Democrats Will Start 2008 With Low Ratings
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON — Democrats on Capitol Hill will enter the 2008 election year with Congress suffering record-low approval ratings and with a paltry list of accomplishments on which to run.
The party’s frustration was laid bare yesterday at a year-end news conference in which Democratic leaders sought to defend their efforts in Congress while placing the blame for legislative failures squarely on Republican lawmakers and President Bush.
“We’ve made progress,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, insisted to reporters repeatedly, citing the enactment of legislation to raise the minimum wage, overhaul ethics and lobbying rules, and implement the recommendations of the September 11 commission.
Mr. Reid’s often defensive pitch yesterday stood in stark contrast to the triumphant tone on which Democrats ascended to the leadership of Congress a year ago, promising sweeping changes in Iraq war policy and domestic priorities such as health care and education. Despite their passage of bills on ethics and the minimum wage, Democrats have been stymied either by presidential veto or Republican filibusters at nearly every turn, including on efforts to force a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, to expand federally funded stem cell research, and to add millions to the rolls of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The majority leader said Democrats had made a “down payment” on the promises they made to Americans who put the party in control of Congress a year ago, but he acknowledged that they had fallen well short on many fronts.
“But for the president and the Bush Republicans in the Senate, we would have accomplished so much more,” Mr. Reid said.
The House speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, largely echoed Mr. Reid’s sentiment, saying that “of course, much more needs to be done.”
The bills passed yesterday to end the session reflected the party’s struggle through most of the year. The Congress overwhelmingly approved legislation to prevent the alternative minimum tax from hitting more than 20 million Americans. But lawmakers did so only after Democrats stripped billions of dollars in tax increases that were intended to pay for the bill. In doing so, they waived “pay-go” rules the party enacted upon taking over to promote fiscal discipline by requiring that any tax cuts be offset by increases elsewhere.
Democrats tried to put a positive spin on a $550 billion spending package approved yesterday even though they were forced to cut billions in new spending to conform with Mr. Bush’s demands. “We did accept the president’s numbers, but it’s our priorities,” Senator Schumer said.
A majority of House Democrats voted against the bill, however, because it contained $70 billion in war funding without a timetable for troop withdrawal.
With partisan fights dominating the headlines for much of the year, public approval ratings for Congress have tumbled to historic levels, as low as 11% at one point over the summer. But with polls showing that Americans maintaining a preference for Democrats on Capitol Hill, Republicans stopped well short of declaring a victorious year.
“At the end of the day I think this majority and this Congress has been a great disappointment,” the Republican leader in the House, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, said of the Democrats.
While he said the Republicans had succeeded in curbing a Democratic appetite for hefty spending, he also lamented a lack of bipartisan achievement on many issues.
When a reporter suggested to Mr. Boehner that Republicans had actually had a very good year, winning victories on major legislative battles like Iraq funding and health care, the minority leader was resistant, focusing instead on a disappointing lack of progress. Pressed repeatedly, he finally agreed: “You’re correct,” he said with a small grin.
The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, acknowledged that blocking the Democratic agenda was a large part of the Republican strategy. Citing a range of tax increases the Democrats had proposed, he said that there were “issues where we felt the ideas that were being promoted were just simply terrible for the country, and we stopped them all together.”
Mr. Reid said he was “optimistic” that the Congress could accomplish more in 2008, but he acknowledged that the political dynamic on many issues would not change without a larger Democratic majority or a new administration.
Meanwhile Mr. Schumer, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, voiced confidence that Republican obstructionism would play to his party’s advantage in 2008. “The Republicans are filibustering themselves out of their seats,” he said. “That is a strategy that will cause them to lose and lose and lose.”