Out of commission, II:

...Another ingredient in the present policy smorgasbord, and its importance to the menus of the political parties, is that the House is controlled by one party and the Senate by the other...

...may be much closer to than many realize...

...Evidence of this can be found in the House Education Committee's creation of a Task Force on Merit Pay, a bipartisan commission whose twenty-one members include the presidents of the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the National Conference of Parents and Teachers...

...The last time that this occurred was in the second half of the Hoover administration...

...These justifications for a commission appear to separate policy-formation from politics...

...After the announcement of the Central American Commission's membership, Sen...

...JEREMIAH BARUCH...

...Who carries policy out is being divorced from what is carried out...

...But many Democrats fear Republican charges of having "lost" Central America or are lured by the possibility of administration support for a Marshall Plan for the region...

...policy toward Latin America [emphasis added...

...Many observers of the use of commissions as a policy vehicle contend that their record has been more encouraging if seen in terms of incremental, long-term change...

...The Task Force was seen, in part, as an attempt to defuse the political advantage that President Reagan was seen to be gaining from his promotion of merit pay...

...The jurisdictions of the taxing committees do not comprehensively cover either the deficit (taxing and spending) or Medicare (e.g., control of health care costs...

...Cord Meyer of the Washington Times saw a commission as an opportunity "to lift the complex Central American dilemma out of the crossfire of partisan politics and would allow our best informed minds to concentrate on what is necessary over the long haul...

...Pundits have duly noted that when in doubt Americans tend to fall back upon commissions with ' 'Marshall Plans.'' But as one recalls in the case of the frequently proposed "Marshall Plan for the cities," rarely are such schemes carried into effect...

...A president quite attached to commissions, Hoover appointed sixty commissions, boards, and similar bodies in the first sixteen months of his administration...

...NEA President Mary Futrell raised a dissent that the final report had retreated too far on the question of the federal role in teachers' pay...

...This comment was echoed in an earlier call, by Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor, for a commission study of the region...

...He cited the success of the Social Security Commission as a case where Washington was "willing to put partisanship aside and forgo political advantage," further noting that ' 'the president and Democratic leaders in Congress came to realize that the subject was much too serious for politics...

...In addition to the associations noted in the Merit Pay panel-the NEA, AFT, and PTA-the idea of a summit conference has the backing of the U.S...

...The Merit Pay panel did afford major education interests a publicized forum for their issues, but it pales in comparison to the ambitions these interests manifested in the proposal for a National Summit Conference on Education, which passed the House on October 3. This measure calls for a summit conference to formulate a national education policy...

...As political parties are declining in their policy roles, organized interest groups and special interest movements have increased in visibility and strength (with the media's assistance...

...Placing the policy responsibility under the umbrella of a bipartisan commission also allowed significant other changes to be made on the House floor, such as raising the retirement age, which would otherwise not have been feasible without the "political," that is, electoral, protection the bipartisan commission afforded...

...Concern over the Central American Commission, as voiced by Senator Dodd, reflects the criticism of study commissions in general-too frequently they are created to evade issues and to delay or even totally avoid taking any action...

...The Reagan policy is not popular," said Dodd, who sees the bipartisan approach as "nothing more than another attempt to defuse congressional and public opposition...

...Amid all this reverberating sound and fury, energetic MX opponent Rep...

...they have watched prominent Democrats line themselves behind the bipartisan banner of the Commission on Central America...

...Harsch concluded, "Mr...

...Henry Waxman of California...

...and in citing the bill's provisions for racial, geographic, and political balance, particularly the last, he noted with satisfaction, "We have been able in this bill to put a number of assurances in that I think will eliminate the party politics...

...Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin said, in support of the measure: "Perhaps the greatest problem facing education today is the politicization of our education system...

...Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, and all other major educational associations, including the School Boards Association, the School Administrations Association, and the American Vocational Association...

...A twelve-member executive committee, with two members apiece appointed by the president, the House speaker, and Senate majority leader, and six appointed by the governors, will be responsible for selecting no more than two hundred participants from among nominees furnished by educational organizations and other groups...

...The chief advantage of bipartisanship for many members of Congress is that it simply saves time and allows them a brief respite from the increasingly vast number of policy choices to be considered, deliberated, and decided upon...

...Opposition to commissions on the deficit and Medicare also comes from those members of Congress who sit on the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees...

...Chris Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, lamented that "we can end up, as we did with the MX, pulling the administration's chestnuts out of the fire...

...Tony Coelho, chairman of the Democratic Campaign Committee, remained pensive: "It raises questions about where we are as a party...

...It is a kind of Alice in Wonderland- with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction...

...They resent "end runs" around their committees, which have primary jurisdiction...

...Yet part of the problem is that no single committee jurisdiction encompasses all the major components of the issues on which commissions have already been formed...

...He also told reporters that he felt "this issue transcends politics...

...they see valuable campaign issues going up in smoke...

...Many Democrats don't want to see more potentially valuable campaign issues being offered up to the goddess of bipartisanship for blessings promised in the future...

...Hoover's affinity for extra-governmental vehicles to devise policy is reflected, perhaps even amplified, in President Reagan's propensity to look first for solutions outside of government (e.g., the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control...

...During the House debate on the Education Summit Conference proposal, Republican Rep...

...Political parties are not providing the ideology to assist them in their growing task and it is no wonder that members of Congress, and the president, are turning more frequently to national associations and their innovative forums for help-but at what cost...

...The names of established Democratic liberals and nuclear freeze advocates were being lit on the electronic voting screen-in support of the Snowcroft Commissions recommendations and the MX...

...What happens to issues when they become "depoliticized" and are approached in a bipartisan manner...

...Hence, one can see the conflicting motivations in the calls for bipartisan commissions on the deficit and Medicare...

...Overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions among departments, agencies, and the White House raise considerable obstacles to any administration's attempt to formulate foreign and domestic policy...

...His governing philosophy has been described by historian Ellis Hawley as a vision of the ' 'associative state," a vision that the U.S...

...The development of policy is to be left to the experts' 'above'' politics...

...They have observed how the Social Security Commission allowed significant changes in Social Security on the House floor...

...When Kenneth Clark was a member of the Kerner Commission, he read the reports of earlier investigations of the 1919 Chicago riot, the Harlem riots of 1935 and of 1943, and the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot...

...If party politics are eliminated in education policy, there are still a lot of choices to be faced in other issue areas...

...A comparable jurisdiction problem exists down the street in the executive branch, even in the case of Social Security, strange as it may seem initially...

...Other Democrats have also raised questions...

...Gunderson went on to observe that' 'education is too important to play politics with...

...Hoover favored commissions because he believed that government should work closely with associations, particularly trade associations...

...Its recommendations, issued on October 11, stated that merit pay was worth experimenting with but wouldn't substitute for raising teacher's salaries across the board...

...The final victory tally-with the help of ninety-one Democrats-could hardly be heard above the gavel-pounding and the House floor and galleries erupting excitedly...

...I do not know when it started . .. whether it started with the activism of various education associations in the political arena...

...Reagan, I submit, needs another national commission to depoliticize U.S...

...To lift out of," or "too serious for," or "transcends" politics-these are phrases that reflect, at least in part, a growing tendency to relegate politics solely to the winning of elections...

...That may be why a leading proponent of a Medicare commission is Commerce Health Subcommittee chairman Rep...

...but certainly it has become evident since the various national commission reports have come out...

...Well, in the case of the Social Security Commission, major participants came to agreement on the "facts"-acknowledged to be an artifice, but at least one upon which an accord could be reached and recommended...

...Senator Jackson seems to have had that perspective as he expressed to reporters his aspirations for his proposed Central American Commission: "What we need is a policy that has a thirty-fifty-year vision of building democracy, increasing economic opportunity, and reinforcing human rights for the peoples of Central America...

...But the vision of an' 'associative state" points to an underlying factor in this commission mania, namely the growing efforts of outside interest groups to look for new arenas for the promotion of their positions on issues...

...Clark ended up declaring...