Guest Commentaries by Lee Hamilton and Douglas Burns
What it looks like when Congress does its job
By Lee Hamilton
If you’ve ever wondered what members of Congress do to earn their keep, the current health-care debate on Capitol Hill should give you a good idea. This complex legislation, placed on the congressional agenda by President Obama but shaped by the intense give-and-take of the legislative process, is a perfect window into our democracy.
Its sheer ambition — to remake one of the key drivers of our economy and to make health care both more affordable and more accessible to Americans — means that it will leave hardly a person, business or organization untouched. The stakes are huge, from corporations’ profitability, to how doctors practice, to the heart of families’ pocketbooks. That is why so many ordinary Americans and so many lobbying groups are intent on having their say in what is taking place on Capitol Hill.
It’s impossible to avoid the debate. Advertisements crowd the airwaves. Demonstrators gather on the Hill or at lawmakers’ town-hall meetings. A torrent of interviews, speeches, editorials and op-eds appears every day. Over coffee at their local diner, around the dinner table, at VFW and Lions Club meetings, Americans argue over the so-called “public option,” mandatory health insurance, and other particulars. You can only imagine how intense things have gotten on Capitol Hill, the epicenter of it all.
In this super-heated atmosphere, 535 members of Congress have to sort out what to do. The answers might seem obvious when you’re shooting the breeze with friends, but it’s not so simple when you’re in Congress. For no matter what you might believe is the right approach, many of your colleagues will think differently, and some number of them will be dead set against what you want to do.
Moreover, as a member you’re listening daily to lobbyists and constituents. Sorting through their various points of view, assessing the conflicting fiscal analyses, trying to cut through the heated rhetoric, gauging the substantive merits of different proposals as well as their political impact: it all amounts to a full-time job in an institution that doesn’t allow the luxury of devoting full time to any single issue.
As a measure of this importance moves toward completion, power inevitably shifted toward a few members of the leadership and a relative handful of members and senators who — often by virtue of sitting on the fence until the end — pressed issues about which they care deeply.
That is why abortion and immigration, concerns that were not especially noticeable early in the process, have become important at the end. The closeness of the vote on the floor magnifies the importance of legislators who feel so passionately about a particular point of view that they’re willing to scuttle the entire bill unless they’re accommodated.
The process is designed to sort through all these conflicts. At every stage, proponents of health-care reform have to find enough support to move the legislation on — and ultimately get the support of the President.
There are plenty of Americans who think this whole process is too complex, that President Obama should simply have submitted his own proposal and then let Congress react. Yet I would argue that the debate has been healthy for this country. Every side has had a chance to be heard, all of us have learned a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of our health-care system, every conceivable interest has been represented at the table, and members of Congress have had to look at the health-care system from multiple points of view.
I guarantee you that whatever the final measure looks like, no one will be entirely satisfied. Yet legislating is not the art of the perfect, it’s the art of the possible. We have a Congress precisely in order to pursue this “dialogue of democracy,” and to produce, in the end, an ambitious piece of legislation with the legitimacy to be accepted among a broad cross-section of Americans. CV
Lee Hamilton is Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
PoliticalMercury
By Douglas Burns
Death TV: Don’t touch that dial
There’s a logical conclusion to the reckless, game of one-upmanship the networks are playing with so-called reality television.
We’ve had bug-eating survivors and broke bachelors posturing as millionaires and banal bachelorettes and American “idols” belting out their bandstand best and “The Donald” firing folk with aplomb. Trump even made the cover of Newsweek.
In this arms race of shameless human exploitation in which TV’s purveyors of voyeurism are hell-bent on capturing the fleeting attention of the Cheeto-eating, beer-swilling demographic, and most everybody else, it’s abundantly clear what’s next.
Televised executions.
And I’m all for them.
They make sense.
For years death penalty advocates have stressed the deterring effect of a few minutes on an electric chair or a date with the needle or a couple of last gasps of deadly gas.
Not for the condemned criminal, because they will be, well, dead. But the next time someone is going to pull a gun in a convenience store he may think twice, knowing that what waits is more than a head-freeze high from a stolen Slurpee and the $32 in the cash register.
Actor Daniel Day Lewis’ frightening, yet uncomfortably entertaining thug in the movie “Gangs of New York” made no bones about cracking some necks to restore his own sense of order to the mayhem of Five Points. Trouble in the neighborhood, you say? He just called for some public hangings.
At the same time, opponents of capital punishment, the placard-carrying long hairs often found holding candlelight vigils outside of penitentiaries, argue that state-sponsored death is cruel and unusual, the stuff of Orwell come to life.
The debate about death is certainly lively.
But because executions are handled in much the same way sperm clinics collect their merchandise — behind locked doors with lots of secrecy and with people who really, really don’t want to talk about it when it’s over — no one knows a whole lot about the process.
By broadcasting the executions, we’d get an up close and personal look, and we could better judge for ourselves.
It would be more insightful than the theoretical debates of college lecture halls and seminaries and political party caucuses.
There’s another benefit to reality TV executions.
Since the state handles the executions, they have a stake in any TV profits.
In these days of the spectacular shrinking state budget, the inmates, the ones that cost us $20,000 a year or whatever the going rate is for annual tuition at Harvard University Law School, could more fully pay their debts to society.
Moreover, they could actually pay some restitution to the victims’ families beyond the few cents an hour they make pounding out license plates.
Let’s say FOX or the WB or HBO ponies up $500,000 for the rights to televise an execution. The state and the victims could split the money 50/50.
More men on death row could mean more money to pay for smaller class sizes in our schools. With more individualized attention, some of those poor students who traditionally go on to become murderers because they can’t add or spell might instead get the extra help they need to advance to community college and become computer technicians.
There’s more potential here.
A death row inmate who agrees to sign off on the televised execution could court his own sponsors for his last meal, and send the proceeds to his family, which will be fatherless before the dishes are done.
Restaurants and beer companies could bid for the last-meal rights.
Kentucky Fried Chicken couldn’t ask for much more than a testimonial from a condemned man who wanted just one last finger-licking wing before getting fried himself?
Of course, would you really worry about licking that grease off your fingers before dying?
Probably not.
But somewhere, in the holes where they live, reproduce and think up these disgraceful shows, you just know there is a network executive licking his chops at the prospect of the ultimate in reality programming.
Death TV: Don’t touch that dial. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
