“Remember,” said Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, “these are really big problems and they’re really tough. Solving them is going to involve some major changes in the way we live, the way we tax ourselves, the way we get our health care and the way we transport ourselves.”  He added: “Many of these questions are caught up in ideological differences that really are quite fundamental. On all of them right now there is no consensus in the country and therefore the political system has to try to create one where none now exists.”  A sign of how hard it is to fashion a compromise on these big questions is the length of time between major legislative actions on them. It took almost a decade from the collapse of the Clinton administration’s health care initiative in 1994 to the passage of the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit. The federal minimum wage went unchanged for 10 years until this spring. The last major overhaul of immigration law passed in 1986. The most recent significant revision to Social Security came in 1983.  Even the relatively new issue of global warming has been batted around since 1988, when Al Gore began talking about its potentially dire effects. Now, despite a foot-high stack of proposed legislation on the subject, virtually nothing has been done.  Mr. Gore said it was extremely difficult to move the political system when it is paralyzed by partisan passion and beset by well-financed and well-organized interests. He refers to the combination of the oil, coal and automobile industries as the “carbon lobby,” which he said is very difficult to defeat.  Washington, he said, has also failed to act on global warming for much the same reason that it has not tackled the possible future insolvency of Social Security or the problem of 45 million Americans who lack health insurance. “There’s just garden-variety denial,” he said. “It’s unpleasant to think about and easy to push it off.”  Washington often serves as a trailing indicator of public sentiment on an issue, following action in state capitals or responding belatedly to a growing public outcry. Congress and the White House did not seriously begin to move on immigration until two years ago, after the Minutemen, a civilian group, started patrolling the borders and Southwestern state governors declared states of emergency to deal with hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants stealing in from Mexico.  Given the failure of the 1986 immigration legislation to stem the illegal flow, the public is wary of any new government effort to control the borders, said Merle Black, a professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. And many lawmakers fear that if they support the current legislation they will be blamed if it fails to live up to its promises. After all, the Medicare drug benefit, too, was a much-heralded attempt to lower the costs of medicines for the elderly, but it created mountains of burdensome paperwork and huge unanticipated costs for the government.  “The public has seen a whole series of performance failures, whether it was the war in Iraq or the response to Katrina,” Professor Black said. “It makes different groups of individuals very skeptical about politicians offering solutions. On top of that, Bush’s approval ratings are so low that he can’t exert any leadership even within his own party.”  Government stasis was not unintended. The Founding Fathers designed the American system of government to cool public passions and created numerous impediments to rash action. They might not be surprised that two decades passed between significant action on immigration law or government old-age pensions. But they might have had trouble conceiving the complexity of the issues facing modern Washington, like global warming or the need to find a way to provide even basic medical care to one in seven Americans.  “It was a pretty simple world Madison was dealing with when he wrote the Federalist Papers,” said Morris P. Fiorina, professor of political science at Stanford University. “His focus was on land, labor and commerce. He was clearly aware of the need to defend the borders, but he was more concerned that you had to limit the reach of government and insure that transitory majorities can’t have their way.”  The molasses pace of governance in America is frustrating to many in and outside Washington. But the framers recognized that the dangers of succumbing to fleeting enthusiasms are often far greater than the slow process of fashioning a consensus from the competing interests of a sectional country.  “I agree that it is a bad thing for it to take an extraordinarily long time to deal with problems,” said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican representative from Oklahoma and now a vice president of the Aspen Institute and a lecturer in government at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. “But I think it is a worse thing to rush into solutions when you’re dealing with a nation of 300 million people.”  He cited Prohibition and the Medicare drug benefit as examples of laws that carried large and unintended consequences.  “I don’t suggest that given enough time you can make everything perfect,” Mr. Edwards said. “But you do need enough time to make sure all views are heard and you can avoid the unforeseen circumstances that plague so many things.”  “You don’t just want them to act,” he said. “You want them to act responsibly.”
On issues ranging from immigration to global warming, lawmakers are paralyzed by partisanship, fear, denial (and the Constitution).