"Process Matters"
Dean writes that although many political pundits and news organizations laugh off or ignore process issues in the federal government, democracy is all about process, people do care about it, and the press should cover it much more than they have over the last several years, the legislative process especially. [We need to know, for example, how major bills did or didn’t get signed into law.] Dean writes that some TV news crews -- cable stations -- and daily papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post do in fact cover it in great detail, and that bloggers and its ever exploding readership care about it as well. Process “is the mainstay of political reporting.” Right on.
“First Branch (Legislature): Broken But Under Repair”
While John Dean has seen and lived through typical partisanship in Washington, D.C. for over 40 years, he believes that conservative Republicans have taken it to extremes for the last 25 years or so, because it’s the only way they can win elections. He also believes that they fear liberals “operating fairly and equitably” and thus engage in such high partisanship to keep the power they have. Dean also writes that conservatives’ anti-government rhetoric makes it hard to actually govern when in power. Thus, a broken government resulted from its lax and ideological ways. All of this is debatable of course, but Dean makes a convincing argument here in more detail than I can analyze for this review
Dean writes that before Newt Gingrich (R-GA) came to town in the mid-1980s, Congress was the place where Republicans and Democrats would socialize with one another, at times get to know each others’ families, go on bipartisan congressional “fact-finding” trips overseas together, and not shut out opposite party members from high-level negotiations on major legislation for purely political and partisan reasons, which is what the GOP did, especially during Bush’s first six years in office. Gone too was the bipartisan socializing events and international trips that could have, if nothing else led to a more collegial atmosphere in D.C., as was the case in the distant past.
The 2003 Medicare overhaul bill is a prime example of how GOP strong-arm tactics and suspension of regular voting rules brought a bill thought to be dead back to light in the middle of a November night, with the support of the president. Dean writes that before the final vote, House Republican Bill Thomas threatened to cancel negotiations on the bill if Democratic conferees showed up to work out differences in the House and Senates’ bills – conference committees had always been bi-partisan. This is what Dean means about when writing about how “process” has been compromised by mega partisanship by Republicans in Washington.
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