He is the leader of his party, the president always is, he could at least say he disapproves of them doing that. I also dont think if the president asked them to have open meetings they would tell him no. But there is nothing but silence from the White House on this.
Doesn’t make it any less stupid after the whole Nebraska debacle.
jeffd
1623
Televising the conference will accomplish absolutely nothing in terms of preventing backroom dealings. It’ll just make the actual conference pointless.
Well I’m not saying there’s a winning decision - they’re just taking one of two losing options. Between the two, I’m guessing this is marginally better, but I don’t think anybody is naive enough to think it won’t attract criticism no matter what they do.
JeffL
1626
It appears that they are going to not go through the formal conference process.
And I’m all for more publicity and transparency in the dealings. That’s a good thing, and one of the reasons Obama promised it would be done that way (and promised it numerous times - he made a pretty compelling case for why that was the way to do this.)
jeffd
1627
As usual, Ezra Klein has a smart take on this.
The idea that putting cameras in the conference will shed genuine light on the negotiations is naive on its face.
edit: Another good take, here:
Yeah, I don’t think the Founding Fathers had the modern 24-7 press in mind when they set up the Congress we have. Let them work in private, at least for a while. It’s not like we’ll never find out what’s in the bill, anyway.
The Constitution was drawn up in secrecy. Closed-door policy making was definitely good enough for the founding fathers.
If I recall correctly, though, they didn’t trumpet that fact in advance. It was kind of a trick that some of the more influential ones pulled to get a document that actually worked written to replace the Articles of Confederation. It worked out well, and I’ve never met a history guy who thinks that The Constitution would have ever happened if they hadn’t closed access to the proceedings, but they were a little bit more clever about it.
JeffL
1631
Would making the discussions public be a “perfect” fix? Don’t think so. But it’s not like we’re going to make it worse. Let’s look at what has happened when they’ve been able to do everything in private back rooms: we get sneaky little moves like clauses that allow the insurance companies to put the annual and lifetime caps back on (said caps being a key to destroying so many families when they have a serious medical crisis) and putting that clause under the section entitled “No annual or lifetime caps.” That’s just one example. Could they have done that anyway? Maybe. But I think the pressure of transparency is going to be more good than bad.
While not a perfect analogy, I worked for a huge global company some years ago, and we decided to make our HR and pay plans more transparent. Things that were jokingly called the “priesthood secrets” that you only got to see when you moved into management. So we proposed putting, on the company intranet, tables of what each level in the company was paid (there was a range, say 85% to 125% for each level, depending on how well you were rated,) what percentage of your salary was the bonus potential for each level, etc. There was a HUGE uproar and protest from a lot of managers - we can NOT open all of that up to everyone! And they made all kind of arguments why not.
And our CEO listened, then said “Well, I guess we know which managers have been lying to their people. Who has been telling their people “Hey, you’re being paid really well for your level!” when they aren’t” etc. " And it was true - those of us who had been honest with our folks thought this transparency was a great thing, but it did indeed reveal which managers had been bold faced liars, and there was nowhere for them to hide when the info went up on the company intranet.
That’s the opinion I have about this: those who have the most to hide in Congress are going to be the ones who will fight transparency the most.
Obama had a meeting with Joe Biden and two Democrat leaders from both the House and Senate. After that, it was announced that they would not be using the normal committee to finalize the healthcare bill.
It’s not hard to come up with ways to make it worse. Like televised C-SPAN, it gives them an incentive to grandstand instead of doing useful work.
That’s just one example.
I have no idea how a public conference committee is supposed to prevent people from putting bill text that disagrees with the heading. It’s not like they project it on the wall and people go up and type in changes. There’s plenty of things you could do for greater transparency, but this isn’t one of them.
But transparency was one of the huge campaign planks for President Obama. He said multiple times that negotiations would be done in the light of day, not in secret backroom deals. Was it naïve when he made that claim, when he talked about changing the politics in Washington?
jeffd
1635
I get the feeling you are totally missing the point here.
Filming the conference will not create transparency. It will create the illusion of transparency. It’s pure theater and will do nothing to address the stuff you have problems with.
During the committee & amendment process, CSPAN filmed literally hundreds of hours of Senate proceedings. And you know what they got out of that? Hundreds of hours of old blowhards tooting their own horn and partisan demagogery. It certainly didn’t create any more transparency - the real heavy lifting happened in private, when Harry Reid merged the committee bills and again when Harry Reid created his manager’s amendment.
Put a camera in the conference committee and the same thing will happen. You’ll get lots of guys making speeches about how great this bill is going to be, while aids hash out the actual details behind closed doors. You’ll get the appearance of transparency, but none of the substance.
John Walker has a good follow up on this subject, something you can do to create actual transparency: require that all bills have a plain-English version alongside the legalese version.
Occasionally politics say populist things that make no sense, I’m afraid.
Personally I’d rather have legislators own up to who wanted every line by line change made to a bill.
Unfortunately, I think our current political situation seems to indicate that that doesn’t achieve the goal I assume you’re working for. I’m sure that this will sound ludicrous, but most politicians, I theorize, are not secretly evil and trying to overthrow the world order and line their pockets with checks signed in the blood of the poor and downtrodden. However, because every single thing they do or do not do can become a piece of campaign material for their next opponent either in their own primary or in the general election, they get more mileage out of dancing around like a bunch of chimps in tiny hats and preserving their talking points rather than actually solving issues. Removing accountability for individual items actually encourages a wiser holistic solution - you don’t end up paying Captain Jackass from Nebraska tons of money to make a vote that he’s afraid to make because nobody will know he made it in the first place. Transparency can cut both ways - too much, particularly in the American political system today, and you’re just compounding the pile of other forces strongly encouraging people to do nothing at all.
That’s a bit surprising given his stance on supermarket nudity. Must be libertarian-influenced.
Thinking about this more, so what are people complaining about on this change the tone/hopeosphere/transparency angle?
- Petty corruption; trading of votes for donations.
- Lack of party discipline.
- They disagree with the solution you want, because it’s less popular.
- They disagree with the solution you want because its their opinion/ideology.
- Lack of ideological overlap between the parties, and the resulting lack of bipartisan solutions.
- Politicians being mean to each other.
