In their new book “The Broken Branch,” The Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann and The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein articulate how the U.S. Congress is failing the American people and they lay out an agenda to help make it the functional legislative branch it was meant to be. The Examiner interviewed Mann and Ornstein to help get a better understanding of Congress’ failures.
Q Let’s just start out with the premise of your book: How is Congress failing America?
A Congress is supposed to act with vigor to pursue policies in the interest of Americans, but to do so in a deliberative process, taking time, considering alternatives, weighing and voting on options, using committees, subcommittees and the floor and doing so in both branches. It is also supposed to do so fairly, underclear rules and with all elements of the country, through all of its elected representatives involved. Congress is supposed to oversee actively whether the laws it passes are carried out faithfully and effectively by executive agencies. Congress is supposed to act as a check and balance on the executive branch, making sure that no one accumulates too much unchecked power in our system. It is not doing any of these things well at the moment — actually, it is thoroughly dysfunctional. There has been a breakdown in the “regular order” — the web of rules and norms that go back to Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson’s Manual — with votes supposed to take fifteen minutes taking three hours, done in the dead of night, with few or any amendments allowed on any bills in the House, no semblance of fairness in conference committees, and a reliance on perfect party discipline to ignore or waive normal parliamentary procedures of fairness. Thousand-page bills are brought to the floor in the dead of night, with no one having read them, and jammed through into law — the antithesis of a deliberative process. Oversight is virtually nonexistent, and there is no congressional check on the executive.
Q What are the costs of these failures to America?
A Bad process is mostly of concern to us policy wonks. But the fact is that bad process leads directly to bad policy — and examples like the Medicare prescription drug bill, the bankruptcy bill, the failures of Katrina, the failure to provide adequate body armor to our troops in Iraq — abound.
Q What are the underlying causes behind these failures?
A These pathologies did not occur overnight, and the cures won’t either. Some of the most significant elements are driven by larger trends in the society, including the culture of argument, the rise of the permanent campaign, the change of the South from Democratic dominance to Republican hegemony, the redistricting dynamic. Others have been driven by the three phenomena of partisanship, polarization and parity — with a partisanship that now is more like tribalism, a sharp and clear division of the parties ideologically and the collapse of the bipartisan center, and the fact that every election leaves close margins in Congress and a chance to achieve the majority or the risk of losing it.
Q Is one particular party to blame?
A There is plenty of blame to go around. When Democrats were in the final decade of their 40-year reign in the House, they were plenty arrogant and high-handed. We criticized them sharply for their insensitivity to the role and rights of the minority party, then the Republicans. But the past several years, under GOP rule, the process has gotten much worse, and consistently so. An ends-justify-the-means mentality, along with the sense that Republicans in Congress are first field soldiers in the president’s army before they are guardians of the legislative branch, and a tolerance of corruption, all have made the situation worse.
Q Do both parties tend to fail American when they are in power?
A We don’t hold a brief for either party. We are harshly critical of the current majority leadership, we have praised those in both parties who have advocated reform, done real oversight, and acted responsibly on ethics issues. We hope a change in majority would bring a change in attitudes and rules, but we are not sanguine that change would be real, deep or lasting. And we will be all over the Democrats’ case if it is not.
Q How has Congress’ relationship with the White House changed over the years? Has this served the public good?
A The relationship with the White House has not served the public — the demise of oversight and the lack of congressional pushback against a massive expansion of executive power are bad for Congress, bad in the endfor presidents, and especially bad for the public.
Q How can Congress reverse its course and begin to better serve America?
A There is no panacea or short-term fix. There are some rules changes that are sorely needed, to invigorate the ethics process, make earmarks transparent and earmarkers accountable, allow real time for bills to be dissected before they are voted on, have a real House schedule with 26 weeks where they are in session for five days and not running around off the Hill raising funds during those sessions, and so on. But just as important is having leaders who abide by the rules win or lose. There are outside forces that need to be reformed as well, such as the redistricting process, and looking for ways to expand turnout to tilt the legislative and political processes away from courting the ideological extremes in the party bases. But none of these changes will dramatically reduce partisanship, polarization or parity.
Q Are these reforms realistic? Do they have a chance of passing?
A Some reforms are realistic and have been drafted and honed, including several by Reps. Obey, Price, Frank and Allen, and some by Reps. Shays and Flake and Senator Obama. Many are under active consideration by the House Democrats reform panel chaired by Mike Capuano. But the bigger issues, including serious ethics reform, much less meaningful campaign fundraising changes or redistricting reform, are uphill challenges.
Q To what extent is Congressional ineptitude and corruption inevitable (considering that we’ve never not had some degree of it)?
A Of course ineptitude and corruption are not new and always present to one degree or another. But they are not always, or frequently, systematic. That is the situation now, pervasive enough that it has led us to be truly dismayed.
Q If Democrats retake the House, do you think the reforms you lay out will be implemented? Why or why not?
A We are hopeful but realistic. When Republicans took the House in 1994, they were genuinely convinced that they could and would change things for the better, opening up Congress and protecting the rights of the minority. They did make many salutary changes early, but they too began to change after just a few years. David Dreier, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, was a champion of reform and the deliberative process when he was in the minority, and has led the effort to kill reform, close off debate and cut deliberation since he has been Rules Chair. Democrats will enter the majority with the same good intentions sincerely felt. Many have been around long enough to know that change can work and actually make the Congress a better institution. But under pressure from the party base, with a small majority in a continuing rancorous environment, the temptation to slip back is very great.
Q We hear lots about political partisanship and its causes. How bad is it (in historical terms) and what, in your opinion, are the main causes?
A This is not just common variety partisanship; it has grown into tribalism. Strong parties are good for American democracy; bitterly polarized and tribal parties are not. We have had vitriol and even violence in decades past that were as bad or worse as what we have now — but it is very different when you have a $3 trillion federal budget in a $13 trillion economy and a global security and economic setting. We can’t afford the dysfunction.
Excerpt from ‘The Broken Branch’
Norms are not laws. Many individual senators in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Paul Douglas and Wayne Morse, took on the institution, thumbing their noses at what they saw as outdated concepts that upheld an unacceptable status quo. Their successors in the body included such liberals as Jim Abourezk and Howard Metzenbaum and conservatives James Allen and Jesse Helms. But it was obvious to us from the moment we each entered the Senate’s environs in 1969 that these kinds of senators were the exception, not the rule. Most senators wore their pride in being in the Senate on their sleeves. Nothing short of a challenge to the primacy and integrity of the body itself could unite them across all conceivable lines.
Moreover, most House members had a heavy dose of institutional patriotism, often accompanied by a contempt, borne in part by jealousy, for the Senate as the so-called upper body. House members and leaders took immense pride in their status as the people’s chamber, the first of our constitutional institutions mentioned in Article 1 of the Constitution, and in their legislative craftsmanship and expertise.
Senators, in their view, were dilettantes, even if many of their House colleagues yearned to make the move to the other side of the Capitol — only one senator in modern times, Claude Pepper of Florida, had made the reverse move, and that not out of choice but driven by his Senate defeat. When an average member of the House was elected to the Senate, the typical line used by his former colleagues was that the move had increased the IQ in both chambers.
During the 1970s and 1980s, we participated regularly in orientations for newly elected members of Congress, put on by our two institutions and the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress as well as the Harvard University Institute of Politics. Successive classes of freshmen would come in and prepare to take office; their incredible pride at joining the House or Senate, being part of history as an exclusive and small group of people ever to have served, was palpable. During much of that era, Rep. Bill Frenzel (R-Minn.), a first-rate lawmaker and member of the House Ways and Means Committee, would join with his wife, Ruthie, to address the new members and their spouses. He would urge them to move their families to Washington; he believed their time in the House would be the greatest experience of their lives and was something they should share with their families.
By the early 1990s, that appeal fell increasingly on deaf ears. Many members shrank from the idea of moving families to Washington, and not only because the anti-Washington political climate of the period made it politically unattractive. Our conversations with the new members revealed a different mindset. Many viewed Washington as an insidious place and were fearful that the more time they spent there, the greater the likelihood that they would catch the virus that caused Potomac Fever. The pride that members of both houses had in their institutions gave way to a skepticism. New and returning members increasingly saw their service in Congress not as a great and joyful time of their lives but as an unpleasant duty, like taking castor oil or serving in the trenches in France in World War I — something to endure, not savor, for the greater good of achieving a policy revolution in the country or winning the tribal war against the enemy in the other party. A number had run on a pledge of limiting their own terms to avoid the fever and to convey their distaste for Washington and congressional careerism.
The reaction of new members has been matched by the growing indifference of committee and party leaders to the history and independent role of their own institutions and by a widespread acceptance by congressional leaders that the ends justify the means.
Patrick W. Gavin co-authors The Examiner’s “Yeas & Nays” column and is associate editorial page editor.
