Excerpt on FEMA shutdown
JIM LEHRER (Editor, Newshour): All right, let's go to the two votes in Congress, yesterday in the House and this morning in the Senate, about -- well, the bottom line is, are we going to have another "shut down the government" crisis?
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times columnist: Yes, well, I look at history, and I assume that we will just do just enough to stay stagnant and miserable. We never seem to solve our problems, but we never quite walk off the precipice. So I'm going to assume that's going to happen again.
You know, substantively, I disagree with both parties. I don't think we should offset our disaster spending with cuts elsewhere. I don't particularly think we should do corporate welfare for electric cars either. So I think they're both wrong.
But the main takeaway, I think, is the whole world is now in a very precarious situation. Europe is sliding off the edge of a cliff, banks in Europe really teetering, our economy really looking like it may go through a double-dip. And they're fighting over this stuff.
JIM LEHRER: Yes.
DAVID BROOKS: It's just unnerving.
JIM LEHRER: Mark, it raises the question. You think, what is it about -- that's going on in this country that the members of Congress don't understand and don't understand the polls that show them, what, 82 percent unfavorable? And they're still playing the same games, like nothing has happened.
Why? What is it they don't get? And it's both Republicans and Democrats in this case.
MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: Yes. Well, I think they came back chastened and severely defensive after the August recess, because after the showdown and the debt ceiling being raised, both sides were hurt, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House was hurt. The Congress was hurt institutionally, politically, across the board.
This is interesting. I mean, this really is -- we have voted literally hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is -- you're talking about $7 trillion to rebuild, in fact, the storm-ravaged United States.
And I think -- I think the Democrats, quite honestly, part of this is the chemistry of -- they have been rolled, they feel, on every showdown, I mean, starting last December, in April and in August, and there was sort of a -- I can't say manhood, because that's no longer an appropriate term, but there was a sense of, we have to earn and stand up and we're not going to take this any longer.
JIM LEHRER: Show how tough we are, yes.
MARK SHIELDS: And I think there will be a showdown. I agree with David. There will not be a shutdown.
JIM LEHRER: But there will be a show -- so, but what is the showdown about now? I mean, is it still about little things? They're not having a showdown about anything large, are they?
DAVID BROOKS: Oh, it's Pavlov dog time. It's: We can do things. We're fighting for you guys, for our base, those guys saying, we're fighting for our base.
And right now, both bases are feeling pretty good, actually. Some of us are left out. But Obama came out, tax increases for the rich. Liberals are feeling pretty good. The Republicans saying, we're not doing business as usual, we're going to shut things down, conservatives feeling pretty good.
Whether we're actually governing, that's another question. But I do think it's a combination of that. And the minusculeness of what they're trying to do is just a function of being stuck in the little pressure zone in Washington.
JIM LEHRER: And that's going to continue?
MARK SHIELDS: Yes, I mean, I think that FEMA is going to run out of money. I think it's a legitimate place to make a stand.
But I do think that there is an awareness that this doesn't look good in the country and, at some point, that it could lead in fact to a -- just a surge on the part of voters against incumbents in both parties.
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