Please, no more posturing.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: STATE OF THE NATION

WHAT CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED between Pres. Barack Obama and the new Republican Congress? ObamaCare will be not repealed. The President will veto anything but the most modest and inconsequential changes. Entitlement reform, so badly needed, is something neither party has put at the top of its list, if it is on the list at all. Income tax reform and simplification, another badly needed change, would require the kind of serious effort that Pres. Ronald Reagan and Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D.-Ill.) undertook to pass the 1986 tax reform bill. This historical bill reduced tax rates to two levels, 28% and 15%, and closed numerous loopholes. Since then, K Street lobbyists and their compliant agents in Congress have left that bill a bare shadow of itself. Reagan and Rostenkowski were not bosom buddies. They were, however, serious politicians, eager not just to serve time in office and rouse their political base.

With important legislation off the table, are political posturing and positioning the dish the public is to be served? Will we again witness the continuing spectacle of both parties using these two years to make the case for the next election, and then using that election to make the case for the next election? This carousel has been spinning throughout the Obama years and, at some point, the switch has to be pulled. These problems cannot keep piling up election after election.

The Republican Congress can send bill after bill to the President's desk, which he certainty will veto. The point the congressional Republican leadership keeps making is: while such efforts may not reach fruition, they will demonstrate what the Republicans could do, once they gain control of the White House and the Congress, but what if they do not attain that control? Then what will have been accomplished? Another two years wasted on posturing and positioning.

While this political dance goes on, problems fester: the national debt approaches 20 trillion dollars; middle class wages stagnate; entitlement spending is on the verge of drowning out other government programs; ObamaCare costs and regulations take a bigger bite out of small businesses; our borders continue to be porous; and our immigration system lacks coherence, letting in people we may not want and keeping out those we may need. As former Sen. Tom Coburn (R.-Okla.) kept reminding his colleagues with chart after chart, government programs are rife with duplication. The public has little knowledge of which ones get...