One Man's Opinion: Good intentions do not always make great legislation

It can often be difficult at a distance to understand the process of law-making in Washington. Aside from the sausage-making analogies that you have already heard, matters are further complicated by both the heavy partisan discord and the razor-thin majority margins now held by Congressional Democrats. During the 2022 mid-terms, which tend not to favor the party in power or holding the White House, a Democratic loss of fives seats out of 435 in the U.S. House, or only one seat in the U.S. Senate, tips either chamber back into a GOP majority. The White House’s original proposals for a massive infrastructure spending bill came in around $2.3 trillion, with some rather elastic definitions of what is considered infrastructure. Now in final stages of negotiation in the U.S. Senate, with not all but a few Republicans onboard, that package has been trimmed to slightly more than $1 trillion, but it still packs a lot of pork.

But the Biden Administration remains intent on cramming a great deal of “Green New Deal,” climate change and sustainable energy initiatives into this omnibus bill. One of the more innocuous and even well-intentioned sounding programs creates a Civilian Climate Corps. Modeled broadly after the Civilian Conservation Corps (also CCC) of the Roosevelt era, the new and improved CCC would be a new federal agency and program, co-managed by the Secretary of the Interior, in collaboration with the Secretary of Agriculture and other relevant agencies. This new CCC would employ young adults, most high school or college graduates, in a wide and non-specific set of initiatives aimed “to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation and address the changing climate.”