Politico covers for Republican heartless incompetence again
by David Atkins
It's becoming old hat at this point to mock Politico's peculiar brand of "reporting," but Jake Sherman's article about the failure of the farm bill deserves a special golf clap. Remember that the normally bipartisan farm bill failed because a bunch of hyperconservatives insisted on adding an amendment to make awful cuts to food stamps--and then over sixty of those Tea Party Republicans still voted against the bill because the cuts to food stamps weren't big enough.
Predictably, most the House Democrats refused to vote for the bill because of the cuts to food stamps. So the bill failed in the House, largely because of the heartlessness of the GOP caucus, particularly its most extreme wing. So how does Politico handle the story? By treating it as a he said, she said story in which GOP and Dem leadership each accuse one another. Seriously:
Someone in House leadership screwed up again.
The defeat of the farm bill — after both parties were privately bullish it would pass with large margins — shows, once again, how massively dysfunctional the House and its leadership has become. And it plainly reveals that a bipartisan rewrite of the nation’s complex and politically charged immigration laws are a pipe dream in the House, at least for now. Preventing a government shutdown and debt limit fight are not far behind.
For decades, the farm bill has been a beacon of bipartisanship in an increasingly rough-and-tumble chamber. The defeat of Thursday’s version was propelled by the adoption of Florida GOP Rep. Steve Southerland’s amendment to institute work requirements for recipients of food stamps. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) spoke on behalf of the amendment, indicating his support.
But passage of that amendment doomed the broader bill. Thursday’s episode illustrates in real time that Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) standard for passing immigration reform will be a massive challenge. Bipartisanship is a process fraught with pitfalls in the House, and leaders in both parties can’t rally their troops to follow them, as 62 Republicans joined 172 Democrats to vote against the bill. Republicans had 171 of their members voting ‘yes,’ and Democrats had 24 in favor.
People involved in the farm debate, irate at the sudden defeat, say the House is plainly not working. Someone’s vote count was off. Someone’s political antennae were frayed. Someone miscalculated the stiff resistance from the rank and file.
I suppose the bloodlessness of that reporting is seen by some in the journalistic community as a pinnacle of unbiased, purely informative journalism. But it isn't. Treating everything in politics as a horse race without values or context is intentionally misleading and uninformative. The reader is left without any sense of why the bill failed, or what they can do to help make things better, or whom to vote for next time to further policies that fit their values. Instead, it's just a tut-tutting about bratty politicians who just can't cooperate to pass bills--as if bipartisan passing of bills were somehow intrinsically the greatest possible good, without passing judgment on the actual content of said bills.
Politico isn't just useless journalism. It's actively harmful journalism.
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