The Democratic Party leaders have big plans for their agenda after they take control of the House of Representatives in the fall:
Democratic leaders, increasingly confident they will seize control of the House in November, are laying plans for a legislative blitz during their first week in power that would raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in an interview last week that a Democratic House would launch a series of investigations of the Bush administration, beginning with the White House’s first-term energy task force and probably including the use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Pelosi denied Republican allegations that a Democratic House would move quickly to impeach President Bush. But, she said of the planned investigations, “You never know where it leads to.”
How ambitious are their plans? Here’s what they’ve got in mind for the first week of Democratic control:
Their leaders said a Democratic House would quickly vote to raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1997. It would roll back a provision in the Republicans’ Medicare prescription drug benefit that prohibits the Department of Health and Human Services from negotiating prices for drugs offered under the program.
It would vote to fully implement the recommendations of the bipartisan panel convened to shore up homeland security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Democratic leaders said.
And it would reinstate lapsed rules that say any tax cuts or spending increases have to be offset by spending cuts or tax increases to prevent the federal deficit from growing.
While I’d welcome an investigation of the Iraq War (there were, I believe, seven Congressional investigations of the attack on Pearl Harbor that took place during World War II), improved homeland security measures, reforms to Medicare Part D, and reforms to restore fiscal sanity to the federal government , the devil, as they say, is in the details. I don’t look as favorably at an increase in the minimum wage not because of the minimum wage itself but because of the many minimum wage multiple union contracts. An increase in the minimum wage would give a lot of union workers who are making significantly more than the minimum wage a raise at the stroke of a pen and I’m chary of the unintended consequences of such a change. I’m more in favor of an adjustment to the Earned Income Tax Credit as a means of giving a hand to the lowest-paid workers.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball describes a Democratic takeover of the House as “possibleâ€. Of the 435 House seats only roughly 30 are in any serious doubt. 21 of those seats are held by Republicans and Democrats would have to take 15 of those to take over the House. And that would give them only the slimmest of majorities, probably not enough to undertake too ambitious a program.
While I think it’s wise of the Democratic leadership to put forward ideas for some of the things a Democratic-controlled House might do, I also believe it would be prudent to diminish expectations. There’s a narrow line between reassurance and overconfidence and the last thing that Demcrats want to do is convince the Democratic base that it’s all sewed up and that they’re not needed. They’ll need every single vote to achieve their goal.
What concerns me most is the prospect that an obsession with going after Bush and his administration will overwhelm all other objectives under a Democratic House majority. There’s very little likelihood that enough Democrats will be elected in the House to achieve much without any Republican support whatever.
It wasn’t pursuit of the White Whale that brought about Ahab’s downfall. It was the disproportionate importance that it assumed.
