Since I’ve been on a semi-leave for the last ten days or so, I’ve been able to watch and listen to the news a bit more like most people do. From a bit of distance, focused mainly on the headlines and without the time to read too deeply down into the details. From that vantage point, the two legislative agenda items I’ve heard the most about in the last few days are Charlie Rangel’s idea of instituting a draft and Marty Meehan’s and Barney Frank’s idea of starting off in January with hearing on the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.
Now, we could quickly get into an internecine fight over the priorities of the next Congress. For what it’s worth, I think we should ditch the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. And I understand that Rangel’s proposal is in the manner of a Modest Proposal. If more political and opinion elites had close relatives in uniform we’d probably be a lot less eager to sign on to new wars for frivolous or inane reasons.
On the draft issue, I get the concept behind Rangel’s call for a draft. I understand the separate argument for a draft on national service grounds, though I think that’s a bit different from where Rangel is coming from. But this isn’t the way people hear this proposal on first contact. We’ve just had a national election that became a massive repudiation of the Iraq War. If you’re a casual news consumer who went to polls to say, enough! on Iraq, I think a vote on reinstituting the draft has got to come off to you, at best, really out of the blue. At worst, I imagine it registers with a big ‘What the hell are they thinking?’
It would be one thing if a draft would materially change our present options. But it won’t. The US military has been all-volunteer for three decades. Whatever is on paper, it would take a really, really long time for a draft to actually start putting real soldiers on the ground anywhere.
But these are both highly divisive issues, ones tailor made for Republicans hoping to trip up the new Democratic congress right out of the gate.
You start with broadly popular and critically needed changes. That allows you to build up the electorate’s confidence in your governance and gains you political capital to tackle more difficult problems. This isn’t about following a timorous legislative agenda that will offend no one. There is a war going on. Two actually. Our military faces a readiness crisis in the very near future. We are in a soldier-slaughtering drift in Iraq. These are complicated questions requiring bold solutions.
I don’t want to make too big a deal about this. We’re in a bit of a news lull. And the press jumps on stories like this. But that is the point. What’s happening here is that there’s a vacuum at the top. The incoming Speaker needs to starting laying out the Democrats out-of-the-box legislative agenda, explaining what it is, who it will help and what it will produce. Nature abhors a vacuum. And if nature abhors it, journalists frigging slash and kill a vacuum. Remain silent and the field goes to every legislative baron’s bright idea. And the country has too much to deal with to drift.
