Shortly before and now after Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in the 2014 election, news outlets asserted that it was incumbent upon the GOP to prove it can “govern,” even though Democratic President Obama retains control of the executive branch and his party retains an effective minority in the Senate.
The proclamation typically appeared in stories centered on how the new GOP-controlled Congress would attempt to pass legislation under contention by both parties or within factions of the GOP.
“Republicans who have been so disciplined in their opposition to President Obama are now finding themselves badly splintered over how to keep the Department of Homeland Security operating as they struggle to demonstrate they can govern effectively as the party that controls Congress,” read a New York Times story Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, a story in the Washington Post on funding DHS said, “Now the majority party in both chambers, Republicans are eager to demonstrate that they can govern after a banner election boosted their numbers to historic levels.”
Another report last month by CQ Roll Call, a Capitol Hill-focused publication, said, “The uncertainty over the future of the DHS funding measure — which must be cleared by the end of next month or partially shut down the department — sets up a tension with the message the GOP is seeking to send from their bicameral retreat that they intend to govern responsibly.”
Use of the word “govern,” however, struck some media observers as inaccurate and perhaps, on some level, suspect.
“ ‘Govern’ is an odd verb to use with the Congress,” Albert May, associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told the Washington Examiner media desk. “I don’t remember the last time the Congress governed the country.”
The word has appeared in similar stories outside of those related to DHS.
A CNN headline in January declared: “GOP agenda for Congress: Challenge Obama, prove they can govern.”
In November, the New York Times reported the GOP has to generally “show it can govern,” now that it controls Congress.
“I think a better verb would be legislate,” said May. “Can they legislate? And then the issue becomes: Can both the president and Congress govern? But this notion of a congressional government is pretty old-fashioned. The president governs with Congress. We’ve got divided government.”
May stressed that the responsibility to “govern” does not rest solely on Republicans in Congress.
“I don’t think the onus is on them that they have to compromise with the president,” he said.
Other media experts have also noticed the tendency for news publications to burden the new GOP-led Congress with governing.
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote a blog post on the subject in November.
“These are false statements. I don’t know how they got past the editors,” Rosen wrote. “You can’t simply assert, like it’s some sort of natural fact, that Republicans ‘must show they can govern’ when an alternative course is available.” He added, “The alternative to ‘show you can govern’ is to keep President Obama from governing.”
Rosen concluded that reporters framing their stories on Congress in a way that places responsibility of governing on Republicans “is a failure of imagination, and a sentimentalism. It refuses to grapple with other equally plausible possibilities. … Political journalists are supposed to know that. They are supposed to know that better than anyone else.”
One journalist dissenter on the ‘govern’ theme was the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman who wrote Nov. 6 in the Washington Post that “No, Republicans don’t actually need to ‘show they can govern’,” noting that Congress, with the GOP at the helm, can pass any legislation it wants but that the results would be little under the still-divided federal government.
“In short, the fundamental gridlock will remain,” he wrote, “and Republicans will say that the way to end it once and for all is to keep them in power in Congress but also give them the White House, too.”
