FOR FIGHT CLUB POLITICS. Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin‘s Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives is the subject of this week’s TPMCafe Book Club. Eilperin’s book highlights the modern crisis of partisan acrimony and incivility in Congress and argues that the body’s traditional deliberative and bipartisan legislative functions have basically broken down. Since this is a lament sounded by more and more people (the old-school institutionalists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornsteinn have teamed up for a similar forthcoming book), I think it’s important to offer a dissenting opinion.
Mark Schmitt makes some of the necessary criticisms about Eilperin’s highly Post-like tendency to erect equivalencies between the two parties in assessing blame for the current state of Congress. But honestly, that critique’s a no-brainer. I think there’s a sound liberal case to be made that at least some of the institutional trends Republicans have either inaugurated or accelerated while in power — centralization of power in the party leadership (power that was once dispersed among committee chairs), elimination of veto points where legislation can be blocked or bottled up, rigid party discipline and efficiency — are on the whole good developments in the abstract that lend themselves both to the emergence of a more effective and ideologically coherent Democratic opposition in the short term and to greatly expanded opportunities for major (and liberal) expansions in government action in the longer term. This passage from early in Eilperin’s book sort of gives the game away:
In one sense, the House is now a better-oiled machine than it used to be. Republicans routinely pass legislation on an array of topics, from curbing class action suits to revamping the United Nations. But on a more profound level, the chamber is dysfunctional. Democratic leaders are tangential to governing, devoting much of their time to issuing press releases, complaining of their ill treatment, and drafting policies that have no chance of making it into law. A few conservative rank-and-file Democrats have the opportunity to shape legislation, but their influence is limited and they must endure constant taunts from their more liberal colleagues. Moderate Republicans experience the same sort of hectoring when they attempt to forge common ground with the minority. In this highly contentious environment, bipartisan cooperation amounts to betrayal.
Honestly, aside from the (significant!) fact that Republicans are the ones in the majority, what exactly is wrong with this situation? What Eilperin is describing is Congress’s transformation, under Republicans’ stewardship, into a more parliamentary-style system, where strict party discipline is maintained, the majority has absolute legislative power, and the opposition’s job is to forge an alternative legislative program and try to win elections with it. Now that’s highly antithetical to the traditions of American political institutions, and even in the current state of “fight club politics” the situation here in the States isn’t nearly as rigidly partisan as it is in, say, Canada or the U.K. But that’s the point: Canada, the U.K., the European continental states with parliamentary systems — they all seem to be doing fine. In fact, the salient difference between them and the U.S. is the comparatively robust size of their welfare states, and that, lo and behold, is hardly coincidental. The relationship between public social provisions and the structure of state political institutions is, in fact, highly significant.
The American tradition, with its decentralized power, weak parties, and structural checks and balances — and particularly the old-style institutional makeup of Congress, with extensive countermajoritarian features like the filibuster and the dispersal of power among many semi-autonomous committee barons — provides an extensive array of checks on the ability to pass legislation, and has been key in hampering the growth of public social protections in America vis a vis other western countries. If, in a fit of power-mad mania, Republicans have helped, even if temporarily, to make Congress a more ruthlessly disciplined and efficient legislative machine, on the eve of a potential congressional takeover these changes seem like something Democrats might want to think about embracing at least somewhat. (These changes, it should always be mentioned, were what the liberal reformers of the mid-twentieth century, both inside and outside of Congress, fought for for just the reasons I lay out; see Julian Zelizer‘s terrific book for that story.)
And while one shouldn’t be cavalier about the real costs of a more partisan and parliamentarized system, neither should liberals be lulled into nostalgia for the good old days of boys’ club back-slapping and chumminess in Congress — a deeply conservative culture even during the decades that Democrats ran the place.
–Sam Rosenfeld
