The Land of the Leaderless

Last Monday, Washington stumbled into the second week of a government shutdown born out of intransigence and irresponsibility in Congress and an unprecedented failure of leadership in the White House.  In many ways, as abhorrent and avoidable as the situation has been, many pundits and politicians assumed it was sadly inevitable given the history and posture of some of today’s most powerful figures in our nation’s capital.   At a time when we have leaders who refuse to negotiate, let alone actually lead, partisanship spawns into paralysis and gridlock—and ultimately, the lights go out. 

Divided government is nothing new to Washington and it has actually functioned, quite well, throughout much of our history.  Recent examples can be seen in President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill during the 1980’s, or President Clinton and Newt Gingrich in the 1990’s.  What the respective duos lacked in political commonality they made up for in a shared commitment to leadership and communication.  They spoke with each other in person or by phone, not from behind a teleprompter.  While conflict was by no means unavoidable in those more congenial times, the approach toward navigating divided government that connected those leaders helped ensure that a solution was never too far out of sight.  That kind of Washington is unrecognizable from the one that exists today, and our nation ails as a result.

Not only has our country been plagued by a government shutdown that has put hundreds of thousands temporarily out of work, but we are also rapidly approaching the mid-October date by which an agreement must be reached to avoid default on America’s debts.  For weeks, the President has been lobbing insults at Republicans in Congress and warning of the dire consequences of inaction, while simultaneously vowing never to negotiate a deal with Republicans to stave off either crisis—thus ensuring the very inaction he claims to lament.  Late last week, a senior White House official made a bad situation worse when he told the Wall Street Journal that “it doesn’t really matter” to the President how long the shutdown lasts, because the Administration believes it’s “winning” politically.   As Speaker Boehner aptly put it the following day, “this is not some damn game.”  

While the absence of leadership from the White House bears a good portion of the responsibility for the mess in Washington, Congress is clearly not without blame.  I have shunned infighting within my own Party over legislative tactics and deplored Harry Reid’s callous refusal to take up the House’s bipartisan funding bills that would immediately re-open critical parts of our government.  Yet perhaps a larger but less frequently discussed failure in Congress has been the demise of the appropriations process.  Rather than funding our government through stopgap continuing resolutions, which impose the threat of a shutdown every few months, Congress is supposed to pass a series of appropriations bills to fund each part of the federal government.  While the House has passed several, the Senate hasn’t passed a single one this year.  Had both chambers done their job, this budget battle and the shutdown would have never happened.

In our federal government, as in all institutions, leadership starts at the top.  Unless and until the President abandons his refusal to work with the rest of our nation’s elected officials and restores the commitment to leadership that guided our nation through troubled times in years past, Washington will fail the country it is charged with