Rational conservative

In my last post (two whole weeks ago -- yikes!), I lampooned George F. Will's suffocating sense of sartorial propriety. Let me hand him a compliment on his syndicated column today. He discusses two current hot topics -- budget "reconciliation" and torture -- to make the point that it has become harder and harder for the public to understand what Congress is doing. He suggests that today's media coverage often misses the real issue when discussing legislative debates. While I disagree with Will's conclusions, I find his analysis clear and reasonably balanced.

"Reconciliation" began as a housekeeping measure to tidy up the budget. By resolution, Congress instructs its committees to report any changes in law that need to be enacted in order to avoid conflict -- to "reconcile" existing law -- with the proposed budget. The Senate Budget Committee then packages those needed changes, together with the annual budget itself, into an omnibus budget bill on which only twenty hours of debate are permitted.

The Democrats have threatened to use reconciliation to enact a health care program if the Republicans have not joined in meaningful negotiations for such a program by October. They have already included such a health care program in their proposed annual budget. Because the budget bill is not subject to filibuster, use of this procedure circumvents a probable Republican attempt to filibuster health care to death.

Will observes that this tactic takes reconciliation far beyond the scope of its original purpose. But he points out that Republicans have few grounds for complaint. Filibusters were at one time a fairly rare procedure, used most famously by Southern Senators to kill civil rights bills.

The most important alteration of the legislative process in recent decades has been the increasingly promiscuous use of filibusters to impose a de facto supermajority requirement for important legislation. And "important" has become a very elastic term.

He feels that a change in the American health care system is such a radical change that it should not be forced on the nation by a narrow majority.

But when Republicans ran the Senate, they, too, occasionally made dubious use of reconciliation.

In fact, Republicans used reconciliation to force through three major tax cuts, and to attempt, unsuccessfully, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

With respect to torture, Will says point blank that it's clear that torture is illegal, and that the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation" involved techniques that most Americans would consider torture. However, he argues -- correctly, in my opinion -- that government lawyers who provided legal opinions justifying the legality of such techniques did not thereby commit criminal acts. Assuming, I would add, that their conclusions were provided in good faith, based on their reading of the law, and that they were not simply dreaming up a requested justification for torture on which the administration could later fall back if things went wrong.

George F. Will's columns are sometimes entertaining, often irritating and wrongheaded, but almost always provocative and logically written, given his core beliefs. I'm glad the Seattle Times continues to carry his column.