Posted on Tue, Mar. 17, 2009

e-mail	print	RSS	reprint
AIM	Digg it	del.icio.us	Facebook

Time for triage; set aside self-interests

It's time for serious triage if we're going to manage America's part in righting the world's staggering economy.

In normal times, hospital emergency rooms treat whatever comes in the door. But when disaster strikes and cases streaming in the door are threatening to overwhelm the facility, someone is assigned to sort them: This patient needs immediate help, this one can wait a bit, an aspirin will fix this one.

Our economic emergency room is on the verge of being overwhelmed, and all of us need to recognize, like the triage person, what's most important right now and what can wait. But it isn't happening, because too many of us are not willing to set aside our particularized interests for the general good, even in a time of clear peril.

Congress is particularly inept at triage. With 535 members (give or take the occasional Al Franken), the sense of national priorities and focus needed to meet extreme challenges is always overwhelmed by individualized self-interest. Thus a routine and mandatory interim spending bill is loaded down with both Democratic and Republican pet projects; Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., threatens the administration with filibusters when and if U.S. Supreme Court nominations become necessary; and anti-abortion groups want to browbeat Gov. Kathleen Sebelius over her appointment to the Cabinet.

It's as if the Titanic has just had its hull ripped by the iceberg and a passenger in the first-class dining room is exclaiming, "But, my God, what if the souffle falls?"

Not only Congress needs to focus. The commentariat of cable TV and the Internet doesn't help by obsessing over gnat bites while T. rex closes in. And every one of us needs to let all of the above people know that we expect them to act responsibly and not divert energy from what columnist Thomas Friedman rightly calls our economic congestive heart failure.

That means taking off the agenda for the duration:

• The culture wars, including abortion and gay rights, pro and con.

• Haggling about whether Rush Limbaugh is the voice of the Republican Party.

• Arguing about earmarks, which will always be part of the legislative process and are Congress' most durable example of bipartisanship.

• Worrying about whether President Obama is "trying to do too much." A president gets to decide about that; then people get to decide if he was correct.

• Delaying crucial appointments because somebody failed to withhold Social Security taxes for a household employee 20 years ago.

And anything else that, like those things, cannot be or does not need to be resolved right now.

The urgent and overriding need is to resolve the banking crisis, which Obama has not addressed vigorously enough. This means deciding on firm rules about how additional infusions of federal money can and cannot be used. It may mean nationalizing some banks or setting up a federalized "bad bank" to take over the toxic assets that contributed to the housing market collapse.

Nothing else will permanently improve until the bank crisis is on the way to resolution.

If Republicans decide to continue their automatic opposition to every administration initiative, then Democrats must simply roll over them and let them explain their obstructionism to the voters.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.CommentBody@

@Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@