Of course, I could get a lot more specific about the second argument. Instead of blaming the Republican Party, I could blame those 80ish Republican representatives that signed the infamous letter supporting the shutdown ploy, who seem most in tune with the Tea Party zeitgeist. I could blame Sen. Ted Cruz, who whipped them into a frenzy and seems to be the source of their initial deadlock-breaking strategy (fund only those parts of govt. that we like and then look surprised when the Senate laughs in our faces). I could blame John Boehner, who makes the decisions about what gets a vote in the House and therefore has the power at any moment to permit a vote on a 'clean' budget resolution. He has not, either (charitably) to avoid a civil war in the party going into the debt limit hike, or (cynically) to prevent them from booting him from the Speaker's chair. But what all 3 of those options have in common is that they act under the aegis and with the apparent blessing of the Republican party, so that's where the blame can most reasonably be stuck.
When Congress last shut down the government, the Republican party suffered for it. The next two election cycles eroded their ranks and bumped Bill Clinton handily to a second term. If one looks at opinion polls today, one might expect the same outcome: Republicans shellacked, House leadership rebuked, Obama and the Democrats strengthened. And maybe this will happen. One certainly may hope. But the funny thing is, House Republicans can see all the same national polling data that the rest of us can, and they aren't budging. Why?
Find out ... after the jump!
Is it because they are delusional and fail to recognize the consequences of their actions? Well, certainly there is an element of delusional thinking among them; the same disease that led Ted Cruz over in the Senate to misread Dr. Seuss for 21 hours as if it would actually make a difference, politically or procedurally. But it's also possible, and indeed more and more likely, that the Tea Party feels free to ignore the consequences for their actions because ... there won't be any.
The last time the govt. shut down, many of the Republicans who took the blame came from competitive districts - one figure I've seen is that 1/3 of those House Republicans came from districts that had voted for Clinton. Today? Not that many. This isn't because of the intrinsically polarizing nature of Barack Obama or his policies; it's because the maps have literally been redrawn to prevent even demographic splits or, heaven forbid, an accumulation of moderates. (Or whatever the proper collective noun for moderates is. Herd? Gaggle? Flip-flop?) And since the most recent census, in 2010, happened to correspond with a Republican wave year in both national and state governments, an awful lot of those districts are drawn to be as steadfastly conservative as possible.
As I watched the news in the days leading up to the shutdown, the media consensus seemed to be that it wasn't going to happen. Boehner and co. knew what was at stake and knew they'd be crucified in the polls if they let the countdown expire. Then they did. And now, two weeks into the shutdown, a sort of horrified realization is sinking in. The representatives who are causing all this disaster are sitting on demographic fortifications that would make Richard the Lionhearted blanch. Check this out:
74% white southerners? Yeah, I wonder who that district is gonna go for in the next elections.
The Daily Show isn't the only one to notice this; they're just the funniest. Across the country, the lack of competitive congressional districts - and more particularly, the lack of a reliable mechanism to make them so - is suddenly a problem rather than an oddity, a quirk of our charming political heritage. Suddenly, people are worried, and rightly so.
Compounding the problem is the way that money tilts Republican (and Democratic, although you don't see us running around with our pants on our heads, do you) primaries toward the fringes. Ever since Citizens United, the government has been essentially powerless to monitor or restrict the funding of political campaigns, and nowhere has that been met with greater glee than by the Republican right. Moderate Republicans know that if they don't toe the party line well enough, they're likely to face a primary challenge (in their gerrymandered-white-middle/upper-class districts) from the right, and that challenger is likely to be funded by the Club for Growth or other such ideological-purity enforcers. And so 80 pants-on-head Tea Partiers become 235 Republicans voting together to further the head-empantsening agenda.
It's worth noting that neither of these factors intrinsically favors conservatives; however, since Republican state legislatures drew our current district maps, and since the Republicans' internal schisms are more easily exploited by targeted outside money, that's how it currently is playing out. It would be equally problematic if such factors were leveraged by a liberal wing of the Democratics seeking to drag the party further off-center.
So there are problems, and these problems are directly and indisputably leading to bad governance of our nation. So we should fix them, right? Well, yes. At the same time, though, it's not like there aren't other examples of legacy systems gumming up the works in our government, proving that systemic reforms are easier said than done.
The filibuster is the obvious example. I remember that when I started working as a copy editor in the summer of 2010, I read many articles discussing the filibuster, the exponential increase of its use, and how it was making it harder for congress to get anything done. Today, you don't see the word filibuster in many articles, aside from those explaining how Ted Cruz's epic misquoting of Green Eggs and Ham wasn't one. This doesn't mean that the filibuster has gone away; instead, reporters just take it as a given that any bill requires 60 votes to pass and report that bills were defeated 53-47 or whatever, when in fact the vote that failed was on whether to stop talking and hold an actual vote. (If I had to make a master list of 10 things wrong with American journalism, despite some fairly cutthroat competition, I'm pretty sure this would make the top 5). And yet, even as the use of cloture rules to stymie legislation has grown slowly more and more common and accepted (scroll down in this article to see a chart) and even 3 years after President Obama spoke on The Daily Show about changing the filibuster, nothing has happened. The institutional inertia of the government is considerable, especially given that rules that allow minorities to exercise undue leverage over the majority also allow said minorities to block efforts to limit that leverage.
So, how can we fix this?
* * *
With regards to redistricting, there are two solutions I can think of; bottom-up and top-down. The top-down approach would be neater, but less likely to happen. Right now, each state gets to determine its own congressional districts however they please, which in many cases means partisan gerrymandering. If the federal government were to establish criteria for all states to meet in order to send representatives to the house, this problem would solve itself. This would have to be a constitutional amendment; existing constitutional law provides no grounds for the federal government to set criteria for representation. As such, this is a pretty pipe dream for the time being, since the process for amending the constitution requires 2/3 of both houses and 3/4 of the states, which is ... unlikely ... under current conditions. (Although I note with amusement that Article V specifically bans amendments defying states their equal suffrage ... in the Senate. Makes you wonder if they thought that cleaning House might prove necessary ...)
The other, more plausible outcome is that states take the initiative to reform their redistricting process themselves. So far as I can tell, the gold standard for this is Iowa, where a nonpartisan commission uses computer software to draw district boundaries, with a premium on keeping counties and cities in the same districts wherever possible. It works, it doesn't cause conflict, and it's cheap. Compare that to Wisconsin, and 29 states like it, where the party in power after the census comes in get to draw whatever funky lines they want up to and until they get sued for civil rights violations. The results are as depressing as they are predictable. The problem is that, like with filibuster reform, nobody seems to want to fix it except for the people getting shorted by it at the moment. Right now, Republicans in both houses of WI legislature are refusing to bring to the floor bills to set up Iowa-style redistricting commissions. Although newspapers statewide have lobbied for this, it seems likely to die in committee. And while Democrats in WI are rightly cheesed off about this, the fact that a similar plan languished and died during the Doyle administration gives their protestations more than a hint of hypocrisy. And again, any effort to solve the problem will have to contend with the same uphill struggle against entrenched interests that make partisan redistricting a problem in the first place.
It's a little early to start making predictions on this; I suspect that the dust will have to settle on the current shutdown and debt limit crisis for a few weeks or months before any real motion happens at the state level. My hope, though, is that at least a few state legislatures are galvanized by this travesty to finally start passing some of these bills into law. Do all states need to follow the Iowa model? Probably not, although I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. Do we need to have some system in place to prevent self-serving and uncompetitive redistricting? Hells yes.
* * *
The campaign finance question is more complicated, and I know less about it, which means I'll have fewer links in this section. I know that the core of the Citizens United ruling held that political donations, both personal and corporate, are a form of speech protected by the 1st amendment, and that existing restrictions such as those in the McCain-Feingold act were unconstitutional. The consequences of this ruling include the legalization of SuperPACs, organizations that, from what I can tell, allow people and companies to throw unlimited amounts of money at whatever political candidate they want in near or total anonymity.
I'm not a fan of this on general principles; money does not equal speech. But the real disaster of Citizens United is that it opens the floodgates for donations and outside spending, not just in general elections, but in primaries. Primaries have always been low-turnout affairs, meaning that only the most committed - and frequently, most extreme - members of a party can be counted on to vote, which is why presidential candidates have to spend months pandering to their bases until then win their nomination, upon which they promptly backtrack as fast (or faster) as dignity permits. So primary elections already have a polarizing tendency, which for years has been offset in many districts by incumbency advantage. Enter the SuperPACs. By targeting established incumbents who fail this or that litmus test with outside attacks and fully-funded challengers at the primary stage, when they already can count on a higher-than-average percentage of hardliner voters, wealthy conservative activists and businesses can unseat insufficiently rabid candidates before many constituents even notice that an election is happening, and since these are the same districts that have been drawn to protect one or another party, even the most extreme liberal or conservative is likely to be elected, since they alternative would be for that 74% white Louisiana district to elect a Democrat. Unlikely.
So there's a problem here, but I'm not sure how to fix it. It may be that there are ways to legislate around Citizens United, inventing new barriers to political spending that Roberts, et al. did not think to dismantle. There are a couple issues with this, though. The first is that, as with all national-level solutions to our problems, such a bill would have to make it through Congress and the White House, which is unlikely, for the same reasons it is necessary. Furthermore, there is nothing preventing Citizens United from suing again and having Roberts, et al. chop through the new restrictions, just as they did the old ones. The other solutions I can see come through the courts; either Roberts et. al. take a look at the current system, say 'my god, what have we done' and accept another campaign finance case to overturn their former decision; or the composition of the court changes in a way that leads to a new consensus accepting a new campaign finance case to over turn the previous majority. The former seems unlikely, since it would involve an admission of fault and backtracking by the current majority (to be clear; the Supreme Court seems to be as functional as any institution chosen by partisan legislatures could hope for, but they have their pride and are unlikely to publicly eat crow on this for the foreseeable future), and the latter will be years off, since the next few retirements are likely to be liberals replaced by other liberals. Until then, we're probably stuck with it. And unlike the redistricting problem, there seems to be diddly that can be done at a state or local level to solve this. It has to come from the top.
There are signs that unlimited campaign donations are at least a double edged sword; in light of the current head-pantsings of the Tea Party, some established business interests are starting to make noises about supporting moderate candidates in Republican primaries, or even making a temporary alliance with Democrats. We'll see what comes of that. I've noted in the past that the best counter to speech is more speech (although I have to give Popehat credit as the place where I first learned that dictum), and if money is speech, then the best solution to money causing problems is to throw money in the other direction. This strikes me as a temporary fix, though, and since I disagree with the basic premise that money is speech, I think there probably will have to be a more durable solution. Until then, however, I absolutely encourage big business interests to get on the ball and start cleaning house before their party of choice drags us all to hell.
* * *
If we default on our sovereign debt this week, we will send a message to the rest of the world, which has built its political and economic systems on the assumption of American reliability and omnipresence, that they need to rethink how they do business. If we continue governing by crisis and grandstanding, that message will be confirmed. And slowly, painfully, the nations of the world will wean themselves off of America, and it will hurt. While in an objective sense I think this would have advantages for both us and everyone else, in the short to medium term, it will be devastating. I've joked in the past, based on certain statistics like infant mortality and income inequality, that America is a 3rd world country. To that dubious distinction, it seems that we can add another: we are a failed state. And unless we can implement structural reforms in our political system to prevent screw-ups like this again, we're likely to keep failing harder and harder for years to come.
Let's hope not. Let's fix this.
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