The regrettable spectacle of lamentable governance masks the even worse spectacle of government at its worst.
Strip away details and consider the essentials. In the regrettable-lamentable case, two sides of a polarized government spurn compromise and act willing to accept whatever happens to the US economy after the federal government defaults on financial obligations. In the worse-worst case, the government punishes companies for failing to comply with impossible requirements. Both cases reek of irresponsibility.
In showdowns over the Affordable Care Act and debt ceiling, realities are clear. Obamacare won't be defunded. Raising the debt ceiling, however distasteful, is less bad than default. Message to Republicans: Deal with it. Literally, deal with it.
Radiant futility
Obamacare might be a mess legally and administratively. But it's law. Americans reelected the president who made it his signature issue. The president's party controls the Senate. The law won't change. Yet a Republican faction in the House refuses to pass a spending bill that funds Obamacare. The position radiates futility. It's foolish. Each day the government operates at diminished capacity, Republicans lose credibility. With credibility goes punch in lesser fights Republicans reasonably might hope to win. And at this writing, Barack Obama has shown no inclination to transcend partisanship. He'd rather taunt self-destructing Republicans than act like a president.
This is a standoff of the deluded. Obama thinks he has a mandate to expand the government in all directions. Republicans think they can stop him with unyielding confrontation. So the economy veers toward jeopardy. Where, oh where, is leadership?
That an effort to fix the Renewable Fuel Standard emerged amid this fiasco is unfortunate but revealing. As has been written here often, governance can't get much worse than the program requiring sales of specific amounts of specific classes of biofuels. The RFS begins with the awful proposition that the government makes fuel choices better than markets do. From there, it gets worse.
The RFS requires the sale in gasoline of more ethanol made from grain than the gasoline market can use. It requires the sale of more gasoline and diesel made from cellulose than the market can supply. It makes obligated businesses buy credits to the extent they can't meet unachievable targets. And the implementing authority, the Environmental Protection Agency, won't fully adjust regulation to reality.
From any political perspective, such a predicament imposed on the regulated must seem unconscionable because it is. A functioning republic wouldn't allow it. But this republic isn't functioning just now.
An effort in the House Energy and Commerce Committee to fix the RFS has encountered—what else?—testy politics. The oil industry seeks repeal of the RFS. The ethanol industry wants no change. Committee members find positions more firmly entrenched than they expected. Some of them have been quoted as saying they don't want a new political fight while Washington, DC, is at loggerheads over Obamacare and the debt ceiling.
Hello? Since when do political fights keep lawmakers from doing their jobs?
On the RFS, the industry's position is right. The law should be repealed. It's a brazen gift to special interests, which will do anything and say anything to defend the largess. It assigns the government an inappropriate role. It exaggerates the environmental and economic benefits of renewable fuels. It elevates food costs. But the people who profit from it, corn growers and distillers, won't find those arguments compelling. They have solid political support.
Change is feasible
The RFS won't be repealed, much as it should be. But it can be changed. At the very least, its requirements must be lowered to achievable levels. Its costs and benefits must be put to honest test. And the extortion of companies subject to its requirements must end.
These changes at least are feasible—or should be. They'd make bad law less so. They'd be better than doing nothing. And making them would reinstitute compromise, an activity once thought to be the essence of political leadership.