The Tabloid Congress

Samuel Eckman

A year after coming to power, the Democratic Congress must be getting pretty bored. Indeed, it is impressive that they have made it this long. After their triumphal procession down the Beltway and into D.C. last January, followed by a productive 100 hours fixing all the problems of government, they haven’t had much to do since. The troops are home, executive overreach of its constitutional powers was halted, and global warming has been forestalled by replacing all cars with unicorns, which are, needless to say, much more fuel efficient and produce less harmful — albeit slightly more unpleasant — emissions.

But enough facetiousness. The failure of the Democrats to pass much of anything over the past year has been a great political victory for Republicans, while the general gridlock in Congress and government as a whole has borne many fruits for lovers of liberty. Fully aware of their own impotence on issues that are both popular and important, rather than taking a nice, long vacation, the Congress has decided instead to turn to issues that are simply popular.

Henry Waxman, the Democratic Congressman from California’s 30th District and Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is the head paparazzo of this tabloid Congress. After the Mitchell Report became public last December — which despite being headed by a former senator, was an independent investigation commissioned by baseball commissioner Bud Selig — Waxman quickly jumped on the outrage bandwagon, announcing a Congressional hearing on the report the same day the 409-page document was released.

At the hearing, he took the “moral” high ground: “…we have no interest in making baseball a central part of this committee’s agenda. But if the Mitchell Report is to be the last word on baseball’s past, we believe we have a responsibility to investigate a serious claim of inaccuracy.” Actually, Mr. Waxman, you don’t. That is laid out pretty clearly in the committee’s Rules and Jurisdiction, but I suppose those are just formalities anyway. Meanwhile, the lawyer for baseball superstar pitcher and alleged steroid user Roger Clemens, Rusty Hardin, eloquently described the entire ordeal somewhat differently: “[Clemens] has not been charged with anything, he will not be charged with anything and yet he is being tried in the court of public opinion with no recourse. That is totally wrong.”

After striking out with Clemens, Waxman proceeded to Democrats’ favorite scapegoat: businessmen. With a recession (maybe) looming, spurred largely by the subprime mortgage crisis, the leaders of some of the world’s largest financial firms were rounded up and interrogated as to how they could ever receive compensation in the midst of the mortgage fallout. The tabloid Congress’s questions may have been better addressed to the shareholders, or at the very least the corporations’ respective boards; but the paparazzi peddle in sensationalism, not substance. The greatest irony, however, appeared subtly in what Waxman proposed as the main question of the day: “When companies fail to perform, should they give millions of dollars to their senior executives?”

Many Americans have the same question, but with regard to their government rather than some companies that have nothing to do with them. As a member of the Democratic Party, which came into power to end the Iraq war, rein in government spending, and clean up the halls of power, it’s amazing that Mr. Waxman would, first, wonder how this might happen, and second, want to bring up the subject of accountability at all. Rather than sticking his nose in other people’s affairs, perhaps Mr. Waxman can lead by example and refuse his pay until he and his underachieving associates start performing a bit better. But unfortunately, Waxman’s idealism ends when it comes to his own paycheck, as two bills blocking the automatic annual pay raise congressmen give themselves were never allowed out of the very same committee that Waxman chairs and that oversaw this corporate inquisition.

Of course, in this light, there are worse things Congress could be doing than playing babysitter for grown men. Regrettable though it may be to see our elected legislators shaking down businessmen and athletes like LAPD officers that just stumbled upon a group of African-American teenagers, they’ve found they have been doing so to their own detriment. And at least their grandstanding has distracted from potentially disastrous work such as renewing the “Protect America Act,” expanding S-CHIP, or sacrificing the economy at the altar of so-called environmentalism. Whether inaction on these issues balances the costs of failure to bring the budget under control or seek some semblance of a plan in Iraq is a question of priorities and calculations. In the meantime, we can add one more data point to the historical record showing that very often, political cries for change and hope in politics are likely to collapse into more of the same as the institutions and incentives that shape the behavior of politicians mold the new guard into replicas of the old.

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