The Antiplanner is glad to see that Republicans decided to take my advice and back off on the showdown over the debt ceiling. But this still leaves the question of why our government is suffering from so much gridlock and how we can prevent it in the future.
Fortunately, left-leaning journalist Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post has some answers. Apparently, gridlock is all the fault of the tea parties. The tea parties forced the House to pass a “no-earmarks” rule, which means Congressional leaders can’t use earmarks to bribe members of Congress to vote for stupid laws.
Second, tea parties (and others) have forced Congress to make its decisions transparent, that is, open to public scrutiny. The inability of members to make back-room deals is apparently reducing Congress’ ability to function.
Tea parties have also wrested control of the Republican Party away from giant corporations, whose interests of course are only for the greater good of the American people. Big business, of course, wants to keep government running so it can profit from ripping off taxpayers, and its a shame that the tea parties have put a stop to that.
Klein has ten more reasons why the federal government is gridlocked, and some of them actually have a germ of truth. Gerrymandering, for example, has both allowed extremists to get elected to Congress and allowed them to stay extreme because they are safe from serious re-election challenges.
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If gridlock is a more serious issue today than it was in the past, it is partly an accident of history. The United States is one of the few countries in the world whose legislature can be controlled by a different party than the executive. When this happens, sparks fly, partly because each side has an eye on the next election as an opportunity to consolidate their power by taking control of both branches of government.
If anything has changed, it is that, in the last three decades, the party that controls the House is less likely to be the same party as the one that controls the White House than it was before. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter years; they also did during the Nixon years, which I remember as being pretty polarized. Except over Viet Nam, polarization was not a huge consideration in those years when Democrats held the White House.
Republicans took the Senate on Ronald Reagan’s coattails, but lost it before Reagan was out of office. Repubicans did take both houses until Clinton had been in office for two years, and the issue they rode to victory on was Hillarycare. They lost the House during Bush’s term, but won it back again after passage of Obamacare.
This suggests that the last several presidents have tried to push through such an extreme agenda that they galvanized the other side, causing them to lose control of Congress. The result is that different parties have controlled the House and White House for twelve of the last twenty years.
Are the issues more extreme because they are more serious? Are they more extreme because modern communications encourage extremism? Or are they more extreme because, in a divided government, individual politicians have a greater incentive to hold out than to cooperate? The answer may be some of all three. But the disappearance of earmarking, back-room deals, and corporate control of government is something to be cheered, not lamented.
My take:
More extreme because the government is meddling more in personal lives. Prime current example is forcing people to buy a product.
thanks
JK
It is the so-called moderates of both parties not the extremists that benefit from Gerrymandering. In order to win the spending war, we must win the Gerrymandering war first. The Democrats and Republicans have gerrymandered so many safe Congressional seats that the Democrats running with little or token opposition can run and run on increasing spending. When a Republican state legislature creates safe Republican seats, it also creates safe Democrat seats and vice versa. With the help of the so called main stream media beating the Democrat’s drum, the Republicans are pretty much forced to spend or be labeled as Scrooges. California has been Democrat for years and years yet even Republicans are winning House seats with 55% or 60% of the vote.
I think gerrymandering is a problem as well (and one that both parties delight in once they have some power). When district boundaries are drawn up in a manner that ensure that a particular ideology will win in a landslide there is no competition and no debate. In the recent government shutdown this allowed a handful of politicians to pursue a tactic that was obviously detrimental to the country (regardless of what you think about the size of government, spending or Obamacare).
In fact, I would agree with my political opponents that government spending and even the scale of the federal government is a serious problem. I just don’t understand why a tactic that obviously causes more problems than it solves needs to be tried.
The best analogy for trying to solve excessive government spending by using the debt ceiling as leverage can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YziagkVsWY
I agree that gerrymandering is a problem that needs to be fixed in order to create a better democracy. However I am not sure that a divided government is a bad thing. In mid to late 1990’s we actually achieved a balance budget because Clinton kept vetoing Republican tax cuts while Republican would not let the Democrats spend more. This worked remarkably well. As soon as the Republicans got control in 2001 they started to borrow and spend, President G.W. Bush made it clear he would approve all spending increases and all tax cuts.
The problem we have now is the radical fringe of the Republican party that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the party.
I don’t buy the argument that Congress is more divisive than before. Any institution in which requires decisions to be made by two separate large bodies and a President is going to be very inefficient and messy. Look at all the crazy compromises about slavery before the Civil War.
When was the supposed golden era when Congress worked smoothly?
Antiplanner,
I agree with Paul above. Divided government is not necessarily a bad thing, as he pointed out that during the 1990’s, divided government – with Republicans in control of the House and Senate, while Mr. Clinton sat in the White House – brought about the most sane federal government in terms of deficits and debt in the past 30+ years. People also tend to forget that Ross Perot (remember him?) was jumping up and down about debt, and he got 20 million people to vote for him in 1992.
As a Tea Partier / minarchist / federalist / believer in the original vision of America’s Founding (sans slavery), I can say that I have met many Tea Partiers who still want to slurp Social Security and Medicare. I have taken a personal vow to forswear ever going on the Federal plantation, but there are very, very few like me.
The America of the 20th century was dominated by the Democratic Party, particularly in Congress. Republicans did have better luck with the Presidency, but it wasn’t really until the 1980’s and early 1990’s that Republicans began to pull more less even with Democrats in Congress. The 20th century saw a relentless expansion of centralized, nationalized, federal power, and Obama Care only expands that power. I didn’t care very much when Mitt Romney got Romney Care pushed through in Massachusetts, or if various state legislatures around the Union besides the one where I live have considered a single payer health care regime, because I don’t live in one of those states. However, with Obama Care, I don’t have any choice. When a Congress enacts something, there is nowhere to escape if you don’t like such far reaching laws, without resorting to leaving America entirely.
When I was an undergraduate student, one of my political science professors once stated that political scientists have run analyses of the effect of centralized power, and they have found that the greater the power is centralized, the more brittle the regime. In other words, nation states with centralized power tend not to last, and America has been drifting that way.
At bottom, the arguments in Washington have become so heated because the stakes have been driven so high. And, it wasn’t me that insisted that the money and the power was be so centralized.
Sandy,
I agree that the legislature has always been divisive, but the way in which the divisiveness is manifesting itself has changed. I can’t remember a time in history when the approach was to create some sort of political/economic doomsday device (hyperbolic, I know) in order to foster action. Of course given the history of divisiveness in congress, there is no “action” we just keep resetting the timer on the doomsday device. Maybe I’m wrong, but this seems like a new approach to me.
I don’t think gridlock is a fair description of the situation. It is much better to think of the federal government as a clearing house for various powerful interests than as an elected government with clearly identifiable visions wrestling for control.
Failing to raise the debt ceiling only lowered federal spending to about $3trillion, which is comparable to 2001 levels of spending if you adjust for inflation. It was a 15% reduction in spending that would have had to be raised to 20% reduction had the debt ceiling gone on indefinitely.
As such, there was never any actual crisis. There wasn’t even a particularly low level of spending. There was, however, plenty of political theater.
There are enough pages in the federal register; gridlock is good. What Congress needs to do is begin repealing legislation. Repeal, repeal, repeal. But that ain’t gonna happen as long as slop keeps hittin’ the trough.
bennett.
You may well be right about this being unique in using a doomsday device. But I am in complete agreement that this constant kicking the can down the road is a total lack of leadership by both parties. I am afraid we will go to the brinks several more times in the next few years.
I also agree with everyone about gerrymandering being bad., but I just note this is nothing new, nor are “safe seats” in both parties.
The main reason it looks so much worse now is the pervasiveness of government and the huge dollars being fought over.
A few decades ago, a shutdown would not touch everyone’s daily lives. But with government touching everything we do, the fights take on more significance.
As a result, everything government leaders do is more important than before. And as it seems that so many of the current leaders (in both parties) are woefully inadequate, it eventually leads us to disaster.
The real crisis is that between 36 and 40% of total federal expenditures come from borrowed money, not taxes. Congress goes into deadlock over attempts to slightly reduce the growth of spending by about 1% point, and no one is going to raise taxes by 60 to 70% on everyone. Spending and borrowing are literally out of control, and outright default is guaranteed. The question is, Will the federal government repudiate its debt, or will it use hyperinflation to eliminate it? Greece at least has the EU to bail it out. We have no one. The pain will be much worse than the Great Depression, and we will finally get our socialist dictatorship.