by Karl Kurtz
Several weeks ago, I heard the American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein give a very interesting speech about the evolution of Congress over the last several decades to a civics teacher training institute that NCSL cosponsored. I wanted to write about his speech, but it was so rich in content that, lacking his text, I despaired at trying to summarize it. Now I have discovered that his speech was a condensed version of an article, "Worst. Congress. Ever.," that he recently wrote for Foreign Policy, so readers have a source to find the details.
In addition to the useful ways in which Ornstein summarizes political changes in the Congress over the last 40 years, I thought two things in his speech were particularly useful to teachers (and observers) of legislative politics. The first is the concept of unified, bloc-voting parliamentary parties trying to operate in a separation of powers system, which he traces back to the health care policy debate of the last Congress:
Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier. The session's legislative accomplishments occurred because Democrats maintained enough discipline -- and had large enough margins -- to enact their bills with the support of Democrats alone. The health-care bill was able to make it past a Republican filibuster in the Senate because Democrats, for a brief moment, had exactly enough senators to overcome it. Both parties acted as if they were parliamentary parties, indivisible blocs rather than groups of individual actors casting votes for reasons besides partisan loyalty. But in a non-parliamentary system, built on checks and balances and a separation of powers, parliamentary parties simply cannot work. Accomplishments get delegitimized, and some areas like climate change, end up in total gridlock.
At the time that he was speaking (and writing the article), before the cross-party resolution of the debt ceiling limit, the two congressional parties were engaged in unyielding confrontation, neither one willing to cede anything to the other. I found his comment that parliamentary-style parties don't work in a separation of power system interesting and reflected that the opposite is also true: American-style cross-party coalitons wouldn't work well in a parliamentary system that depends on unified majorities to choose and maintain the government in power and to pass laws.
The second helpful point was his emphasis on the permanent campaign and increased partisanship in the Congress. After summarizing sweeping changes to the two major political parties in recent decades, he concludes:
At the same time, two other phenomena emerged. The first was the permanent campaign, a change from an era where there were distinct seasons of campaigning and governing -- the former a vicious, zero-sum contest in which partisans were bitter enemies, the latter a conciliatory process of coalition-building among allies and adversaries alike. The second, precipitated by the stunning Gingrich-led Republican congressional victories of 1994, led to an extended era of close partisan margins, which gave rise to high-stakes legislative politics and sharply reduced incentives for lawmakers to work across party lines to solve problems.
If you doubt that politics in Congress has become more partisan, consider this: For the first time ever, in the 111th Congress that convened during the first two years of the Obama presidency, the National Journal's vote ratings showed that the most conservative Democratic senator was to the left of the most liberal Republican. There is now no overlap ideologically at all between the parties. Only nine of the remaining small number of conservative House Democrats (now called "Blue Dogs") were to the right of the most liberal House Republican. That Republican, Mike Castle of Delaware, was dumped by his party in a primary as he ran for the Senate and is now out of Congress, as are the bulk of the Blue Dogs.
I'll reserve comments about the parts of Ornstein's article that trouble me, especially the somewhat sensationalist title, for a future post.
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