Poor Leadership On Immigration Bill

Dan Balz discusses the failure of the immigration bill as symptomatic of a much larger problem on Capitol Hill:

The collapse of comprehensive immigration revision in the Senate last night represents a political defeat for President Bush, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the bill's most prominent sponsors. More significantly, it represents a scathing indictment of the political culture of Washington.

The defeat of the legislation can be laid at the doorstep of opponents on the right and left, on congressional leaders who couldn't move their troops and on an increasingly weakened president and his White House team. But together it added up to another example of a polarized political system in which the center could not hold.

The partisan blame game was already at fever pitch as the bill was going down yesterday. But to those far removed from the backrooms of Capitol Hill, what happened will fuel cynicism toward a political system that appears incapable of finding ways to resolve the nation's big challenges.

If Washington cannot produce a solution to the glaring problem of immigration, they will ask, what hope is there for progress on health care, energy independence, or the financial challenges facing Medicare and Social Security? Iraq is another matter entirely.

The problem of course is not merely political but one of vision. Simply put, Congress lacks the imagination to come up with solutions to America's most pressing problems.

The political polarization certainly does not help the legislative process nor moves solutions forward. But at the same time, so-called leaders also fail to realize that their back-room dealing is what doomed this bill, more so than anything included in the bill itself.

Look, Americans are a generally pragmatic people and they realize that no solution is perfect, but the fact that Congress can't generate a solution seems to indicate that something is very wrong. Recent polling seems to indicate that people are fed up with Congress as an institution. If the discontent moves from the general ("I don't like Congress;) to the specific ("I don't think my Congressman is doing a good job"), we could be looking at a massive change in Washington. But unfortunately, we don't know how people feel about their individual conressman. But one thing is for sure, people don't like the Congressional leadership and they are wanting to see some action--and soon.