Ezra Klein writes about the "Do-Lot" 111th Congress:
The votes are (mostly) counted. The Republicans have clearly and decisively won. But did the Democrats actually lose?
They lost the election, certainly. And many of them lost their jobs. But the point of legislating isn’t job security. It’s legislation. And on that count the members of the 111th Congress succeeded wildly, even historically.
Timothy Egan writes that Obama saved capitalism, and lost the mid-terms because of it:
For no matter your view of President Obama, he effectively saved capitalism. And for that, he paid a terrible political price.
Suppose you had $100,000 to invest on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated. Why bet on a liberal Democrat? Here’s why: the presidency of George W. Bush produced the worst stock market decline of any president in history. The net worth of American households collapsed as Bush slipped away. And if you needed a loan to buy a house or stay in business, private sector borrowing was dead when he handed over power.
With the electorate ostensibly sending a message to President Obama and the Democratic Party in the 2010 mid-term elections, there is no shortage of punditry as to the reasons why voters turned their backs on the Democrats. Whether implicit or explicit, these pundits point to Democratic failures—failure to reduce unemployment more rapidly, failure to frame their agenda within a grand narrative that resonates, etc.
What has largely gone unnoticed—or at least underappreciated—is just how much this president and the Democratic congress achieved legislatively over the past two years. Healthcare reform, the stimulus, and financial regulatory reform, of course, have received all the headlines—and rightfully so—but there have been a myriad of progressive legislative achievements that have gone relatively unnoticed, without the fanfare, anger, faux outrage, and demagoguery of the healthcare debate.
Among others, these include:
-The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, making it easier for workers to sue for pay discrimination based on gender.
-Tripling the size of the AmeriCorps public service program
-Hate Crimes legislation, making it federal crime to commit an assault based on sexual orientation.
-Student Loan reform, discontinuing a forty-five year program that provided federal subsides and guarantees to private student loan lenders, with the Department of Education now handling such loans directly without profit.
-A stimulus package that provided investments in education, health care, a national electronic health records system, infrastructure, green energy, and more.
-Healthcare reform that will extend health insurance to over 95 percent of Americans and does much to begin the process of bending the cost curve
-Financial regulatory reform, which modernizes the regulatory apparatus and rules for the 21st century, while also creating an independent Financial Consumer Protection Agency
These are what Rachel Maddow calls “the underpinnings of the most legislatively productive 21 months in decades”…characterized as “policy, not politics”. It’s safe to say that the Democrats used their majorities to get stuff done, to govern, rather than politicking in anticipation of the next election. For that reason, it has been a two-year super majority well spent.
I’m a little late to this but, hey; it’s been a busy week.
As expected, Republicans have won a sizeable majority in the House of Representatives and failed to win the Senate, despite making some gains there as well, resulting in divided government for at least the next two years.
Republicans were the big winners, but why? As I’ve pointed out several times in the past (here, here, and here), it’s sickening to think that the same folks that (a) were largely responsible for the structural weakening of the American economy and the germination of the financial crisis over the past decade; and (b) did everything in their power to block the Democrats’ economic recovery agenda over the past two years, have now been rewarded with large electoral gains. Now, obviously, the economy is still in rough shape, what with unemployment still hovering between 9 and 10 percent. But does anyone truly believe that the recovery would have been stronger and quicker under Republican governance?
Which brings us to those pundits who maintain, “if only Obama and the Democrats had spent more time ‘focusing’ on the economy, growth would be higher, unemployment lower, and Democrats would still have a Congressional majority”. Of course, as Paul Krugman points out, these people fail to specify what a greater “focus” on the economy would have consisted of. Would greater “focus” consist of a larger, more robust stimulus package? Or simply the president touring the country, repeating over and over, “We’re totally focused on the economy”? Of course, as it turns out, those who assert that the president hasn’t focused enough on jobs and the economy generally wanted a smaller stimulus package (or none at all) and have attempted to block (oftentimes successfully) all subsequent economic recovery legislation in the Senate, from extension of unemployment insurance to tax cuts for small businesses to aid for states and municipalities.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have noted, we are essentially “giving the keys back to the folks who crashed the car.” Very disheartening, indeed.
