The budget deal and the future of Congress

"Political Drama" by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941)
at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

There's a positive tone in town right now, thanks to the budget deal worked out by the Senate Republican and Democratic leaders that not only prevents another shutdown, but funds the government through March 23, which makes it that much longer before we have to endure more brinksmanship. National defense, the Children's Health Insurance Program, disaster relief and the opioid epidemic get two years of funding.

It's not a great deal, being pretty much a logroll that provides additional spending for both parties' priorities. This will, of course, further aggravate the budget outlook already set askew by an irresponsible tax bill in December. The budget deal adds to the Keynesian stimulus begun by the tax cut, at a time when stimulus is clearly not indicated, and stock markets took another dive Thursday. Representative Dave Brat (R-VA), a member of the Freedom Caucus, is perfectly correct to call it a "Christmas tree on steroids" (Sullivan and Lee 2018). On the other hand, given the Freedom Caucus's enthusiasm for that tax cut, it could be taken as sour grapes that they weren't going to get their way on everything.

It's no news to you that Congress hasn't been impressing anyone for quite awhile. After a brief blip up into the 20s last winter, public approval ratings have settled back to the 15-20 percent range where they've been for nearly a decade. Congress as a group has rarely been wildly popular, but it's important to remember that the current numbers are low by historical standards, at least for the 75 years of national public opinion surveys.

My read on the quagmire at our nation's Capitol, previously explored in a number of posts listed below, is rooted in incentive structures. Ideological polarization and geographic sorting mean that neither Democratic nor Republican legislators have much incentive to seek constructive solutions to public problems. Core partisans are suspicious of bipartisan solutions, and there aren't enough swing voters in enough states and districts to counteract that. Accurate representation of their constituents gets them re-elected, but it also tends to stalemate or at best zero-sum solutions.

Ira Shapiro, from his Twitter page

So I was intrigued earlier this week to hear Ira Shapiro, a scholar and author as well as president of Ira Shapiro Global Straegies, LLC, highlight the importance of leadership at a forum celebrating the release of his new book, Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country (Brookings, 2018). He argues the decline of the Senate as a deliberative body is decades old, but suddenly accelerated in the middle of the last decade. "It's no accident," he said, "that the accelerating downward spiral of the Senate coincided with Mitch McConnell's time as leader." Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Democratic leader from 2005-2017, was no prize, either: "Their joint legacy would be a broken Senate."

Source: flickr.com

McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, became the party's Senate leader in 2007, and Senate majority leader after Republican successes in the 2014 elections finally recaptured control of the chamber late in the Obama administration. Shapiro gave three examples of McConnell's norm-busting, counter-productive leadership style:

• After helping pass economic stimulus in fall 2008 when George W. Bush was still President, he "suddenly became against everything" once Barack Obama was inaugurated. Was he more concerned about how Obama's approval rating might affect Republican electoral fortunes than he was about the economy?
• His 2016 refusal to consider anyone Obama nominated to the Supreme Court after Justice Scalia died
• The unproductive handling of health care repeal in 2017

Shapiro clearly sees leadership style as a key causal variable in the current state of Congress. He concluded by pronouncing himself optimistic, anticipating the day when the 75 or 80 Senators "who know what the Senate is supposed to be and hate what it is now" step forward and "actually put country first."

Shapiro was joined on the panel by Molly Reynolds, a fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and author of Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Management in the U.S. Senate (Brookings, 2017). She presented the evidence for the causal role of institutional incentives, in which senators' and voters' "ideological positions make it much more difficult to work collaboratively." Morover, partisan competition for control has increased since the era (1960s & 70s) that Shapiro used as his baseline for Senate performance. As a result, we see both parties staking out ideological positions, and using Senate procedures to thwart the other side, eschewing compromise in favor of "getting [or trying to get] policy done that is close to their own ideological positions." Individual senators, too, use procedures--like holds, which used to be rare but now are as common as dirt--to enhance their own reputations. There've always been such individuals--Wayne Morse and Jesse Helms leap to mind--but there are many more of them. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's mini-filibuster Friday morning is only the most recent example. Reynolds shares Shapiro's discontent with the current state of the Senate, but concluded with a question rather than a hopeful statement: "How do we work within the existing set of incentives to change behavior?"

A third view, identified with political scientists like Morris Fiorina, is that partisan polarization among the electorate was created and manipulated by elites (see also Zingher 2018 and his co-authored article with Michael Flynn in the British Journal of Political Science). If polarized politics resulted from choices, can elites choose to move past it? Or, as I gloomily suspect, is this monster going to be harder to destroy than it was to create?

The panel was organized and hosted by William Galston, Ezra K. Zilkha chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. I once appeared on a panel with Galston, in 2009, which makes me feel one degree of separation from something.

VIDEO of the event is here: https://youtu.be/zB8XZrGxqoU 

SEE ALSO:
"Shutdowns and Sillypants (and the Statler Brothers)," 8 October 2013
"Deliberation and the Shutdown," 3 October 2013
"What's the Matter with Congress," 30 May 2013