The most successful Obama campaign meme–repeated ad infinitum by the mainstream media–is the idea that the country is saddled with a “do-nothing Congress.”

The implication–brilliantly conveyed, though completely untrue–is that we have a “do-nothing Republican Congress,” though in fact the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has been extremely active.

It would be more accurate to say that we have a “do-nothing Senate“–by design, since it’s clear that the Demcorats’ leaders in the Senate believe that legislative gridlock works to their political advantage. It’s been nearly 1000 days since the Demcorat-controlled Senate even passed a budget–a violation of the Congressional Budget Act.

With tomorrow’s official unemployment number looming, and with today’s ADP employment report for December 2011 suggesting some improvement could be on the way, it’s worth asking what happened to Obama’s “Jobs Bill”–without which, he warned, “there will be fewer jobs.” Voters wanted Washington “to do something big and something bold,” Obama said–even if it was a stimulus packed with boondoggles and bailouts, much like the “Porkulus” that launched the Tea Party.

Lo and behold–there is a little bit of life in the job market; manufacturing is improving moderately; and consumer confidence, while still shaky, is up significantly from where it was when Obama was demanding his jobs bill.

And no jobs bill was enacted. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

Obama’s election year retreat from legislative fights means this term will end without significant progress on two of his 2008 campaign promises, an immigration overhaul and closing the military prison for terrorist suspects atGuantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Presidential directives probably won’t make a big dent in the nation’s 8.6 percent unemployment rate or lead to significant improvements in the economy. That’s the chief concern for many voters and the issue on which Republican candidates are most likely to criticize Obama.

In focusing on executive actions rather than ambitious legislation, the president risks appearing to be putting election-year strategy ahead of economic action at a time when millions of Americans are still out of work.

(more…)

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently the subject of hearings in the House Judiciary Committee, has generated interest far beyond the community of copyright lawyers.

To its proponents, SOPA is a critical addition to copyright law, necessary to help creative Americans protect their legitimate property rights from foreign attackers, and thus to preserve the numerous American jobs in our world-class creative industries.

To its opponents, SOPA is an unprecedented attack on civil liberties that threatens to destroy free speech, the Internet, and the thriving American technology sector—not to mention the many American jobs that it creates.

Who is right?  It turns out that they both are: SOPA will help copyright holders protect the rights that copyright law grants them by suppressing free speech and impeding the functioning of the Internet, with predictable consequences on American jobs.

This result is hardly an anomaly.

(more…)

From BusinessInsider:

The House Financial Services Committee canceled a scheduled “mark-up” of a bill to ban congressional insider trading last night, amid concerns that the committee’s chairman, Spencer Bachus, was moving forward with the bill to take the heat off his personal political troubles.

Bachus’ trading habits during the financial crisis were featured in a ‘60 Minutes’ profile last month as an example of potential insider trading on the part of lawmakers. He’s denied those allegations, and seized upon the trading ban — called the STOCK Act — to rebuild his image.

(more…)

With the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee set to begin congressional insider trading hearings today, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, whose husband trades stock options, has proposed a bill that would legalize, not ban, insider trading by members of Congress.

“This is just nuts,” says UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge.

The controversy surrounding Sen. Gillibrand’s version of the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act involves a curious omission of a conjunction that  CNBC.com editor John Carney calls “shocking” and a “scandal” because it would “gut the law” entirely.

In Sen. Scott Brown’s version of the bill, the law reads:

Not later than 270 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Commission shall, by rule, prohibit any person from buying or selling the securities or security-based swaps of any issuer while such person is in possession of material nonpublic information relating to any pending or prospective legislative action relating to such issuer, if–

(A) such information was obtained by reason of such person being a Member or employee of Congress; or

(B) such information was obtained from a Member or employee of Congress, and such person knows that the information was so obtained.

Sen. Gillibrand’s version, however, contains a critical difference:

Not later than 270 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Commission shall, by rule, prohibit any person from buying or selling the securities or security-based swaps of any issuer while such person is in possession of material nonpublic information relating to any pending or prospective legislative action relating to such issuer, if–

(A)(i) such information was obtained by reason of such person being a Member or employee of Congress; or

(ii) such information was obtained from a Member or employee of Congress, and such person knows that the information was so obtained;

(B) the person acted with the intent to assist another person, directly or indirectly, to use the information to enter into, or offer to buy or sell the securities of such publicly traded company based on such information.

As UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge notes, while the omission of the conjunction “And” between clause A and B appears to be a typo, Sen. Gillibrand’s insertion of clause B would mean that a member of Congress would be free to make stock trades using material, nonpublic information so long as they didn’t also help another person make a similar stock purchase.

(more…)

From Newsweek:

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa’s outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market.

(more…)

Richard Epstein in Hoover’s Defining Ideas:

What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create.

One does not have to dip very far into the bill to find trouble. Section 4 of the AJA imposes “Buy American” restrictions on the use of funds appropriated under this statute for work on public buildings. “[A]ll the iron, steel and manufactured goods” used on such projects are to be fabricated in the United States. There are obvious administrative difficulties in deciding what counts as a “manufactured good” for the purposes of the act. But don’t sweat the small stuff.

(more…)

Just minutes after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tabled (read: killed) the second piece of legislation presented by the House to his chamber addressing solutions to the politically manufactured debt ceiling “crisis” – legislation crafted through not only bipartisan negotiations among members of the House, but bipartisan consultation with Senate members – Mr. Reid had the unmitigated gall to infer that Republicans were being “obstructionist.”

As reported in the Washington Times:

“Republicans offered to let the vote happen Friday night, just minutes after the chamber voted to halt a House Republican bill. All sides expect Democrats’ bill will fail too, and the GOP said senators might as well kill both at the same time so that negotiations could move on to a compromise.

“‘We would be happy to have that vote tonight,’ Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republicans’ leader, offered.

“But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid objected, even though the vote would occur on his own bill. He instead said the chamber would have to run out the full procedural clock, which means a vote in the early hours Sunday morning.

“He said he would be willing to move up the vote if Republicans didn’t insist on a 60-vote threshold, which has become traditional for big, controversial items to pass the Senate. But the GOP held firm on that demand, so Mr. Reid said he would insist on the full process, which he said would show the country that Republicans were being obstructionist.”

At a time when the American people are screaming – nay, demanding – that those elected to office in Washington stop with the political positioning and gamesmanship, Progressive Democrat Harry Reid, a man whose approval rating is just 27 percent, whose negatives stand at 53 percent, a man whose last election was handed to him not by the people of Nevada but by the union members of Las Vegas, represents the quintessential example of exactly the kind of behavior Americans detest.

(more…)

From The Economist blog ‘Democracy in America’:

Still, freakish death is profoundly unnerving and facing its immunity to reason tends to aggravate rather than soothe our cellular fear of disorder and death. Far from leading us to resignation, the inscrutability of a sui generis disaster sets our minds in mad motion. We desperately and pathetically grope for some blameworthy failure of foresight, some forward-looking lesson, some food for prudence. It doesn’t matter if there are none to be found. We’ll make it all up if we have to.

Not every general feature of Saturday’s shootings in Tucson has been seized upon. No one is proposing new rules for supermarkets, young white guys, or sun-baked locales. The things we already fear and already desire more thoroughly to control are most vividly salient to us. We seize on those: guns, crazy people. Did Jared Lee Loughner shoot government officials with a gun? Ban guns within 1,000 feet of government officials! Was Jared Lee Loughner detectably crazy? Make involuntary commitment easier! Did Jared Lee Loughner buy a gun while detectably crazy? Tighten background-screening requirements! Did Jared Lee Loughner’s gun sport an extended magazine? Ban extended magazines!

Some of these proposals may have merit, but no more now than on Friday.

(more…)

Inside the Beltway, Democrats are touting the achievements of the outgoing Congress.  Historian Alan Brinkley asserted that this is the most productive Congress since the Great Society.  These congratulatory assessments stand in stark contrast to the fact that Democrats, for all their labors, suffered a defeat of such historic proportions that it gave rise to a new word: “refudiation.”  What explains this paradox?

First, much of the legislation passed in the 111^th Congress is not really legislation at all.  For all of its verbosity, and for all the outrage surrounding provisions like the individual mandate, the health care legislation enacted in 2010 makes precious few decisions.  Instead, vast discretionary authority is vested in dozens of different agencies and officials, in particular the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

When confronted with tough decisions, Congress prefers to let someone else make laws.  Congressmen can then claim credit for providing Americans with health care, while evading blame for increased costs and premiums, poorer quality of care, rationing, massive uncertainty, and higher wait times.  The rules that led to those unfortunate consequences were made by regulators, who will give shape to legislation, and who would bear the brunt of public ire.

Second, Washington insiders tend to subscribe to the belief that what Americans expect of Congress is that it produce a certain quantity of legislation.  Outgoing House Rules Committee chairman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) captured this belief when she lamented that “what we did was work, and our reward was, ‘Get out of here.’”  The volume of legislation produced by the Democratic 111^th Congress should have been reason enough for voters to sustain Democrats in office.

(more…)

When Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) announced that he would not seek re-election this fall, he contended that “Congress is not operating as it should.” He lamented that partisanship and ideology have so pervaded Congress that “the people’s business is not being done.” Bayh cited the recent scuttling of a proposal to create a commission on federal spending, and the handling of a jobs bill. In short, Congress is no longer a properly functioning legislative institution.

Woodrow Wilson’s 1885 book Congressional Government is cited by virtually every scholar as seminal study of that institution. In it Wilson contends that the problem with Congress is that it is too preoccupied with legislating; the most important function of a democratic legislature is debate. Congress must debate, so that the people might receive “instruction and guidance in political affairs.” Legislators must constantly and publicly articulate their positions and attack those of their opponents. The New Republic co-founder Herbert Croly concurs, maintaining that Congress be transformed into “a parliament in the old sense of the word – a talking body, a battleground of opinion.”

The actual business of legislating would be handled by administrative agencies, which Congress would empower to devise and implement the means necessary to accomplish socially desirable ends. Croly observes that “social legislation is coming more and more to demand results rather than prescribe means.” With this understanding, Congress has been delegating legislative power for decades. Confronted with growing public concern over air pollution, Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency to implement regulations to clean the environment. The response of both parties and the White House to spiraling budget deficits has been to propose the creation of a commission to balance the federal budget. Over time, as political scientist Morris Fiorina has argued, congressmen have come to realize that delegating is electorally profitable. Congress earns credit for supporting environmental protection, but public blame for the burdensome rules necessary to achieve clean air is shifted to the EPA.

Freed from the arduous business of legislating, congressmen are able to focus upon debate. Debate, however, devolves into little more than posturing and maneuvering. Members have an incentive to take and hold extreme positions favored by core constituencies, demonize the opposition in order to score political points, and employ overheated rhetoric in support of both. These tactics mobilize supporters and win elections, but are not conducive to effective legislating. Deliberation is not a skill valued by the progressive understanding of a legislature. Such a legislature does not attract members of a deliberative temperament; once there, they have little opportunity for real legislating. The self-interest of legislators is effectively divorced from the exercise of legislative power.

(more…)