American Hangover

Recently, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a freshman from Minneapolis, has drawn attention for anti-Semitic comments that House Democrats could not bring themselves to condemn formally. Party leadership was ignored in meetings about how to handle the controversy, and, by and large, the party and its aspiring standard-bearers sided with the freshman out of fear of the grassroots.

Again, this is not part of the program.

Congressional disorder seems to be a bipartisan affliction. During their previous six years in the majority, GOP leaders constantly had to fight off revolts from the Tea Party. Eventually, the right flank of the House GOP dethroned Speaker John Boehner. His replacement, Paul Ryan, retired last year after serving as little more than a caretaker speaker. If, by some miracle, House Republicans manage to retake the lower chamber next year, it is an easy bet that the circus will continue.

So what?

This kind of behavior undermines the purpose that the parties serve in our form of government, and many people do not especially mind. Americans have, since the start, had an uneasy relationship with their political parties, tolerating them as mainly a nuisance, claques that pursue the interests of their wealthy donors or the ambitions of their leaders. But parties actually do a lot more than this.

[Arthur Brooks: Why we don’t have the leaders we want]

Ideally, we would like our politics to be organized around big ideas. Your vote for Candidate A over Candidate B would be a show of support for his policy proposals. And if enough people vote similarly, those policies will, one hopes, be enacted. This is how representative government can become a republican form of government, where the people actually rule. Those whom they elect carry out the program they campaign on.

But this requires institutions, which in the United States are the political parties. The Republican and Democratic parties are, at least to some degree, organized around big ideas. Generally speaking, Republicans stand for lower taxes and stronger national defense, while Democrats stand for more generous social welfare benefits and a more dovish foreign policy. This means electing more Republicans will usually result in lower taxes and stronger defense and electing more Democrats yields greater social welfare and more diplomacy. The parties, in other words, elevate our vote choices, from decisions just about candidates to preferences about public policy.

For this to happen, members of a party have to agree beforehand on how they will behave once they are in government. If they break this agreement, or otherwise act in erratic and unpredictable ways, democratic accountability is lost, since candidate support becomes divorced from policy implications. Keeping party members loyal, in turn, requires a series of institutional checks, carrots and sticks, to reward those who stick to the plan and punish those who do not.

Meanwhile, politicians have an interest in supporting parties for several reasons. They reduce uncertainty in vote choices by providing information to voters, thus ensuring candidates generally know what they have to do and say to get re-elected. In Congress, a regular system of punishments and rewards creates clear and reliable paths for career advancement within the legislature. Parties regulate political ambition, which is very useful for more established politicians who don’t have to compete with those trying to jump from dog catcher to president. You have to follow their rules if you want their nomination.

So, by imposing some order on democratic chaos, parties serve not only the broader electorate, but also the political elites who seek to lead it. This was at the core of their initial design in the 19th century. For instance, the party leadership usually selected candidates for major offices. The presidential nomination was actually controlled by the delegates to the quadrennial nominating convention, which made for some fascinating stories, as would-be candidates had to win over party regulars at the convention. In addition, many Northern states developed political machines that regulated who could be nominated for all manner of offices, even down to local judges. If you wanted to get into politics, you had to go through the party.

The party in Congress also wielded enormous power. Henry Clay was the first speaker of the House who saw that the job had the potential for leadership purposes, and he wielded its authority for the good of the National Republicans, who later became the Whigs. Clay was one of several powerful speakers to emerge in the 19th century, heading a list that includes James K. Polk, Schuyler Colfax, James G. Blaine, Thomas Reed, and Joseph Cannon. The last two were enormously powerful, so much so that one could call them “bosses” of the House.

[Related: Congress tries to reclaim power after Trump emergency declaration]

While we think of the Senate today as being a body in which members are supposed to be independent of the grubbiness of party politics, the 19th-century Senate was deeply intertwined with it. Prior to the 17th Amendment, state legislatures selected senators, who, once in office, had substantial power, enough to make them bosses of their states. But their rule was not absolute. They ultimately had to keep the party back home happy or be denied re-election.

Admittedly, this system had a lot of defects. Political corruption had become rampant by the end of the 19th century as the parties abused their privileged position in government. Nevertheless, strong party organizations could weed out would-be politicians who refused to toe the party line. It may have produced crooks and second-raters such as Blaine and Warren G. Harding, but characters like Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and even Donald Trump would never have gotten anywhere in a political system as thoroughly regulated as that of the 19th century.

The country decided that the corruption associated with strong party control of politics was too great to bear, and began stripping power away from them during the Progressive Era. No longer do party organizations control nominations for offices. Those have instead been sent to voters, acting either through primaries or open caucuses. Progressive Republicans and Democrats revolted against Speaker Cannon in 1910, and power to shape the party’s legislative agenda migrated away from the speaker’s office to chairmen of congressional committees. The direct election of senators liberated the upper chamber from its dependence upon state legislatures, and by extension the parties that dominated them.

The decline of party organizations has continued over the past 40 or so years. The party’s control over presidential nominations has disappeared almost entirely; witness Trump, himself not a Republican until quite recently, winning the GOP nomination in 2016, and Sanders, who does not think of himself as a Democrat, capturing more than 40 percent of Democratic votes that year. Moreover, the McCain-Feingold Act, by outlawing unlimited soft money donations, greatly hampered the ability of state parties to manage and fund campaigns on the ground and gave an opening to super PACs, which are totally independent of the parties.

The party has regained some power in Congress, though. Starting in the 1970s, the independence of committee chairmen in the House was curbed and more power was given to the party caucus, and thus the party leadership. Committee chairmen who consistently buck the party can be ousted. Similarly, members who regularly misbehave can be removed from key committees, while good partisans can be promoted to the most important spots, where the major deals on crucial legislation get made. The leadership architecture in the House, with its network of whip positions, is an attractive opportunity for many members, offering an inducement for them to follow the party program. All in all, members have a strong incentive to play the inside game in the House of Representatives: Follow the basic guidelines of the party, and in due course you will be rewarded with a share of political or policymaking power.

Yet the influence that congressional leaders exercise over backbenchers is still limited. After all, how attractive is the inside game when voters seem consistently to prefer outsiders? If your constituents are in a foul mood about government, it’s not a great campaign pitch to explain to them all the important work you have done on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Perhaps the most significant illustration of the limits of the inside game came with the 2014 defeat of Eric Cantor by Dave Brat in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. Cantor, by 2014 the House majority leader, was the ultimate insider, until voters kicked him out.

Meanwhile, the outside game has growing appeal for ambitious members of Congress. With the rise of cable news and social media, it’s easy to get attention as a congressional outsider, even if you don’t have any real substantive power or influence within the chamber. All you have to do is be willing to say or tweet something incendiary or stupid. The Internet has also made it easier to finance campaigns as an outsider, since vast networks of small-dollar donors can easily replace the interest groups who have long funded re-election bids. The outside game can likewise be a path to political promotion. Ted Cruz, Trump, and Sanders all were unapologetic outsiders who ran explicitly against the status quo in the 2016 presidential campaign. They won a combined 56 percent of the vote in the 2016 Democratic and Republican primaries. And nowadays, gadflies such as Ocasio-Cortez can make headlines, not with the party’s blessing, but explicitly against its wishes.

Without calling for a return to the smoke-filled rooms of the olden days, we can still admit that this anything-goes approach is a problem. Political parties are essential to democratic accountability. For them to serve their function, they have to have power over their members, to regulate their behavior for the good of the whole party and, by extension, the country at large. Right now, the parties seem to lack such authority, which has resulted in more rogues in our politics and less ability for the voters to ensure they are voting for a policy agenda that can actually be carried out.

Some public intellectuals, such as Jonathan Rauch of the Atlantic, believe the chaos in the House is a sign that we need to bring back earmarks. This was a budgetary device that allowed individual members of Congress to direct how a relatively small amount of government money, anywhere from six to eight figures, would be directed in their districts. The argument is that earmarks were a way to keep House members in line by giving them a bonus for following the dictates of the party. This, the thinking goes, might bring governing stability back to the House.

[Also read: House ‘modernization’ plan: Raise lawmakers’ pay, bring back earmarks]

The idea has merit, but it would require substantial changes to the original earmark system to be successful. While today they are touted as a way to get members to follow the party program, earmarks were enormously inefficient at this task when they were actually employed. Members consistently demanded greater and greater earmarks to vote the “correct” way, hence the rapid spike in costs by the time Congress began pulling back on them a decade ago. Another problem with the old use of earmarks was the decentralized way they were doled out, via appropriations subcommittees. If the goal is for the party leadership to corral members, then the leaders, not the “cardinals” of the Appropriations Committee, should have control over them. And indeed, the number of earmarks was so numerous that not even the cardinals, being appropriations subcommittee chairmen, could oversee their distribution; many decisions were left to staffers, further blunting the parties’ ability to temper member behavior.

Another problem with earmarks is that the vast majority of members don’t actually need them to be induced to play the inside game. Most are comfortable in the traditional routes one takes to acquire power and influence in Congress. The trouble is really just a handful, maybe a couple dozen members between the two parties. In an age of hyperpolarization, where the majority party can expect no help from the minority, it does not take a lot of backbenchers to thwart the agenda of the entire party caucus. A lot of these members will probably not be won over by earmarks. They like the attention that comes with the outside game.

Where does that leave us? Perhaps it’s time to forgo the carrot in favor of the stick. Maybe we need to impose greater penalties on those who don’t do the minimum work necessary for the party’s success. That would require a more expansive role for the party than it presently possesses. For instance, one approach would be to expand the role of the campaign committees, which are the campaign organs in the House and Senate that coordinate with their members for re-election. They are still tightly constrained by McCain-Feingold, and their major activities now are to serve as independent-expenditure entities, a la the Club for Growth or Senate Majority PAC. Why not allow the committees to have unlimited coordination with candidates? That would take the burdens off many members to raise funds themselves and give the party greater leverage over member behavior. Leadership can give wayward members a simple ultimatum: If you want us to work hard on your behalf during campaign season, you have to work with us while we are trying to govern. A related change could be to encourage the campaign committees to intervene more frequently in party primaries, with an implied threat that members who consistently buck the party line should expect their fellow caucus members to support an alternative candidate next time.

There is probably no better way to reform member behavior. Every elected politician wants above all else to be re-elected. Right now, the parties have very little influence on whether that happens, which is why so many members so gleefully defy the party leadership. If the party gains some measure of control over candidate re-election campaigns, they can also gain control over member behavior in government. And the best way to influence elections in 2019 is through money. Campaigns are incredibly expensive to finance, and politicians are desperate for new sources of revenue.

This would, admittedly, require changes to campaign finance law. The stranglehold that McCain-Feingold has placed on the party organizations needs to be loosened, and the parties should acquire additional powers beyond soft money, such as the ability to finance the campaigns of their candidates directly. That might leave some Americans a little queasy, as we are naturally dubious about the intersection of money and politics. But look at the disaster that our politics has become since McCain-Feingold was enacted in 2002. Isn’t it time to consider giving the parties back a measure of control?

Jay Cost is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.