Democratic majority’s achievements not a bad showing

saxo-archive

Monday, Dec. 31, 2007 | midnight

Atlanta

The Democrats have wound up their first congressional session in charge after years of blundering around in the minority, with pundits, analysts and their kind largely concluding that now the Democrats are blundering around in the majority.

That conclusion seems to owe less to the facts than to the craven habits of media conditioned by endless conservative hammering. Accused no matter what of bias -- liberal bias, natch -- the media strain at every turn for an often arbitrary even-handedness, or at least its simulacrum.

Much of the media finally, in the past two years, worked up the nerve to begin reporting some of what the Bush administration had been up to for the previous six, after diddling around in indifference to the accumulating feasances, both mis- and mal-. It followed that the game then required the Democrat Congress be declared a flop.

And the new majority did log a goodly share of shortfalls and wrong turns.

Not least, it wasted a fair slice of eternity in predictably futile efforts to defund, sort of defund, or somehow shorten or be done with the errant Iraq war. The president, adamant and shielded by a veto upheld by the large Republican minorities, prevailed time and again. The Democrats bruised themselves more than the Republicans by repeatedly running into that wall.

As well, Democratic infighting -- an old party tradition -- undermined the majority's potential. The hot-to-trot House was passing every wish-list bill in sight, then went sour against a Senate that didn't have the numbers to concur. (The one-vote edge in the Senate depended upon “independent Democrat” Joe Lieberman, which is like trying to hang your hat on smoke.)

Overall, Congress did manage some useful accomplishments. It finally updated the minimum wage, after nearly a decade of arrears. It passed the first serious energy legislation in years, boosting both conservation and alternative fuels. It lowered student loan rates, a help to middle-class families, and restored the Pell grants that open college to low-income students.

The House adopted rules that require members to fess up to the porky earmarks they slip into budget bills and to name the beneficiaries. Earmarks fell by 25 percent this year from the previous year. And Congress set new ethics rules that end some of the wink-and-nudge gimmicks by which lobbyists had been slipping perks and privileges to lawmakers.

The majority would have accomplished much more but for the boulders Bush and those big Republican minorities rolled into their way.

Senate Republicans repeatedly threatened filibusters that the Democrats, without the necessary 60 votes, couldn't break. And Bush used his veto like a kid with a new toy after six years of ignoring it, even quashing an expansion of children's health care for which the Democrats had won large bipartisan support.

The president also suddenly discovered fiscal prudence after a borrow-and-spend binge that ran the budget surpluses of the late '90s into record deficits -- and then balked when Democrats tried to restore pay-as-you-go budgeting because here and there it might nick the very rich.

All in all, and the kibitzing to the contrary notwithstanding, it was not a bad showing for a party still relearning the ropes and often short-sheeted more for show than for good cause.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.