Commentary—

Congress: Not Up To Big Decisions

By Jack Shanahan

Watching President George W. Bush deliver his final State of the Union address, I was impressed. Not with the speech, mind you — Bush could have phoned it in without anyone noticing — but with the fact that a President with a meager 31 percent approval rating was standing before a Congress rated even lower at 18 percent. This, according to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

Bush’s failures at home and abroad are enough to explain the widespread distaste with the man. But the lack of confidence in Congress is especially troubling. While the public may rally behind a new President next year, Congress as an institution will remain largely unchanged, regardless of which party is in control.

With the monumental array of national security challenges facing the nation, we will need two functioning branches of government to carry out strict oversight and fundamental reform of our government.

First, oversight is vital to an effective foreign policy. We are still living with the consequences of congressional failure to ask the President, the military, and the intelligence agencies hard questions before the Iraq war. But reforming our entire approach to national security will be necessary to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. America is fighting a War on Terror with a Cold War mentality, relying on overblown military budgets and expensive high-tech weapons to defeat transnational threats.

Compounding this problem is a dysfunctional budget process in Congress that rewards pork barrel spending over sound strategy.

Big weapons programs like the F-22 Raptor fighter plane and the V-22 Osprey persist in the Pentagon budget but do more to enrich defense contractors in key congressional districts than they do to address our current military threats. The result is a defense budget that has soared above $650 billion a year without making us safer. Readjusting our current defense posture will require us to reconsider America’s long-term strategic challenges beyond merely throwing more money at the Pentagon.

However, Congress has become increasingly incapable of thinking past the next election cycle. Long-term challenges — not just in defense but ranging from health care, to Social Security, to repairing our roads and bridges — are being outsourced to Blue Ribbon Commissions of retired officials instead of being tackled by the people elected to solve them.

A January 17 article in The Politico, a Washington, D.C.-based political journal, quoted Lee Hamilton, the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, musing that if Congress were in charge of writing the Bill of Rights, it would probably form a commission.

Indeed, the decision over which military bases to close after the Cold War already rests with the nonpartisan Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission, created by Congress.

The BRAC holds hearings and conducts rigorous analysis in same way the congressional committees are supposed to function. Politicians can organize rallies and testify on behalf of their local bases, but often to no avail, in order to prove to their constituents that they are “fighting” to save the base. In other words, the BRAC process has allowed for a certain amount of political theater.

In the end, however, the BRAC has succeeded in making hard choices about military spending precisely because it has circumvented congressional politics.

Whether or not the BRAC is a model that should be applied to other parts of the defense budget is an open question. But there is no doubt that the next president will face a defense establishment propped up by years of deferred decisions, entrenched interests, and pork spending.

He or she will need a Congress that functions. And as it stands, Congress is not up to the job.

The good news — for Congress, at least — is that its public approval rating can’t drop much more.

(Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan (ret) is the former commander of the US Second Fleet. )