Governing as a national majority
Steny HoyerI will never forget how I felt two weeks ago when I watched Barack Obama celebrating with more than a hundred thousand in Chicago, tens of millions across our nation, and millions more around the world. Now, Congress has to ensure that we live up to the possibility of that day, and the promise of this moment in history.
As Democrats, our first job is to remember where our majority came from. We did not just make full-blown ideological converts of the other half of the country. What we did do _ and this in itself was a huge accomplishment _ was convince majority-making independents that we will govern responsibly and effectively at a time of national crisis. The 33 new members of Congress coming to Washington to swell our side of the aisle are pragmatic, not dogmatic. They were elected on promises of bipartisanship and fiscal discipline.
With their help, Democrats are a true national majority party for the first time in decades _ and if we want to stay that way, we must govern like one. Voters have little patience for majorities that pursue narrow, partisan agendas to the exclusion of common-sense accomplishment. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said, we must govern from the middle, welcoming debate in our own ranks and reaching out to Republicans, as well. That is what we did in the last Congress, when 70 percent of the major pieces of legislation passed with significant bipartisan support.
Of course, Republicans have to be willing to reach back. Instead, they may choose to pursue a strategy of obstruction, especially when so many conservatives are blaming the media, blaming moderates, blaming everyone but themselves for what happened on Nov. 4. In the immediate future, with no governing responsibility and with the moderate Republican virtually extinct, the other party is likely to move even further away from the centrist and independent voters who sustained its majorities.
But that wouldn't just be bad for Republicans _ it would be damaging for our country. We need a loyal opposition to engage constructively on legislation, to challenge Democratic arguments and hold us to account.
In the next Congress, our first focus must be on the health of our economy. Democrats will create jobs with projects to renew our worn-down infrastructure _ the roads, bridges, pipes and tracks that are the foundation of our prosperity. We will also help workers who have lost their jobs keep access to health care, temporarily increase food stamp benefits, and extend unemployment insurance, measures that economists consider some of the most efficient kinds of stimulus.
Yes, recovery legislation will raise the deficit in the short term. Fiscal hawk that I am, I still believe that that is the right course, because a wide economic consensus tells us that deficit spending is the way out of a recession like this one.
But in the long run, fiscal responsibility can and must be at the core of our entire governing philosophy. It does not simply mean paying for what we buy _ it means buying the right things. Smart spending can help us get back to long-term fiscal health; spending wisely today can save us money tomorrow. That is why there is still room for Democrats to make far-reaching proposals, even in this recession.
On energy, for instance, a fiscally responsible strategy would invest in new technologies to bring the price of energy down in the long term _ because there is nothing more shortsighted than acting as if our foreign oil addiction is a problem only when gas costs more than $3 a gallon, or only during an oil shortage, or only over the summer. Our energy policy should also include long-term investment to prevent waste by modernizing our national grid.
On health care, fiscal responsibility will mean investing in information technology to help make our health-care system more efficient. It will mean supporting efforts to ground medical decisions in statistics and empirical data. And it will mean expanding access, because the hugely inefficient way in which America pays for health care is harming businesses' productivity and imposing huge costs on them during a recession. We spend more per capita on health care than any country in the world, without the health quality to show for it.
From that perspective, the most wasteful alternative is doing nothing. Health care is an urgent priority; but doing it right will be far more important than doing it within an arbitrary timeframe.
Governing as a national majority does not mean setting modest, middling goals. It means ambitious goals, pursued thoughtfully, with time taken to win arguments and build the agreement that has so far eluded us. As our next president said in Grant Park: "While the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress."
That is our great challenge in the years to come. As we turn from promise to progress, from speeches to statute, let us do all we can to meet it.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., is majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.
This essay is available to McClatchy-Tribune News Service subscribers. McClatchy-Tribune did not subsidize the writing of this column; the opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of McClatchy-Tribune or its editors.
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(c) 2008, Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services