E agora José?

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/16/crisis-addled-washingtonlurchestowardthenextone0.html

Crisis-addled Washington careens toward the next debacle

by Naureen Khan

  

@naureenindc

  

October 16, 2013  11:48AM ET  Updated 10:24PM ET

Deep, systemic factors drive dysfunction in Washington while fundamental differences separate the parties

Topics:

 

Congress

 

Debt Ceiling

 

Shutdown

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives depart after a late-night vote on fiscal legislation to end the government shutdown, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, late Wednesday.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, conceded defeat Wednesday, as the House of Representatives fell in line with the Senate in voting for a bill to avert a national debt default and end the 16-day government shutdown largely on terms laid down by President Barack Obama. The 11th hour deal momentarily allays worries about global economic calamity, though another unhappy reality lies ahead: The next crisis is, as always, only a few months away.

The bill signed by the president early Thursday morning does little to resolve the issues at hand for long. The legislation only funds the government through Jan. 15, a mere three months away, and raises the nation’s borrowing authority until February, at which point another debt ceiling battle looms. This time, House and Senate negotiators are also charged with with drawing up a detailed budget plan for the next decade by Dec. 13.

Such appears to be the new normal for governance in the United States — one self-imposed crisis following on the heels of another, with enormous consequences for the American people.

“We have raised real questions here and abroad about whether our system of government can work,” said Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana and executive director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. “We are paralyzed by these unending conflicts and crises, so the government is not able to handle even routine matters.”

Theories range on how it has come to be this way.

Some analysts say the dysfunctional government is just a symptom of the gaping chasm that exists between the two major parties on questions as large as the appropriate role and scope of government.

“It keeps on repeating because the underlying disagreements between the two parties haven’t been resolved, and that’s because the disagreements are quite fundamental,” said William Galston, a former policy adviser to the Clinton administration and fellow of governance studies at the nonpartisan think tank the Brookings Institution. “The policies that one party believes will spur economic growth are precisely the policies that the other party believes will stunt growth.”

GRAPHIC: The politicization of the debt ceiling, in one chart

 

The apocalyptic deadlines in quick succession — for raising the debt ceiling, for funding government, for avoiding deep across-the-board cuts — are designed to break the impasse and soften the stances of Democrats and Republicans alike. But that tactic has proved ineffectual.

“They’re trying to light a fire for each chamber to have a reason to come to the table, but it’s not working,” said Joshua Huder, senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “What we're seeing here is bicameral dysfunction.”

Others point to the rise of lawmakers within the GOP whose philosophy tends toward no-government rather than limited government — a minority for whom it is not beyond the pale to affix policy demands onto decisions to greenlight typically mundane functions of government. Making matters worse, these lawmakers are outside the control of mainstream party leaders.

“There are two political disputes going on simultaneously,” said Galston. “One is between Democrats and Republicans. The other is within the Republican Party. If we had two mass armies but a single front, that’s bad enough, but what we have is two armies and an insurrection in one.”

The irony is that such brinkmanship prevents either party from enacting broader policy fixes, said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution who has long written about the rightward drift of the Republican Party.

“The problem with six week ‘fixes’ for government funding or debt ceiling increases is that they are not real solutions. They are the problem,” Mann and John Hudak, a fellow of governance studies, wrote last week. “They do not end political and economic hostage-taking. They simply provide a regular schedule of crises, and additional outlets for destructive demands from House Republicans.”

Still others note the systemic factors that are driving the increasing partisanship of lawmakers, from gerrymandering that creates safe congressional districts to the influx of big money in political campaigns that can fell an incumbent for not strictly hewing to the party line.

“We use political primaries to elect hard-liners who may not really be representative of their entire constituencies — people who are hard left or hard right who just don’t want compromise,” said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma. “They’re drawing an ideological line in the sand that’s created a different kind of legislator than we have had in the past.”

In addition, political leaders, like House Speaker John Boehner, see themselves as heads of their parties instead of heads of their respective legislative bodies, Edwards said.

What is the way out? Elected officials could come up with a political solution, with concessions from both, said Galston. Americans could get so sick of the brinkmanship that they deliver the Senate to the Republicans or the House to the Democrats in the next election, thereby unifying government.

A third option, Hamilton said, is if voters revolt and reinstitute the center in American politics, despite the fact that all the forces in politics seemingly tend toward extremism and partisanship.

“Voters cannot dodge responsibility here. They have brought us the people who have brought us gridlock,” he said. “My hope is the political center will emerge again, but it’s not a guarantee.”

Política e jornalismo no banco dos réus no Shutdown ... / america.aljazeera.com/ "We need a more fearless media"

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/1/reporting-governmentshutdowndemocracy.html

Shutdown coverage fails Americans

by Dan Froomkin

  

@froomkin

  

October 1, 2013  3:45PM ET

Commentary: We need journalists to hold politicians accountable for extremist actions, not to enable them

Topics:

 

U.S.

 

Shutdown

 

Media

A man reads morning newspapers from around the U.S. at the Newseum in Washington, Oct. 1, 2013. 

Gary Cameron/Reuters

U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.

When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)

And holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations. 

But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.

What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.

In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

---

Journalists have been suckered into embracing 'balance' and 'neutrality' at all costs.

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But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices, who is risking serious damage to the nation, whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.  

Instead journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.

One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of plague-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. Theydescribe the modern Republican Party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."

But as Mann explained in an interview last year, "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."

Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.

Media critics — and members of the public — have long decried this kind of he-said-she-said reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "view from nowhere."

Blaming everyone — Congress, both sides, Washington — is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public — or their editors — will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.

But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.

So, no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.

We need a more fearless media.