Do the individual timidity of senators and representatives and their refusal to defy partisan pressures explain the failure of Congress to address key national issues, or is it that polarization has structurally locked the House and Senate into prioritizing each party’s interest over the national interest?
For over a year I have been having a running debate over what’s wrong with Congress with my old friend and former Washington Post colleague Steven Pearlstein, now a professor of public affairs at George Mason University.
Steve faults the lack of bravery and integrity and the unwillingness to defend congressional prerogatives. I see the problem as a result of affective polarization in the form of partisan hostility, if not hatred.
Steve, who is also the director of the Fixing Congress program at Penn Washington, is working on a book in which he writes:
The list of major issues unaddressed and unresolved is now so long it would keep a functioning Congress busy for years. Runaway budget deficits. The exploding wealth and income gap between rich and everyone else. The housing shortage. Record trade deficits. A failing public education system. A shortage of affordable housing and a public education system that fails half its students. A health care system that wildly overspends and under delivers. A Social Security program on the brink of insolvency. Climate change. Artificial intelligence and the prospect of widespread job loss. What to do about regulating the internet, social media and cryptocurrency.
Article I of the Constitution suggests that it is the duty of Congress to lead the way: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
Given this failure to act, Steve argues, “wonky as it may be, fixing Congress turns out to be the meta-issue of our time.”
So far no major disagreement, although my approach would be different.
Where my friend and I part ways is that he flatly rejects “the most common and plausible-sounding explanation,” which is that “partisan polarization that has taken hold in Congress and prevented it from acting is merely a reflection of the polarization that has taken hold in the country itself, with voters sorting themselves into warring partisan tribes that are increasingly divided by ideology, geography, race, gender, income and religion.”
Why reject the polarization explanation I subscribe to?
Despite all the polarization, a majority of all voters consistently tell pollsters they want their representatives to accept reasonable compromises. The outlines of such compromises, in fact, are well understood by those working these issues. Such compromises have been well vetted by a policy community that includes think tanks, academics and affected interest groups. And polling routinely shows they are supported by a majority of voters.
In Pearlstein’s vision, the solution is straightforward: The good and decent men and women on both sides of the aisle in Congress must stop cowering, join forces and stand firm for bipartisanship and cooperation:
To some, this may sound old-fashioned, expecting members of Congress to behave as leaders and stewards of the nation’s political system, to see their jobs as not simply to reflect the views and passions of the voters but to help shape those views and direct the passions in constructive ways.
They can’t all, Steve writes,
be Websters, Clays and Tafts, modern-day profiles in courage. But is it really too much to ask that our so-called political leaders appeal to our better angels and leave our politics no worse off than how they found it?
Sadly, I say, Steve is missing the mark here.
To dismiss or minimize the role of polarization is to fail to recognize the degree to which it dominates the political process. To argue that the solution is for the few and the proud to defy polarization is like telling a football player with a broken leg to stop whining and get back on the field.
The argument that voters want compromise fails on two counts. First, poll respondents will come up with League of Women Voters-approved answers endorsing compromise. But many of those voters are not being honest: Studies show that many voters really see “compromise” as selecting their own favored choice.
A June 2014 Pew study found widespread support for compromise, but with a gigantic caveat: Consistent liberals on average contended that under a fair negotiation, President Barack Obama, then in office, “should get two-thirds of what he wants, meeting congressional Republicans only one-third of the way. And 16 percent of consistent liberals think Obama should obtain 90 percent or more of what he wants in these deals.”
Conversely, “consistent conservatives say that ideally, congressional Republicans should get 66 percent of what they want, while Obama should get just 34 percent of what he wants. Nearly a quarter (22 percent) of consistent conservatives think that Republicans should get 90 percent or more of what they seek.”
The headline on a 2013 Pew Report put it bluntly: “Public Wants Compromise, but Not on Issues They Care About.” In other words, what many voters call a compromise is, in fact, a win for their own beliefs and values.
Finally, as terrible as it sounds, when Steve calls on members of the House and Senate to be brave and defy partisan pressure, he is in fact calling on many of them to commit political suicide.
An overwhelming majority of House members run in districts that are safe in the general election, where the only threat to an incumbent is from a more ideologically extreme challenger in the primary.
As I wrote in March:
Of the 435 House districts, The Cook Political Report identifies 36 as competitive, broken down as 17 tossups, 15 leaning Democratic and four leaning Republican. Adding the eight likely Democratic and 17 likely Republican districts, which are much less likely to be competitive, brings the total to 61, or a measly 14 percent of all 435 members.
Steve, who is smarter than I am and in many ways knows more than I do, has a complex counter to the argument that the fear of getting primaried inhibits bipartisanship, which he summarizes in his book:
So when members claim that fear of being primaried is the reason they can’t engage in reasonable compromise, that’s not the full story. What they really believe, but don’t dare say out loud, is that any risk to their re-election is too much risk and that they can’t be expected to do their jobs without a lifetime job guarantee.
I asked a group of experts, former members of the House and scholars and political scientists who focus on Congress, a mix chosen by Steve and me together, the following question:
How much weight would you give these two views of the difficulties of Congress to take action in support of national interests?
1. It’s a failure of individual members to assertively seek out common ground and possible bipartisan solutions, a failure based on a fear of angering primary voters, donors and leadership which does not want to compromise. Congressional inaction could be broken if at first a small cadre of members led the way toward cross-party cooperation, a step that would improve their re-election chances with the result that others would join them.
2. The problem is systemic, not rooted in individual failures of nerve. Polarization prevents across-the-aisle cooperation, with the combination of intensely partisan primary voters wielding power in the growing number of safe seats, donors inclined to support more extreme members and acquiescence to a politics of party hostility the safe route. Some method of breaking polarization is required to free up Congress.
Most of the experts said both, but overwhelmingly they gave more weight to polarization as the prime factor.
Take Charlie Dent, a Republican who represented a Pennsylvania House seat from 2005 to 2018 (one of Steve’s picks):
Both statements are true, but I would weigh the second statement more heavily. Since most members overwhelmingly represent very safe districts, their need to seek bipartisan compromise creates enormous political risks. The few members in swing districts must demonstrate a capacity for bipartisan compromise to survive politically.
House caucus leaders tend to represent very safe districts and share the same instincts as their safe seat members.
On the Democratic side of the aisle, another Steve choice, Tom Daschle, who served as a Democratic representative from South Dakota from 1979 to 1987 and a senator from 1987 to 2005 — as well as a Senate Democratic leader during his last decade of service — expressed a view similar to Dent’s:
These views are not mutually exclusive. Both are true. But I give more weight to No. 2 (polarization) with a caveat. You begin it by saying the problem is systemic, not rooted in individual failures of nerve. The problem is both. Courage is lacking. As a Democrat, I may be biased, but I believe that is especially true on the Republican side over the last decade.
But I strongly agree that breaking polarization is required to free up Congress. That is 60 percent of the equation. The other 40 percent requires a willingness on the part of both leadership and membership to compromise. Compromise is the oxygen of democracy. There is far too little of it today.
Some experts stressed a third factor underpinning congressional inaction: a powerful interest group community, including many trade associations and major corporations that prefer maintenance of the status quo.
Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute whom Steve chose as well, emailed me to say:
There also is the matter of entrenched interests that have set up shop in Washington, D.C., and lobby and pressure Congress to not enact certain reforms. The example of the AARP lobbying against Social Security reform is illustrative. The program is running out of funds, but AARP opposes a range of policy options.
Kosar then went on to describe forces undermining congressional initiative that are directly linked to polarization:
The competition between the Democrats and Republicans to win or hold control of the House and Senate produces incentives to block action. If you are a Democrat you often feel pressure to vote against G.O.P.-led bills to stop the other party from succeeding, and vice versa.
Beyond those factors, Kosar added, it certainly is the case that our primary elections frequently send legislators to Washington who are not particularly open to compromise:
Primaries scare the legislators and discourage them from voting for any bills or amendments that might antagonize any of the 20 to 25 percent of Americans who vote in primaries, some of whom are hard-core, single-issue partisans who view compromise by senators and congresspersons as surrender.
In today’s polarized climate and with a majority of districts safe for one party or the other, the political threat to an incumbent Democrat is a primary challenge from his or her left and for a Republican incumbent from his or her right. The other party is almost irrelevant.
Eric Schickler, a political scientist at Berkley, argued in an email:
The current challenges are largely systemic and not rooted in individual failures of nerves. The big issue is the electoral and career incentives that most members currently face. Polarization, combined with the intense competition for majority status in an era of slim majorities and the nationalization of politics, creates strong incentives for teamsmanship that make it very difficult for cross-party cooperation — at least on those highly visible issues where the parties are far apart and the stakes are highest.
Schickler offered one pro-Steve caveat:
The “small cadre of members” is potentially relevant in the following sense. Given majorities are so tight, if there were a bloc of members across parties who were organized and insisted on certain changes to how the House and Senate operate, that bloc could have a lot of leverage.
However, Schickler continued,
right now, you get groups like the Problem Solvers Caucus that claim to do this, but the members are (for the most part) not willing to seize procedural control — which is what you would need to really change how Congress works.
The reason that centrists do not try to seize back agenda control is their electoral incentives — the need to win primaries, court donors and stay on the good side of party leaders means that these members will engage (for the most part) in only limited forms of disloyalty.
Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, one of the most thoughtful scholars of congressional politics, responded to my inquiries by email:
The short answer to your question is that the polarized electoral process is a formidable structural barrier to bipartisan cooperation in Congress. Perhaps a cadre of courageous (and fed-up) members could overcome it, but for now it looks more like a “project Hail Mary.”
In his long answer, Jacobson argued that at least as far back as 2000, his own calculations published in his 2010 article “Party Polarization in National Politics: The Electoral Connection” in the journal Congress & the Presidency, showed that the interaction between party elites and increasingly polarized voters began an “interactive and mutually reinforcing” process: “the more elites polarized, the more voters polarized in response, and vice versa.”
Since then,
conditions encouraging polarization have only gotten stronger: an electorate sorted into even more distinct and divergent coalitions, the sorting of voters into politically homogenous districts and states, vastly greater campaign funds wielded by partisan and ideological entities, the president-centered nationalization of political conflict, the increasingly fragmented and partisan media environment and the rise of social media entrepreneurs aiming to monetize political fear and rage.
The result, Jacobson contended, is a system
that encourages partisan rigidity in Congress, if only because party fealty is so unlikely to be punished. Indeed, the contrary: breaking with the team is much more dangerous to that large majority of members whose only electoral risk is a primary challenge.
Another scholar of politics and Congress, Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at Brookings, summarized her answer to my query in an email:
I put far stronger weight on your second explanation (impact of parties/polarization) than your first (weak-kneed lawmakers). That said, I wouldn’t completely discount the first explanation, and I think the second explanation (especially its apocalyptic view of polarization) goes a bit too far.
Binder elaborated her view in an illuminating 1020-word analysis, too long for this column but so good that I am providing a link to it.
Steve is a good friend, so I am giving most of the last words to him. He read an early draft of this column and sent me some comments by email.
One unrecognized fact, he argued, is that there are many issues
that aren’t so politically salient that members would be punished if a significant number participated in finding a solution acceptable to a bipartisan majority.
Regulating kids’ use of the internet. Raising minimum wage to $12. Encouraging use of clean energy and expanding the interstate grid. Regulating crypto. Getting money out of politics.
There is broad public agreement on reasonable policy proposals on many such issues that, if enough members voted for them, would not necessarily result in their losing a primary. Did anyone lose a seat because of the CHIPS Act? Infrastructure? No Child Left Behind? Sentencing Reform?
Second, he continued,
is that you have sort of set up a false choice in structuring the column: Either it’s (1) the voters’, particularly primary voters’ fault because they are so partisan and polarized and demanding, reinforced by segmented media and media bubbles; or (2) the members who are courageous enough to push back and use their leadership platform to change the political environment on the outside (get money out of politics, make all primaries open primaries, end gerrymandering, push back rhetorically against polarization and hyperpartisanship rather than contribute to it) or to change Congress’s internal rules, norms, expectations, schedules so they spend more time in Washington, return to regular order and return power, initiative and the ability to legislate back to members and committees.
Whether it’s 60-40 or 50-50 I’m not sure is something anyone can answer and sort of misses the point. Obviously, it’s both, and the two create a vicious self-reinforcing cycle that accelerate both trends.
The issue “isn’t just a lack of courage or seriousness about doing their jobs,” in Steve’s analysis; it’s “not doing the things they could get away with politically that all of them would do together (protection in numbers) that could have a material effect in making the institution functional again.”
Why don’t they?
Fear. Lack of imagination. Leaders who have bullied and sweet-talked them into thinking if they could just sweep the table, things would get better. (They don’t.) The answer isn’t obvious why members won’t do things that are in their own interest, won’t hurt their party and would help the country.
The answer to the mystery, Steve writes,
is that this is a collective action problem. It is not in the interest of any individual to take the risk of challenging leadership and challenging the hyperpartisan norms and trying to fix it.
But it is in the interest of all of them collectively. So if enough of them agree to hold hands and jump and use their votes to demand it (like the Freedom Caucus uses their votes), you might be able to recruit a larger number and solve the collective action problem.
At this point I would only make two points.
First: Raising the minimum wage, encouraging the use of clean energy and regulating crypto are deeply enmeshed in the polarization of virtually everything.
Second, the best way to achieve the goal of creating circumstances in which members of Congress would be willing to compromise their own interests, defy their party and focus on helping the country would be to break the back of polarization.
Asking elected officials to hold hands and jump off the cliff is much easier for an outsider to say than it is for them to actually do.
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