed into this narrow window? Why does so much of the basic plumbing of government rely on a weeks-long period before every other Christmas? Why can’t lawmakers spread this stuff — or at least some of it — across the rest of the time they’re supposed to be working?
The problem isn’t merely that politicians procrastinate until a deadline (or crisis) forces their hand. It’s also that lame-duck sessions reinforce very low expectations for Congress most of the year, perhaps even incentivizing foot-dragging and obstructionism.
Politicians know that during the lame duck, voters are distracted by holiday preparations and vacations. Plus the next federal election is far away. Lawmakers are briefly freed from the pressures of campaigning and the need to position themselves and their party optimally for the ballot box.
In theory, this means those elected to govern can actually, you know, govern.
That is, they can focus on things they believe are right or at least temporarily de-emphasize short-term political considerations that might otherwise interfere with longer-term goals. Their choices are less likely to be dictated by the desire to minimize electoral risk or fears of angering some segment of their base (such as by voting to protect same-sex and interracial marriages).
Politicians might also temporarily worry less about the optics of handing the other side a political “win.” Sadly, during most of the legislative calendar, bipartisanship can be seen less as a virtue than a liability, particularly if party leaders want to make the other side look incompetent or uncooperative.
Then when this lame-duck period ends — and we’re back in regular session — dysfunction and cowardice resume. Voters have conditioned politicians to believe there are no expectations to get much done until the next lame duck. Until then, posturing and political points-scoring are all that’s required. Prospects for passing laws next year look especially bad: The incoming GOP-controlled House seems totally uninterested in governing and instead is poised to waste its time trying to impeach various Biden Cabinet officials and dig up Hunter Biden revenge porn.
So everything gets shoehorned into this brief period, and the calendar gets oversubscribed, and important bills never pass. What a horrible way to run a country, where basically the only hope of enacting critical policies — or for politicians to simply do their jobs — is a brief window around the holidays every two years. If even that frequently.
