Guest Columnist
At
the end of the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy taps her feet three times while
saying, “There’s no place like home.” She wakes up back in Kansas in her
own bed. In dreams, mere words may be able to
make something happen. Here in the real world and especially in
politics, words aren’t enough to get things done.
The President’s State of the Union speech is always an
important part of the political
debate. The TV ratings may not be what they were a few decades ago, but
the address is still carried on every broadcast channel, all the cable
news channels and gets front page coverage in all the national
papers.
President
Obama’s party may no longer control Congress, but he still has the
power of the veto pen, executive authority and the ability to set the
agenda through his speeches. Coming into his
seventh year in office, the President faces a new political reality:
Republicans control both chambers of Congress.
During
the speech, the President recalled the Democratic National Convention
speech that first vaulted him to national prominence in 2004. This is
the speech where he said there wasn’t “a liberal
America and a conservative America; there's the United States of
America.”
It’s
one thing to say that once a year in the biggest speech of the year,
and another thing to actually do it on a day-to-day basis. Behind the
high-minded sentiments
of the address, there were concrete policy proposals. Only a small
handful of those proposals have any real hope of finding bipartisan
support.
The
President did call for more authority from Congress to negotiate trade
deals with Pacific nations and Europe. The President also announced an
initiative
to improve research into diseases. This sounded somewhat similar to the
21st Century Cures initiative that House Energy and Commerce members in both parties started last year.
There
really isn’t common ground to be found on many of the biggest proposals
in the speech. For instance, the President wants to reduce the price of
community
college to nothing for students who maintain a C average.
Right
now, the federal government has very little reach into community
colleges, which are controlled principally by states and counties. By
paying for the bulk
of tuition for these schools, they would effectively be nationalized.
The President noted that Tennessee, a state run by Republicans,
currently pays for community college tuition.
That
the President would use Tennessee as an example shows just how
disconnected he is from Republicans. That a state already has the
ability to act on their
own and tailor a program to their own needs is a strong argument
against an expansive new federal program.
One
of the other major proposals was a series of new tax credits paid for
with a series of new tax hikes. The President already raised taxes with
his health
care law and in the fiscal cliff negotiations. I don’t know of a single
Republican elected to federal office who ran on a platform of raising
taxes. In fact, almost every member would be at risk of losing their
primary if they even voiced support for the President’s
plan.
The
President then threatened to veto a wide variety of bills that could be
on their way to his desk. The fact is that almost anything that will
get to the President’s desk this year will have
real bipartisan backing. Senate Republicans will need at least six
Democrats to pass most bills.
I
know how hard bipartisanship is to make happen. When I served on the
Budget Committee, I negotiated with the Clinton administration to pass
balanced budgets four years in a row. As the Chairman
of the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, I’ve negotiated major
bills to govern the Food and Drug Administration and reform the way we
pay doctors working in Medicare.
You
don’t reach a final agreement by starting at a point that is completely
untenable to the other party. You can’t simply tap your toes while
chanting “bipartisanship” and then wake up with
a new law. I’m disappointed that the President’s proposals are so far
to the left that it is virtually impossible to meet in the middle. It
seems to be a warning that cooperation is going to be difficult to
achieve in the final year’s of the Obama presidency.
Rep. Joe Pitts is a Republican who represents Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District.
