Flood of Political Money Is Bad; Denial of Reality In Policy-Making Is Worse

May 4, 2015

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNews.com

It goes without much argument that the U.S is not in a golden age of self-government. Even many who serve in Congress are all too ready to talk about and write about that body’s disfunction. The sorry state of affairs we see in Washington today is the logical outcropping of seeds planted many years ago, about 20 years ago, in fact, with Newt Gingrich’s legislative “revolution.”

Gingrich ascended the throne of House Speaker after essentially laying waste to the once reasonable landscape of party politics. Pre-Gingrich it was largely understood that candidates would often hit below the belt to get elected, but that it was out of bounds to kick the opponent in the crotch. Gingrich brought an anything-goes brand of politics to Congress, both in elections and in legislating. With his bag-carrying lieutenant Tom DeLay, they also turned Washington into U.S.,Inc., with pretty much everything for sale and brutal retribution for those who refused to buy into their “revolution.”

That’s the kind of politics and legislating we’re living with today, a situation compounded by the Supreme Court majority’s bizarre decisions that corporations are people and unlimited contributions don’t distort democracy.

As destructive as all of this has been, even worse, the Gingrich years set Congress on a course that essentially denies reality. It’s not just that money buys policy---that’s been the case through all of U.S. history—--but even worse, ideology trumps facts and reason.

No better example of this was the closing of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in 1995. As government agencies go, the OTA was small potatoes---about $20 million as an annual budget, supporting the work of 150 or so people who independently evaluated technological issues for members of Congress. Since few members of Congress have backgrounds in scientific fields, but all are called on to make policy about the direction and products of advanced research, it would seem a no-brainer that an investment in independent analysis and interpretation is essential. That’s what OTA did for Congress for more than 20 years.

Until 1995, when Gingrich and his Republican congressional majority zeroed out OTA’s budget and killed the agency.

As former Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, himself a scientist, said, killing off the OTA was like Congress giving itself a lobotomy. It’s not that Congress lacks information about scientific issues, it’s just that for the past 20 years that information has been provided by self-interested parties with no informed, independent buffer to sort fact from pap.

Why did Gingrich kill off OTA? Most observers believe the trigger was OTA’s skepticism of President Reagan’s so-called Strategic Defense Initiative, aka “Star Wars.” Reagan’s vision was that lasers could be deployed in space to shoot down incoming ICBMs launched by the former Soviet Union. It was an exciting idea, one that would change the deadly dangerous Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction. The problem was that most scientists outside the Pentagon doubted that it was possible. OTA’s “mistake” was to write papers for Congress sharing those doubts.

Since Gingrich and others in the leadership were not about to let science get in the way of their pet projects, they killed the messenger. And the messenger has stayed killed for the past 20 years while an estimated $200 billion or more has been spent on Reagan’s original dream.

For the record, lasers still can’t be deployed in space to shoot down incoming ICBMs. There’s been some success destroying missiles from anti-missile platforms on submarines, particularly when the launch is planned and the test is not a surprise attack. There remains a great deal of skepticism in the scientific community that water-borne defense would be effective against a determined multi-missile launch. And we are no where close to military reliance on the laser shield Reagan envisioned as primary national defense.

The program, which still absorbs billions of dollars each year, is now mostly justified as a regional defense system, more likely to be used against local threats, such as Israel’s effective Iron Dome defense against short range missiles launched by Hamas and Hezbollah.

During its years as the technology evaluator for Congress, the OTA became a model for other nations, particularly for the European Union. But the U.S. Congress has no dedicated staff it can turn to for clear, concise, factually correct policy implications on such issues as climate change, genetic modification of crops, satellite controlled air traffic, robotic cars, DNA experimentation with the building blocks of life, or any of the countless branches of science and technology that are forging into frontiers beyond most of our understanding.

Instead, science seems to have become the enemy of those legislators who see it a threat to their favored policy.

The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was created in 1972 by Republican and Democratic members of Congress who recognized the need for objective and authoritative analysis of the complex scientific and technical issues of the 20th century. Now we’re in the 21st century, and in an era where the need is much greater but the political environment has scant appetite for objectivity.

The flood of private money unleashed into our political world is ruinous for our election process. But the ascent of fiction over fact in policy making is, if anything, far worse.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)