The importance of the rules of the game

2008 campaign

One of the thing I finding most admirable in the British mentality is the importance that they assigning to the process rather to the end results. It isn’t so much the victory as the “fair game”. And it is the fair game that allow a society to manage conflicts, rather than the naive attempt to solve them, and remain civil.
One of the biggest faults of the Bush administration is breaking the rules of the game. The attempt to shift power to the executive branch and ignoring the rules when they didn’t lined with the desired policy. The damage to the system is so deep that it take long time to recover.
But this approach, the brake the balance of power and ignore the political process, isn’t unique to the Bush administration not to the Republican party. The fact is that when Hillary Clinton is talking about more efficient government we have enough reasons to believe that the difference between Clinton and Cheney is much smaller than we my suspect.
Clinton’s famous attempt crafting national health care policy is a story of an attempt of enforcing her will and views, ignoring other’s needs and interests and above all ignoring the proper process:

Mindful of this history, the Clintons thought they could prevail by rigidly shielding the process from the established interests—excluding even key Cabinet members. When presidents want a bill, they typically assign it to the relevant Cabinet member or put forward a set of principles and let allies in Congress write the legislation. Both strategies offer the advantage of warding off potential political problems and building a base of support: everyone gets an early sense of the important details and a chance to speak up.
But that includes those interests likely to oppose the legislation, who may seek to influence its outcome. Assessing the historical record of how major reform had been stymied in the past, Bill Clinton doubted that even his own Cabinet could fend off such pressure. And so the president and his counselors devised an end run around Washington’s normal way of doing business. They chose their good friend Ira Magaziner, a business consultant without Washington ties, to manage the task force with Hillary. The Clintons and Magaziner shared a certain hubris, as well as an often articulated disdain for (in what was then the president’s favored phrase of opprobrium) “the traditional Washington views” on health care.
So the Clinton White House made the audacious decision to write the whole thing itself, in a task force shrouded in secrecy, consciously shutting out Congress and the health-care community. They would simply outsmart the Washington establishment. 
[...]
The Clintons considered several legislative options before settling on a clever, but risky, strategy that seemed by then to be their best hope of getting a bill through Congress. An anonymous administration official quoted in a Time column had earlier belittled the petulant chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (“We’ll roll right over him if we have to”), who should have played a critical role. The decision was made to try to attach health care instead to the annual budget reconciliation bill. Theoretically, this offered a number of advantages. The reconciliation bill is the single most important piece of legislation Congress passes each year, because it locks in the spending and legislative changes in the budget—it simply must pass, or the government shuts down. As such, it is accorded special procedural shortcuts: it requires only a simple majority vote in both chambers of Congress, and, tantalizing from the administration’s standpoint, Senate rules permit just twenty hours of debate, so the bill can’t be filibustered. (Ronald Reagan used the reconciliation bill of 1981 to drastically shift spending from domestic programs to defense.)
What this strategy didn’t account for was the considerable ego of Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who was then chairman of the Appropriations Committee, through which the reconciliation bill would pass. Byrd worships the Senate the way some cultures worship their ancestors, believing that the Founders’ ideas live on in its arcane rules and procedures. He has a flair for windy oratory—nothing clears the Senate floor like his annual perorations celebrating Mother’s Day or the first day of spring. The author of a four-volume history of the Senate, he holds strong views about what should, and should not, be permitted. And he has the means to impose them on others.
Byrd felt the Clinton strategy violated the spirit of the budget reconciliation bill by trying to attach something to it that had nothing to do with the budget. In the mid-1980s he had established the “Byrd rule,” which forbade just this sort of tampering with the bill. Health care “was a big piece of legislation, it was important—it ought to have been debated,” he told me recently. “I certainly was abhorrent of the idea of ramming this piece of legislation through by that mechanism.” A succession of eminences led by Jay Rockefeller pleaded with him to relent. The president called him. Byrd wouldn’t budge. The elaborate plan to circumvent the establishment collapsed under the stern gaze of its senior member. “I was the bear trap,” Byrd told me, with a twinkle of defiant pride.

Yes, I disagree with Clinton’s ideology - as I disagree with most of the other candidate. But if it was the question of the size of government, or the universal health care or many other issues I would not be as scared as from the devastating effect of another eight years of an administration that will break the future for the short term achievements - and I share with other the fear that she cannot be trusted.

Related posts

Rogel @ August 14, 2007