The end of the 'do-something' Congress

By Ezra Klein

Republicans will probably win the House today. They might win the Senate, too. But either way, the brief moment in which Democrats not only controlled Congress, but held enough seats to do big things, is over. And it'll end in defeat.

Actually, scratchthat. It'll end in a few dozen politicians losing their jobs. But if you see the point of politics as actually getting things done, the last two years, for Democrats, have been a stunning, historic success. Whatever else you can say about the 111th Congress, it got things done.

There was health-care reform, of course. The bill is projected to cover 32 million Americans (lifting us above 95 percent insured) while cutting the deficit by about $140 billion in the first 10 years -- and by more after that. It creates competitive insurance markets in every state and ends the days in which insurers could turn you away or jack up your premiums because you have preexisting conditions. It empowers an independent commission to cut Medicare's costs and begins to ratchet back the tax break for employer-sponsored health-care insurance that's been at the root of many of our system's dysfunctions. Mark McClellan, who directed the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services under George W. Bush, says the bill is "an important step" and that the provisions that try to move our fee-for-service system to a pay-for-performance regime "are significant in terms of their potential for reducing spending growth." And then there were the parts that few noticed, like adding nutritional information to menus and drive-through boards at chain restaurants.

There was financial regulation, too. If you were looking for a bill that reformed the financial-services sector, as I was, Dodd-Frank probably didn't go as far as you hoped. But it did what it set out to do, creating a 21st century financial-regulation system that now includes a regulator for the consumer-financial products that filled the bubble, a systemic-risk regulator able to watch the institutions that turned the bubble into a crisis, and an array of new methods and powers that can be used to take down the firms that pose a threat to the system. And there were even some of those industry reforms that people like me wanted, notably the effort to force derivatives out of the darkness and onto exchanges and clearinghouses.

Then there was the stimulus. Too small? Absolutely. Were there votes to make it much bigger? Probably not. And even putting aside the economic relief that the expansions of Medicaid, COBRA, food stamps, tax cuts and unemployment benefits gave to millions of Americans, or the millions of jobs the Congressional Budget Office estimates the legislation created or saved, there were the investments designed to pay dividends down the road: We've begun more than 75,000 infrastructure projects, kicked off digitization of the nation's medical records, made massive investments in green energy, started a "Race to the Top" program that even conservatives agree is changing the education system, sent billions to the National Institute of Health, and more.

And those are just the big bills: The 111th Congress also passed Ted Kennedy's national service legislation, and the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program to four million more kids, and new regulations on tobacco, and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

That isn't to say this Congress, or these bills, were perfect. Much of this legislation has lost popularity as the economy continued to suffer, and other pieces, like health-care reform, weren't popular to begin with. The bills themselves suffer from the normal flaws and shortcomings and crass political deal-making endemic to everything Washington does. There are plenty of priorities, ranging from more stimulus to energy legislation, that simply didn't make it through Congress. And reasonable people disagree on whether these bills were worth doing in the first place -- on whether the government should do more to regulate the financial sector, or stimulate the economy, or expand health-care insurance. It's entirely possible to believe the 111th Congress did a lot, and most of it was bad.

We'll continue to have those arguments over the next few years. But we won't get anywhere on them. What's been uncommon about the past two years is that the Democrats in Congress managed to put aside enough of their disagreements to get big, important things done, things they really believed would make this country better, things they'd been fighting and working for and trying to do for decades.

That this has been the most "do-something" Congress we've seen in 40 years hasn't made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That's true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington to do.

Photo credit: By Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post