WASHINGTON — If the signing into law Wednesday of Wall Street reform made one thing clear, it’s this: In hard legislative terms, the nation’s capital is more active, more ambitious and — judging by the scope of legislative accomplishment — more successful than it has been in decades.
For the second time in less than four months, President Barack Obama inked his signature on historic legislation that seeks to remedy domestic-policy problems of daunting political and practical scope.
He signed health care reform into law in March, rewriting the rules by which just about every American will access care. And Wednesday, the president closed the deal on the biggest update of the country’s regulatory system since the 1930s, addressing a need made clear by the 2008 financial crisis.
Yet along with last year’s massive economic stimulus and the rescue of the U.S. auto industry, those pillars now co-exist with a campaign-season theme that Washington is broken, a place of loose work ethic and endless bickering that has to be swept out with a clean broom.
Some of that perception stems from a lack of bipartisanship on issues small and large — not a single Republican voted in favor of the final health care bill, and just three GOP senators voted for the financial bill.
Experts say there is a disconnect between the scope of legislative accomplishments and a perception of the place as utterly dysfunctional that has few parallels in the capital’s history.
“It was two years of very long, studied, hard work,” said Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Golden Democrat who helped craft the Wall Street fix as a member of the House Financial Services Committee.
“I think we’ve done what we’ve had to do and what we were elected to do, which is get the country back on track,” he said.
Democrats can claim with little exaggeration that they are passing sweeping solutions to problems that have been building for decades — kicked down the street or mishandled by successive Congresses.
Regulatory reform signed into law Wednesday reverses a decades-long trend toward deregulating the financial sector, which allowed the growth of monster banks and financial houses and the spreading influence of shadowy instruments such as derivatives.
The bill lets regulators seize and dismantle companies that might pose systemic risk; creates a new consumer-protection bureau to regulate mortgages, credit cards and other instruments that link consumers to the world of global finance; establishes tough new regulations on derivatives; and creates a council of regulators to scour the globe for dangers to the system and intervene before the risks get out of control.
Yet it’s exactly the size and complexity of the Wall Street and health care fixes that have become central to opponents’ attacks.
Republicans hardly speak a sentence about either without specifying the size of the bills — 2,300 pages in the case of financial reform and more than 2,000 pages in the case of health care.
Regulatory reform deals with a subject so arcane — and attacks it across so many dimensions — that it is nearly impossible to effectively explain to voters. So the consumer financial-protection bureau, perhaps the most relevant piece of the legislation to ordinary Americans but hardly the most significant, became the Democrats’ incessant talking point.
It was showcased again at the bill signing, where Obama was flanked by a Vietnam veteran slammed by overdraft fees and a teacher with credit-card woes.
“It’s hard to do hard things. Whether you’re talking about health reform or reform of the financial sector or turning around an economy on the verge of depression, those are inherently hard things to do,” said William Galston, a former domestic-policy adviser to President Bill Clinton.
“In a less inflamed world, Congress would receive more credit for leadership than they’ve gotten. But that and $1.59 will get you a small cup of coffee at Starbucks,” Galston said.
Polls show congressional approval ratings near record lows. Peter Hart, whose firm conducts the NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls, said what is notable is that a majority of voters are inclined to vote against their representatives, when typically their negative feelings are toward lawmakers other than their own.
That raises a scary prospect for a Democratic Congress and its ambitious president in the White House.
Elected on a platform of change, they may be leading a country that is profoundly conservative in the literal sense — the sense in which voters are skeptical of big changes, even ones meant to solve big problems.
Health care reform did so many different and complicated things that Democrats charge it was easy for Republicans to distort.
And now polls show that voters are uncertain that its multi-tentacled patchwork of insurance exchanges, coverage mandates, pilot programs and regulation actually will work.
“The idea that Washington is broken doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t do anything. It means that it can’t do things right,” said Julian Zeli zer, an expert on Congress at Princeton University. “You can produce a lot, but it doesn’t mean that the public thinks the system is working.”
In fact, a true judgment of whether much of this works is years, perhaps more than a decade, away.
The most significant parts of health care reform don’t kick in until 2014, and it will probably take some years after to judge it a policy success or failure.
In the case of the Wall Street fix, its success may lie in forestalling another financial crisis. But Democrats concede it will be hard to prove something didn’t occur that might have.
For now, Democrats may effectively be left to argue what President George W. Bush did when it came to a legacy of two wars: History will prove him right, even if the judgment of the present is more ambiguous.
“If the financial regulations get rid of some of the bad behavior by Wall Street and if heath care does expand coverage to 30 million people and premiums stabilize, people will look at this as a pretty significant moment in domestic policy,” Zelizer said.
Michael Riley: 202-662-8907 or mriley@denverpost.com
