Since I’ve been griping for a long time about Congress being unable to pass so much as a Mother’s Day resolution these days, it’s only fair to highlight the possibility of actual progress on something:
House and Senate negotiators have reached a tentative agreement to deal with the long-term needs of the struggling Department of Veterans Affairs and plan to unveil their proposal Monday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), who lead the Senate and House Veterans’ Affairs committees, continued negotiating over the weekend. Aides said they “made significant progress” on legislation to overhaul the VA and provide funding to hire more doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals. Sanders and Miller are scheduled to discuss their plan Monday afternoon.
We don’t have all the details yet, and the bill hasn’t actually passed or anything. There’s still plenty of time for tea partiers to throw their usual tantrum. And there’s also plenty of time for the House GOP leadership to respond to the tantrum by crawling back into its cave and killing the whole thing. It’ll be President Obama’s fault, of course, probably for attending a fundraiser, or maybe for sneezing at the wrong time.
But maybe not! Maybe they really will pass this thing. It would provide vets with more flexibility to see doctors outside the VA system, which is a bit of a Band-Aid—but probably a necessary one—and it provides additional funding for regions that have seen a big influx of veterans. On the flip side, I don’t get the sense that the bill will really do much to fix the culture of the VA, which becomes a political cause célèbre every few years as we discover that all the same things we yelled about the time before are still true. But I guess that’s inevitable in a political culture with the attention span of a newt.
All things considered, it would be a good sign if this bill passed. The VA, after all, isn’t an inherently partisan issue. Just the opposite, since both parties support vets about equally and both should, in theory, be more interested in helping vets than in prolonging chaos for political reasons.
In other words, if there’s anything that’s amenable to a basically technocratic solution and bipartisan support, this is it. In a way, it’s a test of whether our political system is completely broken or just mostly broken. “Mostly” would be something of a relief.
