the country is hurtling toward the edge of a fiscal cliff, and nobody in Washington seems inclined to pull back. Indeed, no one in Washington seems inclined to do much of anything.
The 112th Congress is likely to be one of the least productive in history. According to the New York Times, Congress passed 173 public laws between January 2011 and August 2012. That’s less than most sessions of Congress pass in a single year. The lack of action is due largely to the inability of Republicans who control the House and Democrats who control the Senate to agree on much of anything.
President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner are no different. After they flirted with a grand budget compromise last year that fell apart, relations between the two political leaders have been rocky. Campaigning for a House candidate in Iowa, Boehner didn’t mince words in his assessment of the president. “The problem is the president’s never done anything, never had a real job, never really run anything. His idea of fixing the economy is having the government spend more money,” he said.
As a magazine with a Massachusetts focus, we don’t normally weigh in on what’s going on down in Washington. But the political paralysis down there is starting to make everyone nervous. Standard & Poor’s stripped the country of its top bond rating last year and things will probably get a lot worse early next year if the Bush tax cuts expire and the so-called sequestration budget cuts kick in. Those cuts, a fiscal gun to the head that both parties agreed to when they couldn’t agree on anything else, could very well send the economy into recession again.
Joe Klein, Time magazine’s celebrated political reporter, says he thinks the dominant issue in this year’s election is who will be able to cut a deal with the other party to avoid fiscal Armageddon. How do you end Washington gridlock? It’s a question in the presidential race, but it’s also an issue looming large in the Brown-Warren Senate and the Tisei-Tierney congressional races.
Scott Brown and Richard Tisei say it begins by electing candidates like them, who promise to work with Democrats to solve the nation’s problems. Yet Elizabeth Warren and US Rep. John Tierney say a vote for their rivals is a vote for a Congress controlled by Republicans who have little interest in meeting in the middle.
No matter who is sent to the White House and Congress, sooner or later they will have to start talking to people on the other side of the political aisle if they want to get anything done. Our cover story in this issue looks at how Massachusetts tackled the political communications gap in an environment not that different from what exists now in Washington.
When Bill Weld became governor in 1991, Beacon Hill was in gridlock. The state’s finances were in shambles and Weld was dead-set against raising taxes. To make matters worse, Weld trashed the Legislature and its leaders during his campaign. “Nothing was getting done,” says Peter Lucas, a columnist for the Lowell Sun who at the time was an aide to House Speaker Charles Flaherty.
Flaherty and Weld met at a Cambridge hotel to call a truce, but they ended up doing much more than that. They arranged for Beacon Hill’s top leaders to meet on a weekly basis to swap stories, discuss priorities, and gain an understanding of one another. Flaherty and Weld are no longer in power, but the meetings they set in motion are still going on today, 21 years later. Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president, participated in those meetings when he was governor.
Democrats and Republicans who participated in those Beacon Hill meetings say they have helped bridge differences and keep the state on track. Every one of them said Washington should do something similar.
“People elect us to office to get things done,” says Thomas Birmingham, a Democrat who participated in the meetings as the head of the Senate Ways and Means Committee and later as Senate president. “If you’re not getting things done, you’re not going to be successful.”