Bipartisanship

In this posting I want to respond to two columns and a comment by a listener-follower?-of the blog. I will try to be short and succinct.

The first column, by Jonathan Rauch in the New York Times, is one of those perennial attempts to say that we are better off with divided government, such as we now have after the recent election. His argument is that a unified government succeeds only in producing unhappiness and a loss of popularity for the majority party, whereas a divided government forces both sides to cooperate with each other, letting "meaningful laws stand a likelier chance of passage, because neither side can easily blame the other for whatever is wrong and because any major legislation needs support from both parties to pass." This argument ignores two things.

First, the unpopularity of the majority party in a unified government is not because it is unified, but because in our system the minority in the Senate can prevent the passage of major legislation desired by the majority. The health care reform bill is a good example. It finally got passed, but not until the minority in the Senate was able to force so many compromises and concessions that the end result was that even the majority was not happy with the bill, and the minority was able with some justification say that it is a bad bill. The unpopularity of the majority was because it was unable to do the job for which it was elected, not because of what it did, and the reason it could not accomplish its goals was the system which allows minority obstruction.

Second, in a divided government the likelihood of getting major, "meaningful" legislation passed at all is very small: the more likely prospect is that we will have gridlock where nothing major gets done. In both cases we make excuses by holding up the misguided notion that somehow we should have bipartisan decision making, a covert admission that nothing can get done without caving in to the minority, and allowing them to delay and distort the process and the result.

The second column, also in the New York Times, is by the noted historian David M Kennedy. He points out that the years from 1870 to 1900 were in many ways quite similar to our recent history in that there was divided government for many years, and major shifts in popular sentiment at elections. There were, as there are now, major issues to be dealt with at the time, "Yet the era's political system proved unable to grapple effectively with any of those matters." There was then, perhaps even more than there is now, "abject political paralysis."

Kennedy points out that the so-called Gilded Age ended with the appearance of the Progressive Movement and leaders such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who were able to force the needed changes in our government. Unfortunately, Presidential leadership did not change Congress. It was instead rather like a deus ex machina that swooped in to rescue a floundering system without actually changing anything. The desperate cry for strong Presidential leadership has remained, over the more than 100 years since, the only apparent solution to a dysfunctional Congress, with Imperial Presidents growing stronger and stronger.

Finally, a reader of my blog sent me an email saying that for him and many others, the problem with government is the lack of accountability and effective management of the bureaucracy. He points to the US Postal Service, NASA, the environmental regulatory agencies that failed to prevent the BP oil spill, the overlapping and conflicting regulatory activities of the different agencies, such as those dealing with food production, and so on. First there has always been waste and mismanagement in bureaucracies around the world: it is to some extent just the nature of the beast.

In the case of the Federal bureaucracy, however, there is an additional consideration related to the above dysfunctional Congress. In our system the built in confusion as to who is in charge of the bureaucracy makes effective management very difficult. Is the bureaucracy responsible to the President, who is supposed to execute the laws, or to the House or to the Senate, who make the laws? The poor bureaucrat does not really know, and gets conflicting pressures from all three of these sources, even down to the staffs of individual Senators and Congressmen. It is little wonder that in this situation the bureaucrat, without any clear lines of authority or responsibility, ends up being in the pocket of the industry they are supposed to regulate, and able to get away with poor management. These are not issues separate from the above dysfunctional Congress.

The ultimate conclusion is that we need a new system.  Enough.