There’s a scene in “The Natural” where Pop Fisher laments that he “shoulda been a farmer.” Watching the Knights in action against the Pirates that day made him lament his choice of being in professional baseball.
I feel the same way about politics right now. For Pop Fisher, farming ran in the family. For me, my granddaddy was a coal miner. A few weeks ago, with my Sorensen class, we toured one of Alpha Natural Resources mines. Being underground, watching the men dig coal from the ground, knowing that after their twelve hour shift they could go home and not think about work, how they could measure their progress by feet per hour, made me realize how lucky those men are.
Yes, their job is risky. Yes, it’s dirty. And, yes, like many, many others, it’s at risk because of government action. But for all its faults, I would much rather be a thousand feet and four miles underground than in Washington, D.C. right now.
As a lobbyist, I’ve spent the last decade or more learning how our system works – not the Schoolhouse Rock version of how a bill becomes a law, but the nuts and bolts of how things actually turn. I know what the bells mean. I know the language and the nuances. I know the people and the players. That familiarity is one of the reasons why I always seem to get fooled by the group insanity that sometimes grips this town.
A week or so ago, I was confident that there would be no government shut down. Today, I’m confident there will be one. Having talked to a number of the principles, heard strategy and tactics that were going to be used, I thought we’d get a continuing resolution and then have another debt limit fight about Obamacare. I thought the idea of a government shut down was unthinkable and something that nobody was willing to accept, especially for yet another Obamacare melee. With the universal complaints about the sequester, it seemed unfathomable to me that anybody would be willing to shut the government down over the umpteenth attempt to stop Obamacare – if things were bad with cuts, they’d be worse with everything shut down. I honestly thought that the adults in the room would stop this kind of thing from happening.
My wife tells me all the time that I put too much faith in the system. That for all of my hardened and calloused attitude towards politics, I’ve still got a lot of idealist in me. Maybe she’s right. But it’s hard to be an idealist as I watch this slow motion train wreck unfold before me.
Because from where I sit, the government is shutting down. It’s 10 PM on Sunday, and the Senate is doing nothing. They aren’t even scheduled to gavel back into session until 2 PM tomorrow, and that will be morning business ‘hour,’ when members come to the floor to talk about whatever they feel like. Reid doesn’t appear inclined to take up the House’s latest CR with the one year delay to implementation of Obamacare and the repeal of the medical devices tax. Precious hours before midnight on October 1 are being frittered away. And nobody appears willing to stop it.
Both sides are at fault here. Republicans have spent the last four years complaining about Obamacare without really trying to fix it. We have talked a lot – Ted Cruz’s 20 hour contribution to global warming was the capstone to years of hot air coming from Republicans about Obamacare – but we haven’t really acted. And by acting, I mean working with both sides to develop a program that either replaces Obamacare or fixes the worst parts of it, like the individual mandate. Instead, we’ve been assuming that the law is so unpopular it would enable to us to crest to control over the House, Senate and White House, and then we could simply repeal it. That didn’t happen. We won the House, but the Senate and White House remained out of reach. And we were left with nothing but the leverage of stopping “must pass” legislation in order to force compromise.
The Democrats, having control of the Senate and the White House, have steadfastly refused to compromise with House Republicans either, whether it was on cutting spending or on Obamacare. Given that the original Republican position in this current fight was defund Obamacare, the one year delay is a reasonable move towards the middle. Not even considering it, especially when so many other provisions of the law have been delayed, is unreasonable.
My biggest concern is that there are too many members of Congress on my side of the aisle who really don’t care if the government shuts down. They don’t view it as a problem. And there will be, invariably, a slew of comments on this article saying the same thing. I find that short sighted and inherently dangerous. No matter how large you think government has become or how invasive, there are core functions we need and a shut down stops those functions in their tracks. It has major impacts on millions of Americans and that’s a bad thing. We shouldn’t let it happen.
Phil Gramm, the former Senator from Texas, once said you should never take a hostage you’re not prepared to shoot. That sentiment always made me smile because it represented a Washington axiom – at the end of the day, the truly unthinkable would never happen because both Republicans and Democrats were responsible and weren’t willing to do things that were truly harmful to the country. Now, that idea scares me because I see so many people in my own party who are more than prepared to shoot the hostage. And they don’t – or won’t – accept that no matter how bad Obamacare may be, it’s not as bad as the structural damage a government shut down or a debt limit default would be.
As I sit here, contemplating what tomorrow is going to bring, I can’t help but wish I was going to wake up at 5 AM and head to the mine, rather than my office in Washington. While I still have a sliver of hope that cooler heads will prevail and we’ll have a last minute deal, it’s just a sliver.
I shoulda been a coal miner.
