POINT: Don’t Blame ‘Washington’ For Nothing Getting Done In Washington | COUNTERPOINT: Welcome To Washington’s Silly Season

Paul Waldman wrote:

The idea of passing a sorely needed infrastructure bill has been raised and shelved so many times since Donald Trump became president that “Infrastructure Week” has become a punch line about this administration’s fecklessness and ineptitude. This is a tale with an important lesson not only for the remaining 20 months of Trump’s term and the four years of his second term, should he win reelection, but the term of any Democratic president, as well. To put it simply, bipartisanship is not in the cards, and the problem is not “Washington.” That doesn’t mean there can’t be productive governing, but only if we stop fooling ourselves about how politics works right now.

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Business leaders and communities around the country are expressing alarm that the bitter partisan impasse in Washington is paralyzing efforts to revamp the nation’s deteriorating and outdated infrastructure.

As millions of Americans hit the road for the Memorial Day weekend, they traveled across aging bridges, on crumbling roads and through tunnels in dire need of repair — infrastructure that earned a D+ grade in the most recent report from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

At the same time, President Trump, who campaigned in 2016 touting his skills as both a builder and a dealmaker, has been unable to reach a grand bargain with Congress, further dimming hopes that upgrading the nation’s roads, bridges and tunnels will bypass the capital’s infamous gridlock anytime soon.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/27/dont-blame-washington-nothing-getting-done-washington/

Kevin D. Williamson wrote:

Somebody tried to play a dirty trick on Nancy Pelosi, slowing down and editing a video of her to make it appear as though she were drunk and incoherent. That’s pretty low: Nancy Pelosi is, whatever her other flaws as a public figure, generally sober and incoherent.

The speaker, for her part, is not exactly conducting her affairs with high seriousness of late. She argued last week that President Donald Trump’s family should stage an “intervention.” The president had briefly attended and then abruptly ended a meeting with Democratic leaders, arguing — not without some reason — that negotiating about taxes and infrastructure with people who pretend to believe that he is guilty of treason and who are seriously talking about impeaching him for . . . something . . . is not the best use of his time. Why waste time on “Chuck and Nancy,” the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Comprehensively-Useless of American politics, when he could be watching reruns of Fox and Friends?

The president has reached into his vast arsenal of schoolyard-bully nicknames — that’s how you know he’s serious! — and christened the speaker of the House “Crazy Nancy.” The Democratic leader in the Senate is to be “Crying Chuck.”

Well.

Washington no longer does much in the way of day-to-day governance and instead careers from crisis to crisis and convulsion to convulsion, the most recent being Friday’s derailment of an emergency disaster-relief bill. It was an end-of-the-second-act setback, a standard genre convention for legislative tragicomedy.

Because Congress has more or less abandoned regular order and the traditional norms of the legislative process, the emergency disaster-relief bill had been scheduled to pass by “unanimous consent” rather than on a traditional vote — this is a three-day weekend, after all! But the thing about unanimous consent is that it has to be unanimous — “It only takes one person to object to unanimous consent,” CNN reports, for all the complete and thoroughgoing illiterates in its audience — and one Republican, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, didn’t like the idea of tens of billions of dollars being spent without members of Congress being present for a vote. So the consent was not unanimous.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/washington-politics-pelosi-trump/