Our Take
If all goes according to plan, this week the House Resources Committee is expected to mark-up legislation to resolve the Puerto Rico fiscal crisis this week. While the entire process is extremely fragile, assuming that the bill can survive the mark-up, it could be on the House floor as early as the week of June 7th, approved by the Senate shortly thereafter and on the President’s desk before the July 1st deadline for the next bond payment. While the bumps in the road have been great the fact remains that this is how the proverbial sausage of legislation has traditionally been made. The new dynamic is that there is a contingent of members of Congress unwilling seem as if they are unwilling to compromise. As the President recently noted, democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right, because we live in a democracy not a dictatorship and in a democracy you need work with people to find middle ground, but then also be willing to publicly say “this was as good a deal as we could get.” In this era of balkanized media sources, with ever more people getting their news from an echo chamber of their choosing, it becomes harder for Congress to reach those compromises, in part because Congress used to have to debate differences of opinion, but now it seems to have to debate differences of fact. That said, this Puerto Rico fiscal crisis solution, if enacted, would be example that Congress still has the ability to rise to the occasion and find consensus.
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