Tim Rogers: Left in the lurch

Good morning.

Let me make sure I have my facts straight before I start whacking away at our shining stars in Congress.

Stop me if I get something wrong. I would not want to besmirch the good name of our political leaders.

Early last week, just after giving President Obama the ability to run up the country’s credit card even more without really getting serious about curbing our spending, our 535 congressional leaders voted to adjourn for a month and quickly got the heck out of Dodge.

That they did so while leaving 74,000 previously employed people without a paycheck did not seem to faze any of them.

Too bad, their actions screamed as they jetted out of sight, we have money to go on vacation and a secure financial future to fall back on. Surely, they must have thought, the American people will understand that it is worth devastating the savings of 74,000 Americans because we are unable to come to some understanding on a bill that would allow the Federal Aviation Administration to continue to operate and allow these people to continue to work and help support their families.

Thankfully, the American people didn’t understand.

And apparently, they let their House members and, specifically, their senators know it.

Most of us have no idea about how exactly the FAA gets its money from Congress, what projects that money supports and how much money goes to each airport in the country. Unless we work for the FAA, oversee its funding or work for the airline industry, the fact is we shouldn’t have to know much about it.

What we do have some idea about, however, is fairness.

And the idea of rich men and women going on break until Sept. 7 while allowing those below them to suffer because of the rich people’s inability to do their job struck nearly all of us as crude and unacceptable.

We don’t care if it is 100 degrees in the shade in Washington, D.C. It is hot in the rest of the country, too. They needed to stay until they had resolved this problem and they didn’t.

Or at least that is how it seemed the story would end.

Thankfully, some sanity returned to these congressional leaders once they reached their destinations and they realized that they had made a bad mistake.

While the House had already approved a measure that would allow the FAA to continue to operate, the Senate had reached an impasse because of a disagreement over two items in the measure that dealt with subsidies for some rural airports and rules that would govern unionization votes for airline employees.

But while the Senate was the chamber holding up the deal, in Washington it takes two to tango and neither the House or Senate should leave without both bodies having wrapped up their work. That is the price for being a significant public figure and a well-compensated leader of our nation. If you have to work weekends and tell your spouse that you can’t go on summer vacation because your work isn’t done, that is what you signed up for.

On Thursday came word of a deal that would allow the Senate to approve the same measure passed by the House and allow those people to go back to work.

Cynically, it allowed the Senate to go along with cutting the rural airport subsidies because the FAA apparently has the power to give that money back even if Congress has voted to remove it. How that works I have no idea but I think it can be found in the congressional mantra that seems to go “be accountable for nothing and to no one.”

So on Friday we were treated to the spectacle of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sitting alone in the Senate chamber and passing this legislation by what is called a “pro forma” session.

While all of the other senators were still out and about, Reid called for a unanimous consent of the measure, which the others agreed to, and just like that 74,000 Americans went back to work.

Ultimately, maybe these rural subsidies do need to be cut. Maybe some of these construction projects aren’t needed.

But that wasn’t what this was about.

This was about leadership and no one in Congress demonstrated any of it.

We have to have faith in our system of government because it has served us well for more than 200 years and all of the other known alternatives are too terrifying to think about. And, yes, our system does lead to these kinds of impasses now and again.

But this Congress abdicated one of its most important roles when it walked out on those workers. Even if few of us have faith that they are serving our country’s best interests, they are still our leaders. We elected them to represent us and we expect better of them despite all of our misgivings.

Seventy-four thousand people are back at work.

Congress won’t be back in until after Labor Day.

Hopefully, those representatives and senators will think long and hard about the shameful way they exited the Capitol earlier this month and resolve not to do that again.

Or maybe they won’t.

Either way, November 2012 will soon be looming over their shoulders. Hopefully, more and more people are starting to think about this funny thing called leadership and what it is that we want, and don’t want, from those who we elect to represent us.

Tim Rogers is editor of The Daily Citizen. He can be reached at 706-272-7735 or timrogers@daltoncitizen.com.

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