Democrats and Republicans alike anticipate something of an
electoral bloodbath in November, and by everybody’s calculation,
Republicans will wind up holding more seats in Congress, the
statehouses, and governors’ offices than they do now. The result
will surely be to slow the Obama juggernaut, and depending on the
outcome, may even reduce the left’s attempt to reshape the country
to a crawl.
But before overly optimistic conservatives begin to think that a
newly constituted Congress will actually repeal the Democrats’
indiscretions and restore constitutional government, let me throw a
little cold water on it all — not on the political results, which
may be real enough — but on what more conservative legislators
might actually be able to accomplish.
Slowing things down can be done. Undoing what has already been
done is much more difficult. Starting back in about the 1960s,
liberals began to build stealth systems into everything they
enacted — stealth systems to make those programs permanent and
almost impossible to disable. The result is what I like to refer to
as the ratchet effect of liberal policies: You can move them
forward, but once you do, they are almost impossible to move back.
It used to be, back in New Deal days, that government just provided
assistance to the poor, the sick, and the disabled. But then
liberals discovered that you could turn the recipients into
constituent groups, you could empower them, make them feel as
though they owned the benefit programs, give them money to lobby
and litigate for the program, and all this wonderful spending would
just go on and on. Obama refers to these constituents as
“stakeholders,” and today they include interest groups working on
the environment, civil rights, labor unions, health care, abortion
rights, legal services for the poor, feminism, homosexual rights,
and hundreds of others.
Entitlements consume 60 percent of the budget, and will consume
more as time goes on. But they are only part of the problem.
Washington is populated by a virtual army of lobbyists, litigators,
activists, and advocates (we could call them “organizers”) working
nonstop to make the government bigger and more intrusive, usually
fed by the taxpayers, closely connected to the bureaucracy and the
congressional staff (or former employees themselves). Hundreds of
millions of dollars are doled out by the Labor Department to labor
union interests, by the Environmental Protection Agency to
environmental groups, by the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) to the “health” lobby — all told, it is estimated
that nearly $1 trillion is spent each year nationwide by
governments on such efforts. And even worse news is that, thanks to
the language in the originating bills, whether Democrats or
Republicans are in charge, the same people will get the money.
Nobody knows how many dollars are included in the recently
enacted health care legislation to perpetuate the health care
legislation, but it is in the billions. Some of it is likely
already being doled out to “organizers” to convince the next
Congress that it was money well spent. As George Will pointed out
recently, the bill includes the following:
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services, in awarding grants
and contracts under this section…shall give preferences to
entities that have a demonstrated record of training individuals
who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged
backgrounds.”
We all know what that means. And there’s a whole lot more where
that came from, as our Philip Klein demonstrates in his report this
month on the unprecedented powers ObamaCare has bestowed on HHS
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
In 1994, after Republicans took back the House and Senate with
much fanfare and announced that the world would change, within a
term or two all was back to normal, and in fact hardly anything did
change. Ronald Reagan was somewhat more successful, but few things
were undone — just overridden. And Reagan was one of the few
politicians willing to step on toes and do what he knew had to be
done.
It is fine to talk about limited government, and we should
continue to do so. But I submit that only an economic disaster of
tsunami proportions — which may, in fact, be on the way — will
force politicians to address the system.
