Who Stole the American Dream? (42 page)

Faced with strong evidence that the skills shortage had been exaggerated by industry, Congress dropped the quota on H-1B visas to sixty-five thousand a year in 2004 but created a special category of twenty thousand more visas for foreign students studying in American universities and transitioning to the U.S. high-tech sector. Despite the change in law, the numbers of foreign workers on either H-1B, B-1, or L-1 visas remained high.

To try to curb the importing of foreign workers, Senator Charles Schumer proposed in August 2010 to more than double the H-1B visa fees to $3,750 a head. The New York Democrat lauded companies such as Oracle, Cisco, and Apple for using the H-1B visa program as intended and then sharply attacked firms that violate the spirit of the law by operating “
a glorified international temp agency for tech workers.” Schumer claimed that he was not trying “to target Indian companies,” but to penalize firms whose business model was built around importing H-1B workers—a description that mostly fit Indian companies and a few American firms that copied the Indian business model.

As Congress passed Schumer’s legislation, the Indian IT industry, treating Schumer’s bill as a salvo at them, protested that the United States was violating international trade practices. Jeya Kumar, CEO of a top Indian IT company, said that raising the visa fee would
“
erode cost arbitrage” and force changes in the operations of “Indian offshore providers.”

“Exactly,” Schumer shot back. “That is what we want.”

But the higher visa fees have had only modest impact, and the fundamental reform pushed by Senators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin to overhaul the H-1B program, clamp down on low pay and other abuses, and improve protections for American workers has been tied up in congressional deadlock. Their bill, strongly opposed by the high-tech industry, has been bottled up for more than three years.

One potentially helpful step, taken by Congress in late 2011, was to eliminate the annual limits on green cards for foreigners who want to work and live permanently in the United States and become tax-paying U.S. citizens, not foreign nationals taking both American wages and taxes abroad. Over time, this step could ease some of high-tech America’s demand for H-1B visas. But much broader reforms are needed to stop foreign “body shops” from undercutting the jobs of American middle-class professionals and to recoup one million jobs already lost to foreigners.

EIGHTEEN MONTHS BEFORE PUBLIC ANGER
boiled over at congressional gridlock on the deficit in August 2011, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana gave public voice to what angers so many Americans today about Congress—it operates like a dysfunctional family.

“
The people’s business is not being done,” Bayh declared in February 2010. Congress suffers from multiple pathologies, he said, and he ticked them off: “
strident partisanship, unyielding ideology, a corrosive system of campaign financing, gerrymandering of House districts, endless filibusters, holds on executive appointees in the Senate, dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.”

It is a list worth rereading. It spells out, item by item, what ails the machinery of our democracy and stands in the way of fixing the nation’s most pressing problems.

The surprise was not in what Bayh said, but who said it and what he was doing about it. Evan Bayh was no stranger to the Washington power game. He grew up in politics. His father, Birch Bayh, held the same Senate seat from Indiana from 1968 to 1980. Evan Bayh entered politics young and rose fast: governor at thirty-four for two terms, then senator for two terms. In 2008, at fifty-four, he was prominent enough to make the short list of potential running mates for Barack Obama.

By 2010, he was a moderate, centrist Democrat with a shot at the presidency if he stayed in the political game. But Evan Bayh was so sickened by the partisan gridlock and inertia on Capitol Hill that he announced he was quitting the Senate—giving up his political career in Washington.

WHAT MADE EVAN BAYH’S INDICTMENT
of political Washington so striking was his description of personally witnessing the Senate decline.

At one time, he recalled, the Senate had functioned well as a legislative body because a bipartisan atmosphere made compromises possible. People found ways around roadblocks. But in recent years, Bayh said, the Senate was so marked by partisan acrimony that it was frequently paralyzed by the refusal to compromise or by a small group of senators who threatened to filibuster and talk a bill to death. “
Just one or two determined senators can stop the Senate from functioning,” Bayh said.

As a boy whose father was a senator—Birch Bayh, a progressive Democrat from Indiana—young Evan Bayh remembered a different political climate in the 1960s and 1970s. He saw his father enjoying friendships with senators of sharply different views—Republicans and conservative southern Democrats. Their social mingling and personal ties, Bayh said, had lubricated the process of government. Personal chemistry often created a way out of political deadlocks.

“Members of Congress from both parties, along with their families, would routinely visit our home for dinner or the holidays,” Bayh recalled. “
This type of social interaction hardly ever happens today and we are the poorer for it. It is much harder to demonize someone when you know his family or have visited his home. Today, members routinely campaign against each other, raise donations against each other and force votes on trivial amendments written solely to provide fodder for the next negative attack ad. It’s difficult to work with members actively plotting your demise.”

By contrast, he recalled an episode in 1968, when his father was seeking reelection. “Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, approached him on the Senate floor, put his arm around my dad’s shoulder, and asked what he could do to help,” Bayh recalled. “This is unimaginable today.”

Today, ideological purists dictate “all or nothing” tactics, Bayh
said. They see “compromise [as] a sign of betrayal.” Gridlock reigns. Little gets done.

For Bayh, the last straw—the action that finally provoked him to quit—was the Senate’s rejection in January 2010 of a proposal for a bipartisan task force to bring the Congress a blueprint for an up or down vote on how to get the deficit under control. A Senate majority actually voted in favor of the commission, 53–46, but the vote failed because, under Senate rules, passage required sixty votes—a filibuster-proof supermajority.

The margin of victory, the seven missing votes, had evaporated at the eleventh hour, Bayh noted, “for short-term political reasons.” The commission had been born as a bipartisan idea, with fourteen Republican and eleven Democratic co-sponsors, Bayh among them. President Obama had initially reacted coolly, but when he belatedly endorsed the bill, seven previously enthusiastic Republicans switched sides—six of the GOP co-sponsors plus Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Previously, McConnell had ardently endorsed the plan. It was, McConnell said, “
the best way to address” the budget crisis. “It deserves support from both sides of the aisle,” McConnell had declared, chiding President Obama for hesitating to back it.

But when the president endorsed the bill three days before the vote, McConnell switched sides. Outsiders were astonished. “
It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the only thing that changed … is the political usefulness of the proposal to McConnell’s partisan goals,” wrote Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of
The Washington Post
. “He was happy to claim fiscal responsibility while beating up Obama for fiscal recklessness. But when Obama endorsed the idea … and when the commission actually, against all odds, had the wisp of a chance of winning the needed 60 Senate votes—McConnell bailed.”

The past few years have seen a siege of partisan conflict. But it would be hard to find a more vivid contrast between the politics of then and now, between the mid-1960s and today, between the bipartisan politics of middle-class power and the partisan ferocity of the New Power Game, than the votes on major health care legislation in 2010 under President Obama and in 1965 on President Johnson’s proposal for Medicare.

The debate in each case was furious. While liberals and moderates urged a broad new government insurance program as a safety net for the needy, conservative opponents ran angry newspaper ads with dire warnings that the new health program would lead to rationed care and a dangerous tide of “socialized medicine.” Business groups charged that patients would lose “the freedom to choose their own doctor” and that Washington bureaucrats would intrude on “the privacy of the examination room.” The hyper-rhetoric was the same in 1965 as in 2010.

In 1965, with Congress considering the first significant expansion of the government’s social safety net since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, it was the strong centrist vote, the pivotal middle ground in Congress, that carried the day.

When the votes were tallied, 65 Republicans joined 248 Democrats to give Medicare a huge 313–115 majority in the House.
In the Senate, 13 Republicans joined 57 Democrats for a 70–24 majority. Yes votes were cast by some of the most prestigious Republican moderates in Congress—Senators Jacob Javits of New York, Clifford Case of New Jersey, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, George Aiken of Vermont, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, and Thomas Kuchel of California.

In 2010, the vote on Obama’s health care plan—to extend health insurance to thirty-two million financially strapped Americans and
to prevent insurance companies from barring coverage for average Americans with preexisting medical conditions or charging them steep fees—was sharply partisan. There was no middle ground. No moderates offered a compromise bill, as Republicans had done in 1965.
GOP opposition was monolithic in 2010. Even the few Republican moderates toed the party line, though the Obama bill was a less ambitious expansion of government-backed health care than the
health reform proposed by Republican Richard Nixon in 1974.

Facing a wall of Republican opposition, the Obama White House had to make concessions to pro-business conservative Democrats and independents to piece together enough votes for passage.
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut extracted a White House promise to kill “the public option,” a government insurance program that was anathema to the private insurance industry. In the end, a watered-down health care bill barely scraped through.

Significantly, the final vote did not bring closure. With today’s sharp ideological schisms, no issue is ever settled. Every issue is forever in dispute. When the new Congress convened in January 2011, House Republicans set out to repeal, defund, and cripple not only the new health program, but other new Obama initiatives, such as the bill establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That did not happen in the era of powerful centrist politics. Laws were enacted and Congress moved on.

Government worked better when bipartisan collaboration was the norm. Republican presidents benefited as well as Democrats—Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and Richard Nixon in the 1970s.