Divided We Stand

What to expect from the long-awaited, much-anticipated return of gridlock.

From the February 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

At the same time, scant attention will be paid to offering students real escapes from low-performing schools. With or without an NCLB reauthorization, billions of federal dollars will be spent on schools where kids continue to languish in failing conditions.

Lisa Snell is director of education and child welfare at the Reason Foundation.

Aaron Houston

Every American concerned about excessive government intrusion into our lives should greet with optimism the return to a system of partisan checks and balances.

The last four years have witnessed an unprecedented level of government interference in individual lives. While National Security Agency wiretapping and detainee rights have attracted much attention, examples of abuse of power in other arenas abound, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration’s raids on medical marijuana patients.

You shouldn’t expect the Democrats to include protections for medical marijuana patients in the leadership’s widely touted “First 100 Hours” plan. But this and other issues, such as reforming the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity, will at least have a fair hearing this session, which is more than was ever offered when Republicans controlled Congress. We can also expect to see soul searching within the conservative movement and within the GOP. Many Republican members of Congress have long disagreed with the administration on spending, and there is hardly a bigger boondoggle than the nation’s failed war on marijuana users.

Intellectually honest conservatives in Congress are now free to pursue cuts in programs they have long despised, such as the government’s anti-drug media campaign, which has run ridiculous ads featuring stoned teenagers driving over a little girl on a bicycle, showing one stoned teenager date-raping another, and claiming that people who buy marijuana are funding terrorism. (The media campaign was targeted for elimination by the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives in September 2005.)

We cannot expect the country to change overnight, and certainly not in the first 100 hours of a Democratic Congress. But the Bush administration will no longer have carte blanche to run roughshod over our individual liberties. Americans of all political stripes ought to rest a little easier.

Aaron Houston is director of government relations at the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C.

Adrian Moore

In 2000 President Bush had bold plans for privatization and shrinking the federal work force. His Management Agenda included making it a matter of course to use “competitive sourcing” to shift work to the private sector whenever it makes sense to do so.

But the GOP Congress never supported Bush’s privatization efforts. Already drunk on power and with a war on terror supplying endless kegs of that heady brew, few Republicans saw any reason for competition and privatization. They resisted legislative changes that would advance privatization, refused to appropriate funds for the privatization process, and took a sudden keen interest in protecting valiant federal workers from the depredations of competition.

In spite of congressional resistance, Bush’s political appointees, especially in the transportation, interior, and defense departments, marched ahead with competitive sourcing, saving more than $3 billion and outsourcing about 41,000 federal jobs, almost enough to offset the fiasco of federalizing the once-private airport security workers. Unlike the Clinton-era outsourcing of federal workers, the Bush administration’s efforts were felt across the federal government, not just in the military.

In the next two years, privatization by federal agencies probably will taper off. The Democrats now in power are suspicious of the private sector and like to glorify the public servants in government employ. They will probably resist Bush’s competitive sourcing more actively than the Republicans did. More important, the political appointees who carried the ball are starting to look for new jobs and will be less interested in pushing privatization on an unwilling bureaucracy.

I do expect, though, that the Republicans in Congress, cut off from the taps of power, will rediscover their small-government sensibilities and find some new interest in getting the federal government out of businesses it never should have got into, such as utilities, Amtrak, and Social Security. Better late than never.

Adrian Moore is vice president of research at the Reason Foundation.

Jonathan Rauch