Sen. George Mitchell On Congress and Bureaucracy | George Mitchell | Big Think

Sen. George Mitchell On Congress and Bureaucracy

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Sen. George Mitchell On Congress and Bureaucracy

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George Mitchell:

George John Mitchell is the American special envoy to the Middle East for the Obama administration. A Democrat, Mitchell was a United States Senator who served as the Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995. He was chairman of The Walt Disney Company from March 2004 until January 2007, and was chairman of the international law firm DLA Piper at the time of his appointment as special envoy.

He is the Chancellor of Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 2006, he was asked by the Commissioner of Baseball to lead an investigation of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball.

In addition to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Senator Mitchell has received awards and honors including the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Truman Institute Peace Prize, the German Peace Prize and the United Nations (UNESCO) Peace Prize.In the Senate, he was closely associated with free trade and environmental legislation, and with aid to housing and education. He led the successful 1990 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, including new controls on acid rain toxins. He was the author of the first national oil spill prevention and clean-up law. Mitchell led the Senate to passage of the nation's first child care bill and was principal author of the low income housing tax credit program. He was instrumental in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, landmark legislation extending civil rights protections to the disabled. Mitchell's efforts led to the passage of a higher education bill that expanded opportunities for millions of Americans. Senator Mitchell was also a leader in opening markets to trade and led the Senate to ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement and creation of the World Trade Organization.For six consecutive years he was voted "the most respected member" of the Senate by a bipartisan group of senior congressional aides. In 1994 George Mitchell declined an appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States in order to remain in the Senate and pursue the struggle for universal national health care.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why is it so hard to get things done?

George Mitchell: Well, I don’t think it’s any more difficult than it ever was to get things done. I think that’s part of the deliberate design of the forty-five men who wrote the Constitution. Remember, their central objective was independence from Britain, self-governance and the prevention of any established or King-like authority in the United States. They had lived under a British King-- they did not ever want there to be an American King. If you look back over history, they have been brilliantly successful. We’ve had forty-three Presidents, and no Kings in American life. And they wanted to disburse authority. They were very suspicious of the accumulation of authority in any one person. We know all the phrases: power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think that first came from an Englishman, but nonetheless, it was widely believed by the men who wrote the Constitution. And so they devised a complex system to disburse power, to make it hard to get things done. In fact, I believe that the Senate is a microcosm of all of the American political process, because in the Senate, it is very hard to get anything done. It’s much easier to block things and I think it’s an exaggeration but captures the spirit of what the founders wanted to do by saying that in order to prevent bad things from happening, they made it difficult for anything to happen. And so getting a bill passed in Congress is not an easy job, particularly if it’s controversial, covers a subject that affects large numbers of Americans, and probably rightly so. I was a Senate Majority Leader for six years and I was enormously frustrated on many occasions by the rules and procedures of the Senate and by the difficulty of getting things done, but with the perspective that comes with time and not being directly involved in the job, the way I look at it is that if you go back over American history in the most important tasks, maintaining sovereignty in the people, the preservation of individual liberty, equal justice applied equally to every citizen, opportunity for every citizen- we’ve done pretty well.

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