On July 12, 2006, not long before the biennial congressional elections, a panel discussion was held at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C. The purpose was to discuss The Broken Branch, a new book about Congress written by Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann. These men are noted scholars who have been involved in politics and government for years. In addition to the two authors, two former Speakers of the House were on the panel: Thomas Foley, Democrat and Newt Gingrich, Republican.
The following quotes and paraphrases were taken by me from a video recording of the proceedings available on the AEI website. The discussion continued for more than an hour so I am offering only selected highlights. Please remember that what you are about to read reflects two centuries of interaction between political parties. Here are the highlights:
· [Congress] "is broken at this point and needs enormous changes to bring it back to where it should be and needs to be if we are going to make our Constitutional system work."—Ornstein
· Collapse of Regular Order, Collapse of the Deliberative Process, and Collapse of Oversight. Taken together these three symptoms spell Total Collapse of Congress.—Ornstein, paraphrase
· "Ends justify whatever means necessary." the general attitude of the controlling party.—Ornstein
· "...battered Congress syndrome." The Congress keeps getting slapped around by the Executive and keeps coming back for more.—Ornstein, paraphrase
· "From the initial Constitutional design through the initial century, Congress struggled to find its way, to first of all, to create political parties, which were never anticipated in the Constitution to find the right balance in division of labor between parties, committees, and individuals."—Mann
· [The Framers wanted to] "avoid dictatorship by designing a machine [Congress] so inefficient that no dictator could force it to work, and they achieved brilliance, because we can barely get it to work voluntarily."—Gingrich
· "...failure to do aggressive effective oversight disserves the country."—Gingrich
· [America is]"entering a cycle in which the challenges we face are a greater mismatch with our potential solutions than any time since April of 1861."—Gingrich
· [Congress faces]"...a totality of complexity vastly beyond the current system’s capacity to deal with."—Gingrich
· "Congress really has to think about how fundamentally wrong the current system is."—Gingrich
· "When you have incumbents who get reelected by focusing on gimmicks—gerrymandering is a gimmick, mass mailings are a gimmick, raising money from lobbyists in Washington is a gimmick—you are depriving the system of the legitimate constant reassurance that it has earned its authority from the American people and this is an enormous challenge. It then leads to a culture in which members focus on their own interests rather than the country."—Gingrich
· "The Legislative Branch has to rethink how it’s organized and how it functions. The appropriations process has become absurd, and the idea that you can have thousands of earmarks micromanaging the national government down to the two-hundred thousand dollar items to buy votes is a fundamental assault, and the correct answer is the American people to start firing people."—Gingrich
· "...jet travel, the internet, blogging, and the 24-hour news cycle" have made it difficult to work together.—Foley, paraphrase
· "If Congress fails, democracy fails."—Foley
· "We are partisans and we have to be—it is the nature of the body."—Foley
Ornstein, Mann, Gingrich, and Foley paint a bleak picture. I think it is fair to say that they all agree with Gingrich’s point: "It then leads to a culture in which members focus on their own interests rather than the country."
But Gingrich got the cause and effect relationship reversed. congressmen always focus on their own interests, not the country’s. Through their political power congressmen have created the culture of Congress, and they have prostituted our election system with the "gimmicks" Gingrich talked about so they can preserve their power.
Congress, the work product of the congressmen who inhabit our Two-Party System, which the Framers did not want and did not design, is in shambles—that is if you want a government that obeys the Will of the People. Generally speaking, the problems these men discussed are due to the infestation of the political parties by corrupt congressmen.
The members of the Legislative Branch, at least during the careers of these four men, too often did not act in the interests of the nation. They, the members of Congress, fought with each other, usually along party lines, to increase and preserve their power. They all worshipped the God of Reelection and Personal Gain. They were guilty, in some cases, of criminal behavior and in other cases of just plain dereliction of duty.
I have read The Broken Branch by Ornstein and Mann and it does an excellent job of detailing the internal problems created for Congress by its own members. Let me repeat, the problems of Congress were created by the members of Congress, and they are the leaders of their respective political parties. And of course these problems have their largest impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. Congressional representatives rarely lose their homes, their savings, their jobs, their retirement benefits, or their health insurance.
The Broken Branch is practically devoid of ideas for improving the situation. I did find this quotation in an article in the Washington Post. Ornstein said:
...But ultimately, only a credible threat that the public is prepared to throw the rascals out will change the ways in which politicians in Washington operate.
Ornstein’s approach, and Gingrich’s, is just another way of saying, "Stay the course," an infamous slogan that will become synonymous with incompetence, or negligence, of the worst kind—the kind that causes the destruction of innocent lives, whether it is in Iraq or New Orleans.
Ornstein and Gingrich stop short of explaining just what the public will use to replace the "rascals." The only choice our political parties give us in any election is "more of the same." The congressional election of November 2006, and the events since that time, in my opinion justify my dismissal of Ornstein’s solution. To the degree possible under the present system of elections rigged by political parties, gerrymandering, money, and ambition, the public did "throw the rascals out," and nothing changed.
Proof of the inadequacy of the 2006 elections can be found in a recent book, The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich. Bacevich made a few comments about Congress and its partisan behavior:
No one today seriously believes that the actions of the legislative branch are informed by a collective determination to promote the common good. For this very reason, periodic congressional efforts to curb presidential power are mostly for show and mostly inspired by a desire to gain some partisan advantage.
The chief remaining function of Congress is to ensure the reelection of its members, best achieved by shameless gerrymandering, doling out prodigious amounts of political pork, and seeing to the protection of certain vested interests. Testifying to the spectacular effectiveness of these techniques, in 2006, 93 percent of senators and representatives running for reelection won. The United States has become a de facto one-party state, with the legislative branch permanently controlled by an Incumbent’s Party.
Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism, p. 69
I agree with Bacevich’s observations and I especially liked his "Incumbent’s Party" idea. I wish I had thought of it.
So the election of 2006 has come and gone and many citizens worked hard then and since then, but nothing has really changed. Our nation is still faced with the same serious problems and has done nothing to fundamentally change things. Our future is no brighter. Ornstein, Mann, Gingrich, and Foley could have been describing today's congress. Four years have passed and almost nothing has changed.
So, if everybody works harder for the 2010 election will things be any better? Will the current system ever produce meaningful change?