JONATHAN COHN OCTOBER 14, 2011
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Another day, another mild-mannered journalist is having a tizzy. As well he should.
The journalist is James Fallows of the Atlantic. Look up the word "fair" in the dictionary and you'll find his picture there. The author of countless, award-winning books and articles, he's long had a particular interest in the media -- and its tendency to fall into lazy reporting that misrepresents political reality.
Lately that has drawn his attention to reporting about Congress and, in particular, the U.S. Senate. And this week he can barely contain himself over coverage of the vote on President Obama's job bill.
A majority of senators voted to end debate on the proposal, so that it could come to a vote, and it's likely a majority (or at least 50, with Vice President breaking the tie) would vote to pass the bill with a little more tweaking and/or lobbying. But nobody is tweaking and nobody is lobbying because the entire Republican caucus, joined by two Democrats, have filibustered it. In other words, they are blocking the bill from coming to a vote.
As you can see above in the chart from Ezra Klein, which Fallows cites, use of the filibuster has become standard operating procedure in this Congress, so that it now takes 60 votes to conduct even routine business. It is not at all what the country's founders intended when they set up the constitutions' system of checks and balances -- and it's the single biggest reason Obama and the Democrats haven't gotten more done in the last three years.
But you'd never know it from the media. As an example, Fallows highlights the headline from Thursday's Washington Post, "Senate Has Become a Chamber of Failure," and then this passage (words bolded by Fallows):
The Senate's top two leaders [Reid and McConnell] have spent the past nine months trying to trick, trap, embarrass and out-maneuver each other. Each is hoping to force the other into a mistake that will burden him and his party with a greater share of the public blame.
On Tuesday, as usual, it was hard to tell whether anyone was winning.
To which Fallows responds:
No, it is not hard to tell. Since Scott Brown's victory over Martha Coakley and the end of the Democrats' 60-vote majority, Mitch McConnell has flat-out won, and (in my view) the prospects of doing even routine public business have lost, by making the requirement for 60 votes for anything seem normal rather than exceptional. And by eventually leading our major media to present this situation as an "everyone's to blame" unfortunate and inexplicable snafu, rather than an intended exercise of political power by one side.
6 comments
Headline: Brutal mugging cripples local resident; victim may have totally deserved it. That's modern evenhanded reporting for you, I suppose.
- janus
October 14, 2011 at 12:02pm
Republicans like to point to a candidate's business experience as a skillset for being president. Why would such skills matter? And we have an articulate president, which I would have thought would matter, but that doesn't matter. When McConnell came out of the last budget debate and said he wouldn't talk to Harry Reid -- he would only talk to the President --I wish President Obama would have said: "Don't come crying to me, Mr. McConnell. You get back in there and do your job and do the work that institution has to do."
- Nusholtz
October 14, 2011 at 12:09pm
This is like a dysfunctional marriage, where one party (the Democrats) offer compromise after compromise, while the other party (the Republicans) stone-wall, do passive-aggressive actions like SAYING "I want to compromise" while DOING something completely different. And the poor marriage counselor keeps saying to both parties "Look, just work together". Which helps not at all, because the passive-aggressive CAUSE is not being identified or defused in any way. Which is what has to happen here. Otherwise, in 2012 the Republicans are going to ride this "The Congress Is Dysfunctional" meme directly into office, getting rewarded for their own bad behavior. And America loses, as Republican policies maintain the Recession.
- AllanL5
October 14, 2011 at 1:26pm
I'm with Fallows on this - mad as hell - but not at just the media. I'm equally pissed at Reid for not simply forcing an end to cloture, and making the Senate as democratic as an organization in which some members represent 30 million or more voters, and others less than a million, can aspire to be. If he doesn't have the 50 votes in the Democratic caucus to do that, he should force the issue anyway to demonstrate that at least someone in the damned Senate "gets it." This country is becoming a political joke, and Senate rules are an important contributor to the dysfunction that is make us a joke.
- IowaBeauty
October 14, 2011 at 1:55pm
Fallows, to my knowledge, has never said it, but I would suspect that Fallows' reaction, not just to the media but to the Republicans during this economic crisis, is very much influenced by all the time he spent in China, where it's common-place for black to be called white, up to be called down. We seem to have crossed the Rubicon, where words mean what I say they mean, where truth is a matter of opinion. [An aside, it's not a coincidence that Strunk and White have recently come under attack.]
- rayward
October 14, 2011 at 2:19pm
Let's hope not, i.e., Republicans pinning the tail on Obama, thereby regaining the White House as well as both houses of Congress. The latter is a dubious outcome but not by a lot. We could have a series of alternating one-term Presidents at best. The worst-case scenario, however, could resemble a U.S. variant of the Brezhnev years of the Soviet Union: ten, twenty, even thirty years or longer of stagflation; or worse, an Era of Stagnation with deepening resignation. It might be Ahmadinejad's revenge—entropy on a mass scale. That could further enable Japan, Korea, eventually China, to take the leading role economically, therefore politically, away from the U.S.; the fate of which, in a century's time, might become an eclipse of the American Promise of Progress, the disappearance of the American Dream. I do love, poetically and imagine-arably, to play the role of Prophet of Doom; hence a grain of salt, or a drum of acid, should be taken, or contemplated, respectively. It's Friday and I'm pooped from a week of various and sundry insults and horrors. So I'll give it a rest, and see y'all on Monday.
- Tgossard
October 14, 2011 at 2:31pm