How Congress works

The papers were full of stories yesterday about how the Democrats have been unable to get their agenda passed through Congress and how they're pointing fingers of blame at each other. The Wall Street Journal looked at the stalled agenda that they can't seem to move out of Congress.

Democrats took control of Congress last January promising a "new direction." A year later, the image that haunts them most is one symbolizing no direction at all: gridlock.

Unfinished work is piling up -- legislation to aid borrowers affected by the housing mess, rescue millions of middle-class families from a big tax increase and put stricter gas-mileage limits on the auto industry. Two months into the new fiscal year, Democrats are still scrambling just to keep the government open.

President Bush and Republicans are contributing to the impasse, but there's another factor: Intraparty squabbling between House Democrats and Senate Democrats is sometimes almost as fierce as the partisan battling.

The Hill looked at how the Democrats are caving on their budget proposals in the face of the Republicans and President Bush working together as a road barrier.

The Democrats’ capitulation Wednesday on the total domestic spending level is the latest instance of Bush prevailing on a major policy showdown. Bush and his Senate Republican allies have repeatedly beat back efforts by Democrats to place restrictions on funding for the war in Iraq as well as Democratic attempts to expand funding of children’s health insurance by $35 billion.

Democratic leaders said Wednesday that they would keep total spending at the strict $933 billion limit set by the White House. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also abandoned a proposal she supported Tuesday to eliminate lawmakers’ earmarks from spending bills after she faced stiff opposition from powerful fellow Democrats.

The Washington Post examined the blame game going on between House and Senate Democrats.

Now, as Congress struggles to adjourn for Christmas, relations between House Democrats and their colleagues in the Senate have devolved into finger-pointing.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) accuses Senate Democratic leaders of developing "Stockholm syndrome," showing sympathy to their Republican captors by caving in on legislation to provide middle-class tax cuts paid for with tax increases on the super-rich, tying war funding to troop withdrawal timelines, and mandating renewable energy quotas. If Republicans want to filibuster a bill, Rangel said, Reid should keep the bill on the Senate floor and force the Republicans to talk it to death.

Reid, in turn, has taken to the Senate floor to criticize what he called the speaker's "iron hand" style of governance.

And USA Today continues the story.

Of course, this was all exactly predictable. (As I did on January 5.) That is how our Congress works. The majority can get passed almost anything they want in the House of Representatives as long as they stick together. But the Senate is designed to slow everything down. They have all sorts of rules that allow the minority, in fact allow a single senator sometimes, to block what the majority wants. With holds and filibusters, the Senate has reached the point where it takes 60 votes to get through anything big. The Republicans faced this time and again in the 1990s and similar stories were written then about the exasperation that House Republicans had for the Senate Republicans. And the Republican Senators kept pointing out that the House shouldn't pass legislation that they knew would be blocked in the Senate. And there were cries then for the Senate to force the Democrats to hold actual filibusters for Bush's judicial nominees. And that fell to nothing just as Harry Reid's abortive attempts to force Republicans to filibuster over the war in Iraq.

So this story is nothing new except maybe to people who don't understand how the Congress works. The real story has been that the Republicans ability to hold together. In the Senate, 41 votes can block anything. And they have held together and supported President Bush despite Bush's low approval ratings.

Since this situation was predictable, the question also arises of Democrat overpromises. They should have known that they couldn't do all that they were promising to do. I wrote a column a year ago about what a sorry history our nation has of trying to run a war from Congress. But the Democrats acted as if they could rise above the rules of our political system because they had won the 2006 elections. And now they're reaping the reward of frustrated supporters who are angry that everything they were promised has not come to pass.

Please remember all this as you listen to all the presidential candidates talk about how they're going to bring about change in Washington. Without those 60 votes in the Senate, little is going to change. And gridlock will result. And both sides will end up sniping at each other and casting blame. And the media will complain about partisan bickering. The supposed "change agent" will be disappointed and will join in with the blame game while supporters will be angry . It will happen. Count on it.