Legacy of first 100 days rests on second

By Lisa Mascaro

Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Watching history in real time can be blinding. It unfolds opaquely, the forest we cannot quite bring into view until moving far enough to take a long look back.

As Congress adjourns for the summer recess, the House and Senate’s inability to pass health care legislation by President Barack Obama’s August deadline is seen as a major setback.

The lack of a legislative victory on the priority policy item is a loss, to be sure, but it overshadows the complexity of the first half of this first year of the new administration.

Associate Senate Historian Donald Ritchie is a helpful guide here. “This has been a more productive Congress than we’ve seen in a long time,” he said.

Comparisons to 1933 come to mind, the first year of President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, when an allied Congress passed the sweeping New Deal legislation.

So, too, do comparisons to 1965, the first year of President Lyndon Johnson’s term, when a sympathetic Congress was finally able to usher through Medicare, the Voting Rights Act and the War on Poverty efforts that had been dammed up.

Ritchie said several factors are at play to create an environment where Congress can work so productively — a new president with an active agenda, a robust majority in Congress and a crisis.

All three were present in 1933 when the New Deal was passed during the Great Depression and again in 1965 as Johnson entered his first full term after John Kennedy’s assassination.

“You have that combination in this Congress,” Ritchie said. “The stars are aligning.”

The greatest hits signed into law so far:

• An expansion of a popular children’s health care program that was vetoed twice under President George W. Bush but is now law.

• A fair-pay law that gives those who have been discriminated against more time to pursue damages.

• An economic recovery package that is the country’s largest single attempt to shore up the economy with extra unemployment benefits, tax cuts, health care assistance and money to build roads and other public works projects.

• Anti-tobacco legislation that had been pursued unsuccessfully for decades and will require bolder warning labels on cigarette packages and end the sale of candy-flavored smokes attractive to kids.

• New credit card rules that ban random interest rate hikes, shifting due dates and other practices that contribute to increased debt.

• Housing help to broaden the eligibility requirements of a mortgage rescue plan.

• A sweeping public lands bill that sets aside more acreage for conservation than any legislation in years.

• A novel “cash for clunkers” program that is giving the auto industry a jolt by offering cash incentives for those who junk gas guzzlers and buy new wheels.

• And the Senate’s approval last week of Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court.

A couple of months back, when the tobacco bill passed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that in a typical year, that would be enough of a victory for Congress to hang its hat on.

Obama knows that he must sprint through the year, as do House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reid. By the second year of a new administration, the presidential honeymoon is over and mid-term congressional elections are in play. Legislating recedes and politicking comes to the fore.

If health care reform passes this fall, 2009 will clearly become one for the history books. If not, the legacy of this Congress will remain opaque until we move farther along.