Can this government be fixed? Three steps that might help
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Can this government be fixed? Three steps that might help
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - The third threatened government shutdown this year
was narrowly averted. Congress' deficit "supercommittee" is
apparently on a track to nowhere. And there has been contentious
debate but little action on the proposals to help the jobless.
Can this government be fixed?
Americans are increasingly frustrated by the disconnect between
what they say they want in their government, and what they see
happening in Washington. A majority want compromise; they see
polarization. They want economic and other problems addressed; they
see gridlock and a series of perils-of-Pauline cliffhangers. By a
record 4-1 ratio in a new Gallup Poll, they express dissatisfaction
with the way the country is being governed.
"We are in this period of great anxiety because of economic
uncertainty … and that has people worried about their future," says
Dan Glickman, a former Democratic congressman and Cabinet secretary
affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center. "What they need is
confidence building, and what I don't think they sense from our
government system is confidence building. Everything they see is
division."
The result, he says, has "got people either nervous as hell or
disengaged."
While President Obama and congressional leaders wrestle over
immediate crises - a stopgap deal approved by the Senate late
Monday has put off the latest budget showdown until Nov. 18 - a
growing number of think tanks and advocacy groups with such names
as No Labels, Americans Elect, Third Way and Ruck.us are trying to
address underlying factors that fuel Washington's partisan
stalemate.
They note three "wave" elections in a row shifted political
power but failed to fundamentally change the way Washington works,
or doesn't work. They have some ideas for steps that could
help.
Perhaps the most significant would change the way congressional
lines are drawn, making more districts competitive and increasing
the odds that centrist candidates could prevail. Revising the rules
for Senate filibusters could prevent a few senators from routinely
blocking action supported by a majority. And changing the
congressional calendar could encourage legislators to build
personal relationships with colleagues from the other party.
"No one of them would turn the world upside down," William
Galston, a former White House adviser now at the Brookings
Institution, says of a laundry list of ideas collected in a joint
study by Brookings and the Hoover Institution. "But if you did a
few of them, you would probably see some changes in a relatively
short period of time."
Below, three measures some experts say could make a government
that often seems dysfunctional work better.
Drawing the lines
The center aisle that divides Republicans and Democrats in
Congress has become a chasm.
There was a time when the Democratic caucus included Southern
conservatives and the Republican caucus included New England
moderates, making it easier to forge bipartisan coalitions.
No more.
These days, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, Ben
Nelson of Nebraska, is more liberal than the most moderate
Republican, Susan Collins of Maine. A National Journal
study concluded political polarization is the highest in the three
decades it has analyzed congressional voting patterns. The
Brookings-Hoover study concluded it was the worst since the
1890s.
One reason: Many congressional districts are drawn to be
overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic, in part to protect
incumbents. That means one party's nominee is virtually assured of
winning the general election, so the only contests that matter are
the primaries - and primaries tend to be dominated by the most
conservative Republican voters and the most liberal Democratic
ones.
Even with the turmoil of redistricting, the nonpartisan Cook
Political Report rates only 53 of the nation's 435
congressional districts as competitive in 2012, plus 61 more that
might become competitive. In other words, control of three-fourths
of the House isn't considered in question.
"As the threat to elected officials comes more from primary
challenges than general-election contests, the lack of cooperation
seems to have become more evident and more consequential," says GOP
pollster Whit Ayres, co-founder of a group called Resurgent
Republic. "The people who are willing to work across the aisle and
the people who are within shouting distance of the center of the
political spectrum have gotten fewer and fewer."
In the wake of the 2010 Census, states are redrawing
congressional lines to reflect population changes. A few have
launched efforts to devise districts driven more by geography than
politics - likely resulting in more competitive contests and, more
centrist lawmakers.
California voters last year overwhelmingly approved a landmark
initiative that turned redistricting over to a citizens'
commission, charged with defining districts that share a "community
of interests." Florida voters passed ballot amendments that
required districts reflect existing governmental and geographical
boundaries.
A few other states - including Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa,
Minnesota, New Jersey and Washington - have tried various
approaches to reduce partisan manipulation of redistricting, with
varying degrees of success.
They are, however, the exceptions. "The majority of states, from
the perspective of most good-government reformers, are continuing
to move in the wrong direction," says David Wasserman, who tracks
congressional redistricting for the Cook Report.
Texas Republicans have drawn a map that chops Travis County
among five congressional districts to divide Austin's Democratic
voters and weaken an incumbent Democrat. Maryland Democrats are
considering a plan that would split the state's western
congressional district three ways to weaken an incumbent
Republican.
Another experiment being tried in California: open primaries, in
which the top two finishers run against one another in the general
election, regardless of party affiliation. That could give voters
the option of more centrist contenders even in solidly Republican
or Democratic districts. Washington state adopted a similar system
in 2008.
"Watch over time," says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, "and
I think California may lead the way, as it has on some other
issues." On Monday, former Phoenix mayor Paul Johnson filed papers
for a ballot initiative in 2012 that would establish open primaries
in Arizona.
Changing the rules
When Tom Udall was elected to the Senate from New Mexico in
2008, he was dismayed at the difficulty of getting things moving
even when most senators supported a measure.
"People want us to work with each other; they want us to put
aside our differences and find common ground," he says. "But now we
have an entrenched group that is very ideological, and they are
putting sand in the gears."
Republicans routinely use filibusters to block action in the
Democrat-controlled Senate, threatening endless debate that can
only be cut off by commanding 60 votes. It is a tactic Democrats
used, albeit not as often, when Republicans were in control.
What once was a rarely used maneuever has become routine. The
Senate historian's office reports that cloture motions - efforts to
shut off debate - rarely were filed more than a few times a year in
the 19th century. That number began to expand dramatically in the
1970s and then exploded in the late 1980s.
In the last session of Congress, there were 91 cloture votes on
everything from the health care overhaul to the START nuclear
treaty to a string of presidential appointments.
At the beginning of this year, Udall and several other
Democratic senators offered a plan, which they said could be
enacted by majority vote, aimed at reducing the number of
filibusters. The proposal would have limited filibusters to final
action on a bill, not to procedural motions, and would have
required senators to remain on the floor during a debate designed
to block a bill.
"It's like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," the 1939
Frank Capra classic in which Jimmy Stewart wages a filibuster on
the Senate floor, Udall says. "The core of our proposal would be to
force senators to stand up and talk."
The plan won the support of 44 and 46 senators on key votes.
Udall hopes to pursue the changes down the road.
"The system is broken and dysfunctional," he says, "and everyone
knows that."
Meeting the other side
Former vice president Dick Cheney disputes those who say that
Congress in some bygone day was a better, more cooperative
place.
It has become " the conventional wisdom that 30 or 40 years ago
times were much pleasanter in Washington; people got along;
Republicans liked Democrats and so forth," he told USA TODAY in an
interview about his memoir, In My Time. "Well, 40 years
ago, when I came to town, in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had been
assassinated; Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated; we had gone
through the Tet offensive in Vietnam; we had elements of the 82nd
Airborne guarding the Capitol building with machine guns. It was
not a warm and fuzzy time."
The one-time congressman from Wyoming said the system "was
designed for conflict."
Even so, others see changes in Washington's culture that have
prevented the sort of personal relationships that can help foster a
deal, or at least reduce the demonization of the other side.
"Much of the blame for the disconnect between the parties goes
to the congressional calendar, where you have members scurrying
home (to districts) on Wednesday nights or certainly by Thursday
nights," says Matt Bennett of Third Way. "They're not around on the
weekends, and the demands of fundraising means they are separated
from each other the minute the votes are over. They don't interact
at all."
The centrist think tank sent an open letter to congressional
leaders in January urging them to end the practice of having all
the Republicans sit to one side of the House chamber and all the
Democrats on the other during the State of the Union Address.
Several lawmakers took the suggestion and scrambled the seating, at
least for that night.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, co-author
of a book that labels Congress The Broken Branch, suggests
a schedule that would have lawmakers meet for three weeks, then
take one week off to return to their districts. He'd build
apartment buildings on the sites of two old hotels on Capitol Hill,
rent them to members of Congress and provide child-care facilities
to encourage them to move families.
Ornstein also endorses an Australian law that requires citizens
to vote or face a fine, guaranteeing turnout by more than
activists. And the odds of that particular idea being
implemented?
"Slim to none," he acknowledges, "and slim just left the
building."