The Washington Post

December 21, 2001, Friday, Final Edition

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A44

The Congressional Scorecard

CONGRESS LEFT town for the year yesterday having accomplished a great deal less than the billowing rhetoric of the occasion was meant to suggest. Its main achievement was to squander the budget surplus by passing the president's ill-advised tax cut. It then failed at the end to pass an economic stimulus bill.

Republicans blamed Democrats for ignoring a national need, but the Democrats were right to resist; what the Republicans called a stimulus bill was a second ill-advised tax cut in thin disguise that would have done long-term harm and very little short-term good. The normal operations of Congress, as of the rest of the country, were suspended Sept. 11. The parties then commendably set aside their differences in behalf of the common defense. The appropriation of an emergency $ 40 billion was timely, though not terribly difficult to accomplish; an airline protection bill was sensibly structured. But a more important reinsurance bill foundered on politics as usual and failed to pass. An anti-terrorism bill contained some useful provisions but in the end was an infringement of civil liberties; fearful of being blamed if a second attack occurred, Congress said yes to administration requests for increased investigative and other powers that it ought to have denied.

Congress passed, at the president's request, a potentially useful though hardly revolutionary reauthorization of the basic forms of federal aid to education. The goal is to make schools more accountable. But otherwise the scoreboard is blank. Trade legislation finally passed the House, by a single vote toward sessions's end, but is stalled in the Senate. Campaign finance reform passed the Senate early in the year but is stalled in the House. A petition to force a vote there had 214 of the necessary 218 signatures when the House adjourned, with a 215th promised; thus only three to go. It should be the first order of business next year.

There was not even the hint of a serious effort, by either party, to deal with the long-term financial problems of Social Security and Medicare; the disappearance of the surplus compounds both problems.

No effort was made to reform the farm programs either; to the contrary, members of both parties vied to extend the piggery. The Democrats, having taken control of the Senate with the defection of James Jeffords early in the year, were said to be poised to insist on their own agenda as distinct from the president's. But the Sept. 11 attacks pretty well ended that. Another year has gone by without an increase in the minimum wage. No step was taken to reduce the number of people without health insurance; not even a modest bill to provide the insured with greater recourse against managed care companies could be passed. And now it appears there will be no increase, at least until next year, in support for the unemployed.

The inaction is perhaps to be expected. The government remains divided between two parties of quite different views. A small group of centrists drawn from both periodically claims to hold the balance of power, and might if its members were forceful. But they aren't. A major issue next year will be the return of deficits and what to do about them -- borrow the money, rescind some of the tax cuts yet to take effect or cut spending. That will further sharpen the differences between the two sides in the run-up to the election. It isn't clear that the second year of this Congress will be much more productive than the first.