For all the cursing of congressional gridlock, one of the greatest sources of Washington’s evils may be the bias in favor of doing something.
As voices chime in from the major media, from K Street, and from party leadership for the new Republican Congress to do something, it’s worth pausing, taking a breath, and looking at the recent problems caused by this urge — and the less-than-noble incentives that sometimes drive it.
The Beltway media’s predominant bias is that, for every issue, Washington politicians should do something. The simplest explanation for this bias: it gives reporters something to write about. Inaction is bad for readership.
Democratic politicians’ uncontrollable urge to do something is tied up with their view of government’s role as the champion of justice, the wise arranger of the economy and shaper of culture.
But there’s a deeper motivation to do something, and the Republican leadership shares it: When government takes a more active role in the economy, it creates private-sector employment opportunities for the policymakers — and for their advisors, like Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber.
Gruber, the MIT professor who won almost $400,000 in contracts from the Obama administration in a non-competitive contract process, came into the spotlight again this month when a new video surfaced in which he admitted that “lack of transparency” was crucial to passing Obamacare.
My colleague Byron York pointed to a more interesting Gruber detail: After the bill passed, Gruber won hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts with state governments setting up the exchanges under Obamacare.
Gruber, then, had to mislead Americans (or maybe just their senators) in order to pass Obamacare, and that opened a gusher of lucrative contracts for him. There is no doubt that Gruber sincerely thought the country needed health-care reform. But still, his financial interest in the bill ought to have raised some skepticism about the numbers he was peddling.
If Gruber had looked at his budget models and told Congress, “there’s no way you can accomplish what you want to accomplish without more taxes,” he would be a much poorer man today.
Congressmen and their staffers face the same incentives: Craft a sweeping reform, push it through Congress, and thereby make yourself very valuable to the states and private companies facing new mandates, regulations, and subsidies.
Obamacare made many congressional staffers wealthy, but also some lawmakers. Even if doing something often makes an incumbent vulnerable to attack, it also helps him get a raise once he loses — and Obamacare is again a prime example of this.
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., both quit Congress after voting for Obamacare, knowing they could never win re-election. Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., lost his re-election because of Obamacare. All three have found gainful employment that probably wouldn’t exist if Obamacare hadn’t passed.
Stupak is now a lobbyist at the K Street firm Venable LLP, with clients in the drug and hospital industries — both industries that supported the law. Pomeroy, the day after he left Congress, joined the health-care practice at the lobbying shop Alston & Bird. Nelson joined a public-affairs firm and got a job running the National Association of Insurance Commissioners — a group explicitly empowered by Obamacare.
Had Nelson, Stupak, and Pomeroy — just those three men — weighed all the pros and cons of the bill and concluded it was time to go back to the drawing board, they wouldn’t be as wealthy as they are today.
After Enron collapsed in the largest bankruptcy in history (at that time), Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. It was everything the do-something crowd demands: sweeping, bipartisan, quick. It also probably made things worse for investors and companies. And former Rep. Michael Oxley, R-Ohio, is now the top lobbyist for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a body made more relevant by the law that bears his name.
These days, the cry for Republicans to do something comes from many corners. Pay close attention to the voices and you can sniff out incentives that don’t align with conservatism or even the broader GOP. Sometimes it’s liberals. Sometimes it’s Capitol Hill reporters. Often it’s K Street lobbyists who know that more legislation now will mean more contracts later.
There are things the GOP should try to do. The most important might be tax reform — which, by the way, is mostly a matter of undoing previous messes Congress has made in a fitful effort to do something.
Sometimes it’s best to not just do something, but instead to take a breath.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
