Governing in fantasy land
POPE Francis arrived in Chile with the right message: He was “pained and ashamed”, he said on Tuesday, about the irreparable damage abusive priests have inflicted. Yet he refused to meet with victims of the country’s most nefarious sexual abuser, and when pressed about his support of a bishop linked to that priest, he dismissed the accusations.
It seems the pope has yet to fully appreciate that the abuse of minors is not simply a matter of a few deviant priests protected by overzealous prelates but of his church’s acceptance of a horrible violation of a most sacred trust.
Acknowledging and regretting the damage is not enough. If the Catholic Church is ever to lift the stain of child sex abuse, the pope must take every opportunity to reject not only clear violations but also the slightest appearance of tolerance for such behaviour.
He missed that opportunity in Chile, shaken by revelations about the sexual crimes of Fernando Karadima, once an influential priest. It took years for the church to act on complaints about him, but a Vatican investigation in 2011 finally found Karadima guilty of sexual abuse and restricted him to a life of isolated penitence.
Among those accused of turning a blind eye to Karadima’s behaviour was a longtime member of Karadima’s entourage, Juan Barros Madrid. Yet Francis made Karadima a bishop in 2015, despite protests from his victims, Barros participated in the pope’s official ceremonies. When reporters raised the subject on Thursday, Francis answered sharply that there was “not one single piece of evidence” against the bishop. “It is all slander,” he declared.
Francis has repeatedly pledged action to end the abuse and the cover-up. But too often he and his church raise doubts that they’re fully committed.
ISERVED as US House majority leader in 2013 during the last government shutdown. A lot has changed in our nation’s politics since then, but when it comes to shutdowns, much remains the same. A shutdown is a pretty pointless exercise in self-inflicting a modest wound. And the media obsession with countdown clocks and shuttered national parks misses the real story: the inability of some elected officials to work within the realities of governing rather than the perceived realities of the political cocoons that members of both parties increasingly occupy.
The 2013 shutdown was the result of some Republicans, first in the Senate and then in the House, insisting that the president sign into law a provision defunding Obamacare, even though the president who would have to sign that was . . . Barack Obama.
In the real world, it was a pretty absurd idea. But in the political cocoons of some on the right – I will not call these conservative – it was a plausible strategy that required only greater resolve on the part of elected Republicans to succeed. After 16 days, I along with 86 other House Republicans voted to reopen the government. Obamacare was just as funded as it was before.
The circumstances leading to the current shutdown are of course different. On its face, it is congressional Democrats who are insisting that something be done, in this case on immigration, in exchange for their support for reopening the government.
But the root causes of today’s shutdown are the same as they were in 2013: a desire to govern in a reality that doesn’t exist.
Washington has a lot of must-do items on its plate: resolving the status of “dream- ers” under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, agreeing to new discretionary spending levels (especially for defence), raising the statutory debt limit and mitigating some of negative impacts of the Affordable Care Act.
Addressing each of these will require bipartisan support, and one can easily see the outlines of a reasonable compromise:
including a path to citizenship, for DACA recipients in exchange for a major investment in border security.
defence spending coupled with a sizeable increase for nondefence, with much of the latter set aside for pressing national priorities, such as the opioids crisis and infrastructure.
limit – there is no political appetite today for the major entitlement reforms our country needs over the long term.
subsidies under the ACA and extending the suspension of ACA taxes in exchange for greater flexibility for states to reform the ACA.
I suspect that when the shutdown concludes and the smoke clears, something along those lines will be the new law of the land. So why go through the shutdown to get there?
Because, not insignificant, elements of both parties think they can govern in a world where they get everything they want without agreeing to some of the priorities of the other side.
For example: on the left, DACA without anything meaningful to secure the border, and on the right, the wall but no path to citizenship. That may sound doable on certain cable “news” shows, but it isn’t if you’re governing in the real world.
The practical impact of this government shutdown will be modest and temporary.
Some number of Americans will be needlessly inconvenienced, and the government will waste a fair amount of money shutting down and reopening. But we will soon recover just as we have after all previous shutdowns.
The political impact will also be temporary. In the midst of a shutdown, pundits like to spend a lot of time speculating about who will be blamed. Most voters quickly forgot the 2013 shutdown. The news cycle is even more rapid and our attention spans even shorter today.
The lasting impact will be determined by the attitude our elected officials take away from this pointless, self-inflicted wound. Is there a renewed commitment to governing within the constraints of the real world and the need for bipartisan agreement? Or do more members of both parties retreat to the safety of political cocoons?
We will begin to see the answer to that question when we see who votes to reopen the government.