Why Yes! Yes We Can!
There is only one catch...We could do it in 1986, and maybe in 1998, but not in 2014. That's the thesis of John Harwood's article in the New York Times: "When a 2nd-Term President and a Divided Congress Made Magic".
First Harwood explains why it worked in 1986:
"In 1986, President Ronald Reagan sat in the White House. Fellow Republicans controlled the Senate but not the House — a mirror image of the alignment President Obama governs with today. That September, strong bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress passed a drastic revision of the tax code that eliminated valuable tax breaks while lowering the top rate to 28 percent from 50 percent. The following month, less than three weeks before Election Day, bipartisan majorities transformed the federal immigration code as well, with amnesty for some already in the United States, penalties for businesses hiring illegal immigrants, and more money for border enforcement... All of them accepted two stipulations that, by narrowing the range of disputes, made getting to yes easier. They agreed that the new tax code would raise the same amount of money as the old one (making it “revenue neutral”), and that it would get that money from the same groups of earners (making it “distributionally neutral” as well)."Then Harwood explains why it won't work in 2014:
"Mr. Obama and his party want more tax revenue and more progress against income inequality, which has widened since Mr. Reagan’s time. Republicans have more difficulty selling reductions from a top rate of 39.6 percent than from 50 percent as in 1986... What controlled the action was what the congressional scholar Norman Ornstein called “the problem-solving caucus” — driven more by issues than partisan imperatives. Today, Mr. Ornstein said, that caucus “has dwindled dramatically.” That’s in part because the number of truly competitive districts — where voters selected a member of Congress from one party and a presidential candidate from another — has dwindled from 45 percent of all House seats in 1986 to only 6 percent, or 26 seats, today. The crucial ingredients for bipartisan action, former Senator Bradley said, are “independence of thought and capacity to listen.”A good article, but I think Harwood missed a couple of points. President Reagan prioritized doing a deal ahead of ideological or partisan concerns. Don't get me wrong. Reagan was a partisan and an ideologue. But he made doing deals a priority and was willing to suffer the slings and arrows from his own party to get a deal done. As Harwood points out in the article "Republicans like Phil Gramm of Texas... called granting permanent residency to some immigrants who had crossed the border illegally “outrageous.” Nevertheless, Reagan got the immigration bill passed.
