The American public hates Congress. Like, really hates it. For all of 2011, Congress averaged a 17 percent approval rating in Gallup’s weekly polling, the lowest ever recorded by that organization. That made the establishment roughly as popular as Paris Hilton (15 percent approval), BP during the Gulf Coast oil spill (16 percent), and the idea of the United States turning into a Communist country (11 percent). So, not good.
Many political cynics—and they are legion—insist that Congress has always been an unpopular institution and will forever remain one. True. But that misses the point that things are measurably and objectively worse now than they ever have been before. The public used to dislike Congress as an institution but defend the relative merits of their own individual members. In recent years, the gap between those two numbers has narrowed as people’s disenchantment with the body writ large has begun to infect even the most beloved members.
Take the fight over raising the debt ceiling, a debate that paralyzed official Washington for the entirety of the spring and summer of 2011. The limit on the nation’s credit card had regularly been raised in the past—seventy-four times since 1962 to be exact—but newly elected Republican members aligned with the Tea Party insisted that the days of writing checks that their collective asses couldn’t cash would come to an end this time around. (Gross imagery, I know.)
As the country teetered on the verge of default, Congress twiddled their thumbs—seemingly daring the financial world to call their bluff. Standard & Poor’s did, downgrading the U.S.’s credit rating for the first time in history. (We made history! Wait …) A deal was finally struck that averted default and created a super committee—irony intended—that was supposed to figure things out. Except that they didn’t. Can you blame people for thinking Congress was the appendix of the body politic, a part that was there but no one really knew why?
The damage to Congress’s already terrible reputation was significant. Republican pollster Bill McInturff wrote a memo in the immediate aftermath of the debt ceiling “deal,” trying to put it into some political context. “The debt ceiling negotiation is an extremely significant event that is profoundly and sharply reshaping views of the economy and the federal government,” wrote McInturff. “It has led to a scary erosion in confidence in both, at a time when this steep drop in confidence can be least afforded.” He added: “The perception of how Washington handled the debt ceiling negotiation led to an immediate collapse of confidence in government and all the major players, including President Obama and Republicans in Congress.”
Just in case you need more evidence of this pox on both your houses (of Congress) mentality, all you need to do is check out this word cloud derived from a Washington Post–Pew poll where respondents were asked to say the first word that came to mind. The three most commonly mentioned words? Stupid, ridiculous, and disgusting. That about covers it.
The inability of Congress to do much of anything stems from a variety of causes. The bases of the two parties are further apart ideologically than they have ever been before. (Gallup polling for 2009, 2010, and 2011 shows that the gap between Republicans and Democrats regarding how President Obama is doing his job is wider than any first three years of any president on record.) A permanent election mentality has seized Washington, driven largely by the prohibitive cost of running for reelection; it takes so much money to run and win that incumbents spend hours a day raising money almost from the moment they are elected to office. And over the past decade a surprisingly large number of House members—twenty to be exact—have been elected to the Senate and have brought the more confrontational and less bipartisan approach that dominates the lower chamber to the world’s greatest deliberative body.
Political scientists have written books—and will continue to write books—about why Congress has stopped functioning anywhere close to how the Founders would have imagined it. But I am all about solutions—winning the future!—and below offer five (relatively) quick fixes for Congress’s current problems. You’ll notice most of these suggested solutions focus on elections, not legislation, a reflection of the fact that I believe you have to change the kind of people who get to Congress before you can change Congress.
The current system of two-year terms for House members is equivalent to watching half of a movie. By the time you’ve settled into your seat, figured out who the characters are, and sussed out the basic plot, it’s time to go.
And because House races have become multi-million-dollar affairs in recent years, newly elected members who sit in anything but the safest of congressional districts spend the vast majority of their first two years in office raising money in the hopes of making it to a second term. That, surprisingly enough, isn’t conducive to actual legislative achievement.
Extending House terms to four years—the same period of time presidents, governors, and other statewide elected officials serve—would slow the dash for cash slightly and allow freshman lawmakers some chance to actually think about what they want to do—other than be reelected—with the seat they hold.
Even if House terms were doubled to four years, it would still make them two years short of the Senate’s six-year terms—preserving the divide between a body more receptive to the will of the people and one that prides itself on being the more temperate, slower-moving body.
A possible wrinkle: split up the House between those members in competitive districts and those who aren’t. Make anyone who sits in a district where the last presidential nominee of his party got 60 percent of the vote or more run every two years, forcing him to stay vigilant, in case someone within his own party wants to challenge him in a primary. (The simple truth is that members who sit in safe districts are almost entirely free of public accountability at this point. Voters don’t pay all that much attention to what their specific House member is doing unless the incumbent in these districts commits a crime. Literally. So House members are likely to get reelected thanks to a money edge and the other advantages of incumbency.)
Give the members who sit in seats where their party’s presidential nominee won less than 60 percent four years to make their mark. They’re the ones who really need the extra time to try to show voters in their swing districts why they deserve a second term.
An added bonus of that approach for political junkies: running up the score might be a disincentive in such a system. Members might shoot to win 59 percent of the vote in order to double their amount of time in office. But that also could be playing with fire, as running to keep it close could backfire if you got caught in a last-minute wave or made some sort of major gaffe in the final weeks of a campaign. Oh man, that would be awesome. Admit it. It would rock.
Every ten years, each state redraws its congressional lines. How these lines are drawn—and by whom—can make a decade-long difference in the competitiveness of a single state. Unfortunately a majority of states still allow some combination of the state legislature and/or governor to draw the lines—a reality that not only makes the process decidedly partisan but also de-emphasizes the sort of compromise-minded politics that Congress needs more of.
Take California. In 2001, Democrats—John Burton, the state senate president, and Michael Berman, the brother of California representative Howard Berman, to be exact—controlled all the levers of the process and set about protecting their large majority in the massive fifty-three-person delegation. Republican incumbents went along for the ride, content with holding the seats they had with no real prospects of picking up any new territory over the decade. (The one incumbent who got shafted was Democrat Gary Condit, who at the time was fending off allegations that he might have killed his onetime lover Chandra Levy. Democrats made his district more Democratic and he lost in the 2002 primary.) The result of the deal cut by both parties’ incumbents? One of the fifty-three—yes, fifty-three—congressional districts changed party control over the entire decade of the 2000s. (That was Representative Richard Pombo, a Republican, who lost a race to Jerry McNerney in 2008.)
That lack of competitiveness drove Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to push a ballot measure that would take power for drawing congressional lines away from the legislature and put it in the hands of a so-called citizens commission—a group of allegedly average people who would craft the lines without any political considerations or allegiances. Proposition 11, as the measure was known, passed with 51 percent of the vote in November 2008, and the citizens commission redrew California’s map in 2011. The result? Thirteen districts rated as competitive heading into November by the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political handicapping shop (and my first employer out of college!). Thirteen out of fifty-three is still less than 25 percent of all the California congressional seats, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.
The problem is that California’s citizens redistricting commission is the exception, not the rule. It is one of only seven states—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Hawaii, Iowa, and New Jersey are the others—that employ some sort of nonpartisan method of drawing lines. The other forty-three states still use the mostly or purely partisan approach, in which the relative competitiveness of a state for a decade is determined by which party controls the governorship and the state legislature.
It’s ridiculous. I mean, in what other line of work do you get to determine—for a decade, no less—the relative safety of your job? “Um, yes, boss, I’ve done a good job. I should get a ten-year guaranteed contract with no option for you to get out of it—no matter how poor a job I do.” It makes no sense, and it needs to stop.
Nonpartisan redistricting commissions in every state would likely double—and maybe triple—the number of genuinely competitive races in the country. (Look at Iowa, which draws its lines by commission; the state has four congressional districts, each of which is considered at least marginally competitive heading into November.)
That level of competitiveness would put a premium on candidates who were not simply water carriers for one party base or the other but rather messengers to the ideological middle, where elections are won and lost. And once they got to Washington, they would know that simply retreating into an ideological corner would ensure their defeat when they next stood for election.
Congressional redistricting might happen only once a decade, but its impact is vast. Change how lines get drawn and you change who gets elected—and how they act once they win.
In the majority of states in the country, the only people who can vote in a primary are those registered as members of the party—a “closed primary” system in the nomenclature of elections. For Republicans, thirty-one states have primaries that are either closed or semiclosed, which means that independents can vote. That number is twenty-nine states for Democrats.
The goal of closed primaries is a simple one: candidates should be picked by people who have a demonstrated commitment to a party, not by fly-by-nighters who may or may not have any long-term dedication to one side or the other. The other argument in favor of closed primaries is that it wards off the other side meddling in a primary in hopes of nominating the weaker candidate for the general election. The most famous example of that phenomenon was conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” in which he urged listeners to cross over and cast votes for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid in hopes of extending the race between the former first lady and then Illinois senator Barack Obama. The primaries did go on—and on—all the way through June 6, but there was no empirical evidence that Limbaugh had swayed enough Republican voters to claim credit for the lengthening of the Democratic race.
What closed primaries produce—and there is plenty of empirical evidence here—is candidates who appeal to the hardest liners of each party. And while that’s fine in some places—conservative districts having conservative representation makes sense after all—it’s not the right system for the majority of districts and states in the country. After all, if you are elected thanks to your strict adherence to the principles lovingly cradled by the Democratic base, what incentive do you have to do anything in a bipartisan manner once you get to Washington?
Imagine if all fifty states had open primaries where voters were free to vote in whichever primary they were more interested or invested in. While Republicans would almost certainly vote in large numbers in Republican primaries (and Democrats in Democratic primaries), candidates would be forced to moderate their messaging—at least somewhat—in hopes of appealing to the independents and crossover voters looking to make up their minds.
A more centrist—or at least ideologically diverse—electorate would also encourage more moderate-minded candidates that they might be able to win. Take Tom Davis. In 2008 Davis, a proven vote-getting centrist Republican, was considering a run for an open Senate seat in Virginia. But Virginia Republicans decided to choose their nominee via a convention process—in which 3,500 or so hard-core GOPers would pick the candidate—rather than a primary. Davis, knowing his moderate views would make him anathema to that crowd, bowed out in favor of former governor Jim Gilmore, a conservative but someone with little appeal to the middle of the electorate. Gilmore won the convention easily and then, predictably, was swamped in the general election by Democrat Mark Warner.
If the Tom Davises of the world had the chance to run in open primaries, a lot more of them would. And while not all of them would win—Davis would likely have come up short against the popular Warner too—some would. And electing centrists to the House and Senate would provide an incentive for deal making, the sort of thing that is currently nonexistent.
In the 1990s, term limits were all the rage. Hoping to convince the public that they didn’t want to make a living out of being in politics, candidates across the country—from the state legislature all the way up to the House and Senate—signed a pledge from U.S. Term Limits, an independent organization, committing themselves to spend only two terms in the Senate or three terms in the House.
But when those pledges came due, many of the reform-minded politicians balked. They liked being in office. They felt like building seniority was good for their constituents, not bad. They wouldn’t have ever signed the pledge if they knew then what they know now, they argued. The term-limits community, not surprisingly, wasn’t happy—and vowed to exact revenge.
The test case was Washington representative George Nethercutt (R), who had ousted Speaker of the House Tom Foley (D) in 1994 largely by casting his opponent as an out-of-touch career politician. Six years later when it came time to honor his term-limit pledge, however, Nethercutt decided he’d rather not. The term-limits crowd went at him hard—and lost. Without a demonstrated ability to punish those who would cross them, the term-limits movement withered. After all, empty threats don’t scare anyone.
The failure of term limits to flex its political muscle doesn’t mean, however, that it’s a bad idea. Just that the term-limits folks went about it the wrong way. (After all, there are term limits in eight state legislatures, and thirty-seven states have term limits for their statewide elected officials.) In order to have real bite, term limits need to be written into the law, which is, in the case of the U.S. Congress, the Constitution.
Would some elected officials balk? Absolutely. But standing against the idea of a citizen legislature in an America where people hate politicians and everything associated with them is a recipe for disaster. Public pressure and a fear of losing on this one issue would likely convince some of the on-the-fence members to get behind the bill.
Our suggested term limits? Six terms for a House member and two terms for a senator. That makes it an equal twelve years on both sides of the Capitol. It’s enough time so that you aren’t out of office as soon as you actually begin to figure out how the place works. And if you can’t get anything done in more than a decade in office, do you really deserve to be in office in the first place?
If we were creating a Congress from scratch, is there any way that we would want members of Congress trolling for donations at night while they are trying to legislate during the day?
Put aside the obviously atrocious optics of some political action committee donating a boatload of cash to a senator soon after he votes in favor of its pet bill (quid pro quos are almost impossible to prove legally, but regular people know that sort of thing stinks badly). From a purely logistical perspective, it’s almost impossible to juggle the heated policy discussions that go on during congressional sessions with the ever-increasing need to raise the millions of dollars you need to keep your job.
Banning political contributions for House members and senators during the time Congress is in session would make clear that when in Washington, the job of our elected representatives is to craft legislation, not to collect checks. It’s not unheard of, particularly at the state legislative level, where lawmakers are often banned from raising any campaign cash during sessions.
Incumbents, particularly those in swing districts, wouldn’t like the ban, believing that it would force them to tie one hand behind their back when running against a challenger who was not operating under the same fund-raising constraints. (On a related note: members in safe districts would love this ban, as they would be freed to focus exclusively on legislation rather than on spending time raising money that they almost certainly don’t need to win reelection.) But the advantages of incumbency—from broad name identification in a district or state to the ability to raise money from a variety of national sources—more than make up for any disadvantage to members of Congress by a ban on in-session political contributions. Plus, leveling the financial playing field even slightly in favor of challenger candidates would be a good thing, ensuring that more turnover in seats was a real possibility.
In modern politics, the appearance of impropriety is the equivalent of actual impropriety. Voters believe that their elected officials are bought and paid for by moneyed interests who have their own bottom line in mind, not the best interests of the country. While that may not be the reality—members forever insist that political donations don’t sway their votes—it really doesn’t matter. The only way to win back public confidence, not to mention create space for legislators to, you know, actually legislate, is to ban political contributions during congressional sessions. Given the relatively lax schedule that the House and Senate operate under—who else gets to take the entire month of August off?!—they still should have plenty of time to raise the cash they need to run credible campaigns for reelection.