Is Gridlock Good?

Fred Thompson, writes a very thought provoking article today regarding the one idea about which all commentators  have been wringing their collective hands. That issue is "gridlock."Read the following article and tell us if you agree or not. We want to hear from you.

Conservative Tom

P.S.  We think he is on the right track.

Fiscal Gridlock

FRED THOMPSONNO COMMENTSSHARE

As you may recall, I recently wrote about the downside of cooperation and bipartisanship in Washington. Compromise, I said, in large part is what has gotten us into the fiscal mess we are in today. This, of course, goes against the grain of much of the “enlightened” mainstream commentators’ thinking. But upon reflection I felt that my analysis was somewhat incomplete. For example, don’t we need bipartisanship if we are ever going to reform entitlements and the tax code? So how does one determine when compromise is a good thing and when it’s not?
To answer this question, a couple of thoughtful columnists have recently come to the rescue. One of them is a conservative and the other is often called a liberal (though I now think that assessment is a little harsh). George Will wrote the following in the Washington Post on May 16:

Bipartisanship, the supposed scarcity of which so distresses the high-minded, actually is disastrously prevalent. Since 2001 it has produced No Child Left Behind, a counter productive federal intrusion in primary and secondary education … the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act; an unfunded prescription drug entitlement; troublemaking by Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac; government directed capitalism from the Export-Import Bank; crony capitalism from energy subsidies; unseemly agriculture and transportation bills; continuous bailouts from and unreformed Postal Service; housing subsidies; subsidies for state and local governments; and many other bipartisan deeds, including many appropriations bills.

It’s as good a summary of the bad results of bipartisanship as I’ve seen, and I’m familiar with them because I voted the wrong way on a couple of them back in the day. (Most of the legislative mistakes I made were when I gave the federal government the benefit of the doubt as to what it could competently do.) The common denominator of all of this legislation is spending and or regulating.
So if this is the downside of bipartisanship, when is it beneficial?  Two days after the Will article David Brooks, on the op-ed page of the New York Times wrote:

Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self restraint. … Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. … Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self doubt and self confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness…it became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.

As Brooks goes on to point out, this is one reason why Europe and the U.S. are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time.
So there we have it. When it comes to the easy and enjoyable, such as spending other people’s money, bipartisanship reigns. It’s when it comes to something that would actually help the country – such as restraining ourselves from running off a fiscal cliff – that gridlock raises its ugly head. Witness Obama’s reaction when Rep. Paul Ryan put a reform plan on the table.
So when your liberal friends bemoan the gridlock and the lack of bipartisanship in Washington, tell them it’s not true. Gridlock happens only when politicians are actually trying to do something responsible – which is the much rarer occasion.
-Fred Thompson