WASHINGTON - The collapse of legislation to bail out the U.S. auto industry is a fitting end to this year in Congress - and a warning to President-elect Barack Obama that even larger Democratic majorities next year won't guarantee smooth sailing for his ambitious agenda on economics and other issues. Polarized, beset by crises and preoccupied with ideological and regional politics, this Congress followed a pattern familiar in the past decade. It railed and wrangled over the nation's toughest problems but in the end failed to advance solutions.
Wrestling with health care, costly dependence on foreign oil and the greatest economic crisis in more than a half-century, the House and Senate have floundered into stalemate. Meanwhile, the economic woes have gone international.
The House and Senate did pass major legislation this year in response to the nation's economic problems - but for the most part, they did not act until a crisis could hardly be ignored. Each time, lawmakers had to struggle to reach agreement. Sometimes, as in the auto bailout, the legislation was not even approved.
Economists reviewing congressional efforts have not raved. The federal fund to subsidize affordable housing has had few takers. The $700 billion effort to shore up the financial services industry took a drastic change in course - without congressional input and only after about half the money was spent. Skepticism about those efforts contributed mightily to the Senate's rejection of the auto bailout bill.
"They have really been behind the curve," Dean Baker, co-director of the Center on Economic and Policy Research, said of Congress. "But they have been better than Bush."
Analysts such as Baker blame President George W. Bush for failing to exercise stronger leadership on the economy. They are hopeful that the federal government will be more effective when Obama is sworn in as president with a larger Democratic majority in the House and Senate. But Obama inherits a political and economic legacy that could make it hard for him to extract timely, effective policies from Congress.
"The real question is: Will Congress be Congress and slow things down, muck things up and muck things up with too much local politics," said Robert Reischauer, head of the Urban Institute and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.
The challenges Obama and the next Congress face are great. The sheer magnitude of the nation's economic turmoil confounds experts in both political parties.
