Easy Way Out

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 4, 2006 11:03 AM

But seriously, folks, has Congress become something of a joke?

Are these toothless lawmakers no longer capable of passing anything with bite?

Consider:

Folks on the Hill were desperate to demonstrate their deep concern about gas prices. So Republicans-- Republicans !--said maybe they'd pop the oil industry with a new tax. Then the industry howled. Never mind.

And how 'bout giving each taxpayer 100 bucks so they can fill 'er up two or three times? That was the GOP plan. John Boehner called it "stupid." Never mind.

Democrats want to investigate oil company price-gouging. Great. Will that produce another barrel of oil?

So the House cooks up some thin gruel just to show that it's doing something . (Not that there's much the Hill can do to get prices down in the short term, but everyone has to maintain the fiction that government can fix this problem, preferably by November.)

Remember lobbying reform? The Hill was so nervous about the Abramoff scandal that even Denny Hastert was talking about greater disclosure, ending earmarks and perhaps limiting freebie travel. Now that the Abramoff furor has died down, the leadership is backtracking on almost every point. The House passed a watered-down bill yesterday that contained such stinging provisions as ethics training for lawmakers. So members of Congress will be able to continue to stuff bills with home-district pork, often as a favor to the interest groups that finance their campaigns. Talk about a formula for corruption.

Remember when House Republicans were hot to crack down on immigration? That was before two rounds of major rallies that generated a lot of sympathy for those who are here illegally. The hard-liners don't like President Bush's guest-worker program, and on this issue, like so many others, gridlock seems to reign.

And that list doesn't even include long-term problems like Social Security on which Congress has already punted. Not exactly a profile in courage. (And as Dana Milbank noted the other day, Bush engaged in a classic Beltway stall when he promised in his State of the Union to appoint a commission to study Medicare and Social Security. But it's worse than we thought: He hasn't named any commissioners.)

Of course, there is one issue on which Congress seems poised to act: extending tax cuts. Whether you think that's a good idea or not, isn't it telling that the one thing lawmakers can agree on is handing out goodies as opposed any measure that involves the slightest sacrifice?

"The House narrowly passed a bill on Wednesday intended to restore public trust in Congress by reshaping the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists," says the New York Times. "But Democrats denounced the measure as a sham, and 20 Republicans voted against it. . . .

"The measure falls short of what Republican leaders promised after the scandal involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff rocked the Capitol in January. The chief Republican architect of the bill, Representative David Dreier of California, the House Rules Committee chairman, conceded that he wished that the measure 'were stronger than it is.'"

Now that's an understatement.

"Under the bill," says the Boston Globe, "members of Congress can still fly on corporate-owned aircraft if they pay the owner the equivalent of a first-class plane fare, and lawmakers and their top aides can become lobbyists after just one year out of office. Lobbyists are still allowed to hand out gifts to members of Congress worth up to $50, despite House leaders' initial vow to lower the value limit to $20.

"In addition, a proposal to ban free trips through the rest of this year was jettisoned on the House floor yesterday. Instead, lawmakers can go on such trips if the ethics committee clears it."

And we all know how tough the ethics committee is.

As for the gas issue, the Wall Street Journal reports on the less-than-sweeping measure:

"After airing complaints about high gasoline prices and oil companies' high profits, the House voted for measures to prevent gasoline price gouging and to help speed the construction of more refinery capacity.

"Republicans and most Democrats voted 389-34 to give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to define, investigate and penalize gasoline price gouging."

And the impact?

"As Congress moved Wednesday to approve legislation responding to high gasoline prices, energy experts said there is not much lawmakers can do in the short run to bring down the stratospheric prices at the pump," says the Chicago Tribune. "Analysts said a measure approved by the House on Wednesday to strengthen penalties on gasoline price-gouging would do little, if anything, to affect gas prices. It is not clear much price-gouging is going on, they said, even as oil companies are making record profits."

Oh, and in case you were wondering:

"The new boss of ExxonMobil was unapologetic yesterday about his company's record profits, saying its take is merely 'what the market gives us,' " the New York Daily News reports.

" 'We're in the business to make money,' said CEO Rex Tillerson, asked on NBC if he would consider cutting profits to help consumers."

Well, at least Bill Clinton got something done yesterday. The former fat kid brokered a deal to get sugary sodas out of schools.

Here's a new Colbert twist: A blogger mad at a lawmaker for criticizing Colbert. Kos begins with the news story:

"House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) took on a rare role yesterday as a defender of President Bush.

"Hoyer came to the defense of the commander in chief after Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, where the president took a drubbing from comedian Stephen Colbert.

" 'I thought some of it was funny, but I think it got a little rough,' Hoyer said. 'He is the president of the United States, and he deserves some respect. I'm certainly not a defender of the administration,' Hoyer reassured stunned observers, but Colbert 'crossed the line' with many jokes that were 'in bad taste.'

"I'd like to know which jokes, in particular, Hoyer thought were in bad taste.

"Colbert, like many of us, is crashing the gate in DC. The natives, not used to getting more than Jay Leno-style good-natured ribbing, don't like it when one of their own gets a serious dose of reality. And Steny Hoyer, more than almost any Democrat in the House, has been there a tad too long.

"Well, more than a tad."

Salon Editor Joan Walsh also imbues the comic's performance with great meaning:

"Colbert's deadly performance did more than reveal, with devastating clarity, how Bush's well-oiled myth machine works. It exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion with an administration that has treated it -- and the truth -- with contempt from the moment it took office. Intimidated, coddled, fearful of violating propriety, the press corps that for years dutifully repeated Bush talking points was stunned and horrified when someone dared to reveal that the media emperor had no clothes. Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner -- an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: 'He wasn't funny.' "

John Podhoretz says Bush can't be doing as badly as the polls indicate:

"It seems like everything is hurting Bush. The fact that he is deriving no benefit whatsoever from an economy growing at a 5 percent rate with declining unemployment is surely a landmark in the history of public-opinion research. The polling so clearly out of whack with the stats that one of two things must be true. 1) The economic data -- including a jump in personal income -- are only numbers on a page and aren't having any positive impact on people.

"Or 2) the degree of discontent being measured is actually far less severe than the polling numbers suggest. People say the country 'is on the wrong track' but they don't actually believe it, or act in accordance with that sentiment. If #1 is right, then the GOP will indeed reap the whirlwind this year and in 2008. But if, as seems more likely to me, #2 is right, then we're going to learn something very telling about the nature of political polling in a non-presidential-election year."

Jonah Goldberg compares Bush to Nixon--but it's not what you think:

"The truth is, Nixon was the last of the New Deal-era liberal presidents. He sponsored and signed the legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, the Water Quality Improvement Act and the Endangered Species Act. He oversaw the establishment of Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon created the Philadelphia Plan, the springboard for racial quotas; pushed for Title IX (the women's 'equality' law); and hired Leon Panetta (later Bill Clinton's chief of staff) as his director of the office of civil rights.

"Nixon pushed aggressively for national health insurance that would cover 100 percent of the nation's poor children. He increased federal spending on health and education programs by more than 50 percent and massively boosted spending on the National Endowment for Humanities. He tried to increase welfare with his Family Assistance Plan and Child Development Act.

"Economically, Nixon got along swell with the chamber of commerce crowd, but he was well to the left of almost any leading Democrat today, championing wage and price controls as a legitimate tool of state, and boasting 'Now I am a Keynesian in economics.'

"I could argue that Nixon's amoral foreign policy is today alive and well in many corners of the Left, but that's a distraction from my central point.

"Bush is certainly to the right of Nixon on many issues. But at the philosophical level, he shares the Nixonians' supreme confidence in the power of the state. Bush rejects limited government and many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that position. He favors instead strong government."

You have to admit, Nixon seems more liberal three decades later than he did to Democrats at the time.

The Republicans have come up with a new rhetorical weapon in the gas debate, as Dick Polman observes:

"Any day now, I am expecting to hear that the beleaguered Republican leaders in Washington have set up a website called blamebillclinton.org. Or perhaps he can be retroactively impeached on a new list of charges.

"Bill Frist, the lame duck Senate leader, is the latest to play the blame Bill game, seeking to turn back the clock to the '90s as a way to shift responsibility from today's governing party. But as we shall see in a moment, factual reality can make that game very difficult. On the Today show, Frist said we wouldn't be having gasoline problems today if President Clinton had decided 10 years ago to permit oil drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. Frist told Katie Couric: 'We passed it last month in the United States Senate. It has overwhelming -- maybe you don't support it -- but it has overwhelming support. We passed it in the legislature back in 1996. President Clinton vetoed it. Unbelievable. Passed the House. Pass the Senate. And if President Clinton had not vetoed that, we would have more than a million barrels of oil coming here every single day. That's more oil than we import from Saudi Arabia right now. It's a matter supply and demand. Right now we would have increase supply if it had not been vetoed by President Clinton.'

"(Just a quick digression. You've got to love his little side comment, 'maybe you don't support it.' Translation: Katie's also to blame, Katie must also be ganging up on the Republicans. In the ensuing exchange with Frist, she had to interject, 'I don't have a position.')

"Anyway, Frist's problem was that he omitted a few important facts about price and supply:

"1. Two years ago, President Bush's federal Energy Department concluded that any price drop triggered by a larger domestic oil supply would be 'negligible.'

"2. And the U.S. Geological Service has concluded that, at the peak of production (probably 20 years after the refuge was even opened), the amount of extracted oil would satisfy roughly one to two percent of Americans' daily consumption."

In other words, Polman is doing a medical diagnosis of Frist's argument and pronouncing it brain-dead.

I mentioned yesterday how bloggers were ripping Mike McCurry for his swipe at them in defense of his position, as a spokesman for the likes of AT&T on Internet regulation. Now the entire roster of the Huffington Post seems to be unloading on him:

David Sirota: "Mike McCurry is in one of those tailspins of dishonesty and contradiction that is so wildly out of control, you just have to sit back, grab some popcorn and watch with laughter. Defending his role as a professional corporate PR flack lobbying for telecom companies, he berated folks for having the nerve to mention his financial ties to the Big Business interests he is shilling for."

Matt Stoller: "We cannot lose sight of the fact that Mike McCurry is standing in as the public face for some very bad and very arrogant people trying to monopolize how Americans communicate."

Adam Green: "I still want to like Mike McCurry. But I can't right now because he's doing a truly awful thing. Not only is he serving as the mouthpiece for AT&T and other corporations who self-servingly want to end the free and open Internet as we know it, but he is committing the cardinal sin of any spokesperson: He is outright lying."

I bet McCurry is glad there were no bloggers around when he was White House press secretary.

Blogger Michael Yon, who reports from war zones, shreds a Wall Street Journal piece saying there's a great business climate in Afghanistan:

"The media is not up-playing the danger in Afghanistan but seems to be grossly missing it. Unfortunately, I predict NATO and other forces will lose increasing numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan. The place is bad. Really bad. And it's getting worse."