Downgrading Democracy

Gridlock in Washington, D.C. is not a new phenomenon. With Congress’ approval rating stuck at 9 percent and both parties attempting to claim the moral high ground on their plans to improve the economy, it’s a miracle that anything gets done in the capital at all. It often seems that both parties would rather let the country fall to pieces than give an inch on any dearly-held position. When democratically elected representatives find themselves unable to make decisions, democracy itself is often questioned. Surely there are few presidents who have never wished for the other two branches of government to vanish altogether. Wouldn’t everything be easier if Americans and their representatives would just shut up and trust the man at the top to make the choices? D.C. would certainly be quieter without all the squabbling.

This moment of gridlock is no exception. A recent spate of articles and opinion pieces has questioned the very foundations of American government. In the September issue of the American Prospect, Harold Meyerson wonders what the founders were thinking when they drew the blueprints for a government at odds with itself. Peter Orszag, Obama’s onetime budget director, writes in The New Republic that the solution to Washington’s loggerheads is less democracy, not more. And Michael Lind of Salon offers up a paean to the anonymous government functionary, who makes up for a lack of flashiness and media-ready quips with his (or her) stolid determination to keep the cogs of the republic turning.

Meyerson’s disquisition on the history of political paralysis is more diagnostic than prescriptive. He provides a valuable history lesson, but the conclusion he reaches — “Gridlock in Washington is no accident. It’s built into the Constitution” — necessarily limits his menu of solutions. Short of convening a constitutional convention, which Meyerson acknowledges would “unleash every bat in America’s political belfry,” the options are confined to tweaking the current system and fumbling at the margins. Wary of the power of the masses and keenly cognizant of the far-reaching effects of revolution, the founding fathers instituted the checks and balances that every middle-schooler learns about in civics class: three branches of government, a relatively weak executive, and what Meyerson calls “a bias for stasis” that “places roadblocks in the path of major policy shifts.” It was a deliberate departure from the European model of parliamentary government in which one party, by controlling both the executive and legislative branches, can enact its agenda unimpeded. It’s roughly comparable to allowing the party that captures the House to pick the president. In such a reality, John Boehner would occupy the Oval Office. (I shudder.) Instead, Meyerson writes, “Even when the same party holds Congress and the presidency, the system still fragments power. Presidents and congresses are elected not merely independently but at different times and by different electorates.”

The American system makes gridlock the default setting, as multiple factions of government must align in order to pass substantial legislation. Meyerson takes health care as an example. Opposition to national health insurance was hardly milder in 1940s Britain than in the United States, but “while Labour needed only a majority of Parliament to enact national health insurance, progressive reform in our system requires the alignment of both houses of Congress with the president, the appeasement of committee chairs, and, since the Republicans began insisting upon it, a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate.” With so many moving parts, it’s no surprise that another 70 years elapsed before the U.S. implemented even the tepid reforms of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Meyerson blames the demise of the so-called public option on the paralysis caused by the parties’ refusal to compromise — paralysis that our system of divided government is not designed to handle.

Meyerson’s conclusion — that “the Founding Fathers got it wrong” — is actually belied by his historical focus. There is no denying the ridiculousness of modern-day Washington, most recently exemplified by sight of Democrats and Republicans locked in a stand-off over how to pay for a tax cut that both sides essentially wanted to preserve. In hopes of scoring an election-year victory, neither side offered realistic legislation, opting instead to play to their bases with proposals (the Democrats’ “millionaires’ tax” and the Republicans’ fast-track approval of the Keystone XL pipeline) that clearly have no chance of becoming law. But Meyerson makes plain that the founders did not intend their nascent government to address such intransigence. Quick and easy decision making, a hallmark of top-down monarchies, was exactly what the framers wanted to discourage. Meyerson quotes Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that “in the legislature, promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit.” In 1789, Hamilton et. al. had good reasons to be wary a domineering legislature. It does not follow that, simply because these unavoidably fallible men did not anticipate problems two centuries hence, they “got it wrong.” Perhaps what is wrong is the way we have interpreted the Constitution, continuing to hew slavishly to a document written hundreds of years ago in very different circumstances. In many ways the Constitution has proven to be remarkably flexible; indeed, that malleability is often praised by historians as evidence of the founders’ farsightedness. In other ways, however, every generation has read into the Constitution what it requires. For all of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia’s talk of originalism, the Supreme Court often resorts to interpretation scarcely more logical than the ancients’ reading of goat entrails. The individual right to bear arms hangs on the placement of a single comma in the Second Amendment, and the liberties ensconced in the Bill of Rights now have “penumbras.”

Toward the end of his article, Meyerson offers his own insights into how to adapt the Founding Fathers’ government to the twenty-first century. The problem, as Meyerson diagnoses it, is a government hamstrung by the founders’ mistrust of popular sentiment; the solution, therefore, is not the retreat from direct democracy recommended by Orszag and Lind but instead a more full-throated embrace of it. But compared to the detailed analysis of the country’s problems, Meyerson’s prescriptions seem small-bore and unlikely to materialize. “The two reforms with the most support — ending the filibuster and abolishing the Electoral College — would do nothing to curtail the fragmentation of power within the federal government,” he writes, “but both would limit minorities’ ability to reduce the sway of majorities.” Though the filibuster has certainly been misused (and overused) lately, it is hasty to dismiss the founders’ wariness of pure majority rule. The GOP’s insistence on a 60-vote majority has blocked progressive legislation and created a morass out of the confirmation process, but Democrats could easily and quickly end up on the other side of the divide. In the event that a President Gingrich (who has already offered to make John Bolton his Secretary of State) tries to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with another Robert Bork, liberals like Meyerson might not be so eager to do away with the filibuster.

Meyerson’s second recommendation, to “change the timing of elections and the terms of congressional office,” holds more potential, though it would take some heavy lifting to implement. He notes that “these wouldn’t be parliamentary elections — the candidates for president, senator, and representative would still be elected separately — but at least our elected officials would all derive their power from the identical and most broadly representative electorate.” This could forestall the gridlock that occurs when an executive elected on “hope and change” in 2008 is forced to work with House freshmen voted into office by the Tea Party wave of 2010. “Elections have consequences,” Obama reportedly told Eric Cantor in 2009, “and Eric, I won.” It is difficult, however, to carry out a supposed mandate from the voters when a good portion of the legislature was elected under entirely different circumstances. Meyerson’s recommendation would remedy this problem, though there is also a case to be made that less frequent elections would further insulate the House of Representatives from swings in the national will. Whether such insulation is good or bad is up for debate; in fact, Meyerson himself might point to the meteoric rise of the Tea Party as a phenomenon from which the House should have been protected.

In spite of this note of caution, Meyerson ends his article with the argument that “The problem isn’t that we’re too democratic. It’s that we’re not democratic enough.” To accept this pronouncement, however, one must subscribe to the author’s view that a parliamentary system is inherently more democratic than a presidential one. And while Meyerson demonstrates that the former is “more responsive, and more efficient” than the latter due to the ease of moving legislation through a unified executive and legislature, efficiency is not synonymous with democracy. Health care reform would surely have been easier Democrats had dominated all branches of government, but few Republicans — whose voices would have counted for nothing in the process — would have called the outcome more democratic. Neither, I suspect, would the large portion of Americans who now oppose the Affordable Care Act. Democracy can indeed be defined as the will of the majority, but such a definition is cramped and narrow, especially in a country with a tradition of strong minority rights.

Others who pontificate on the fate of American democracy are less gung-ho about enhancing the will of the people. Meyerson is notoriously bullish on holding politicians accountable to the voters; more recently, he has fulminated against the “headlong retreat” of democracy in Europe, where he believes technocrats and bond markets have usurped legitimately elected leaders. Peter Orszag advocates for less, not more, democracy, and his analysis ultimately rings most true. Einstein is said to have quipped that “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” Likewise, it is difficult to believe Meyerson when he suggests that the prescription for what ails our democracy is more democracy. In his essay for the American Prospect, Orszag at least dares to think outside of the box.

Orszag diagnoses an overdose of democracy, pointing to the recurring threat of government shutdown. Last summer’s debt-ceiling showdown was only the most prominent example, as it has become almost routine for Congress to run the clock down to the last possible minute before forging an agreement — if an agreement is forged at all. Aviation inspectors spent two weeks in limbo in August amid a partisan spat over rural-airport subsidies. Then a battle over funding for disaster relief, of all things, nearly brought the government to a standstill in September. Most recently, Congress nearly missed a midnight deadline to pass an appropriations bill needed to keep the government functioning. In a sane world, the default setting would be a smooth continuation of business as usual; inaction on the part of the legislature would not herald an apocalypse. Instead, Congress is saddled with too many crucial choices, and inaction produces not the status quo but chaos. Orszag thus identifies the core decision-making dilemma as the high number of decisions themselves.  Allowing Congress to argue over everything from the tiniest details (naming post offices) to the dangerously influential (raising the debt ceiling) only multiplies the opportunities for negotiations to go off the rails. It is sheer insanity, he suggests, to give a rotunda full of squabbling children the responsibility of preserving the full faith and credit of the United States. He writes:

To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

Orszag is hardly the first person to point out the essentially chaotic nature of democracy. There’s a reason all 300 million Americans aren’t allowed to vote on every decision the country must make. The Athenian version of direct democracy, in which each citizen steps forward to place his marble in a jar, is obviously unrealistic for a country that stretches from one ocean to another. In lieu of such democratic purity, the Constitution established a representative democracy, in which we vote for a couple hundred goons to work our will in the halls of Congress. Orszag suggests we take the outsourcing of representative democracy one step further; not only should the general public delegate decisions to Washington, but Washington should delegate decisions to experts who possess even greater wisdom. “What we need,” he writes, “are ways around our politicians.”

To circumvent incompetent or stubborn politicians, Orszag promotes what he calls “automatic stabilizers,” which would take effect in response to external conditions without requiring legislative input. Instead of relying on Congress to ameliorate an economic downturn with a politically risky stimulus package, the stabilizers imagined by Orszag would kick in when unemployment reached a certain level or GDP declined. He offers a progressive tax code as an example: “The tax code takes less of your income as that income declines, so after-tax income tends to decline less in response to an economic shock than pre-tax income. Since spending is based on after-tax income, the impact on the economy is cushioned.”

Orszag would also link the size of the payroll tax to the unemployment rate. When joblessness spikes, the tax would decrease, thereby avoiding the current partisan stand-off over extending the current 2 percent cut. He also favors the establishment of independent commissions based on the 1980s process for closing military bases. A panel of experts compiled a list of bases slated for closure; unless Congress passed legislation disapproving the entire list, the recommendations were enacted without any further action. Orszag writes that “even though this process favored action over inaction, it was not completely undemocratic: Congress still had oversight and could, if it wanted to, reject the commission’s ideas.” Obama’s health care reform includes a similar panel charged with reducing Medicare costs, and Orszag would expand the framework to include a commission on infrastructure construction and another on tax policy. Though nominally a good idea, Orszag’s proposals were written prior to the failure of the supercommittee — a panel ostensibly empowered to make just the sort of difficult decisions that frighten politicians. The spending cuts triggered by the committee’s failure were designed to be unpalatable to both Democrats and Republicans, but Sen. John McCain and other defense hawks have since moved to exempt the Pentagon’s budget. A prime example of Congress rewriting its own rules, this outcome demonstrates the loophole in Orszag’s suggestion: There is nothing that spurs Congress to action faster than the consequences of inaction.

Orszag addresses only briefly the objection that his tweaks would “reduce the power of elected officials and therefore make our government somewhat less accountable to voters.” He doesn’t deny this fact; he simply feels that it is a small price to pay for a more efficient government. Unlike Meyerson, whose solutions are less controversial because he couches them in the rhetoric of more, not less, democracy, Orszag willingly admits that the strength of our government cannot be measured by its faithfulness to majority rule. “We might be a healthier democracy,” he writes, “if we were a slightly less democratic one.”

Even Orszag, however, in his call for independent commissions, acknowledges the inherent conflict of a representative democracy outsourcing its decision-making to professionals. Michael Lind, writing in Salon, doesn’t bother to pay lip service to the wisdom of the masses. To make the case that “America needs more powerful bureaucrats,” Lind brings up the slightly inconvenient example of J. Edgar Hoover, who used and abused his position as FBI director to dominate government through eight presidencies. Though Hoover’s legacy has made the country wary of the unchecked power of unelected officials, Lind points out that this is an anomaly; the first half of the 20th century “was an age of great bureaucratic empire-builders, many of whom, like Hoover, spent their entire lives in government.” Lind argues that the fallout from Hoover’s corrupt tenure, combined with a growing conservative disdain for government and the demonization of “empire-builders” like Robert Moses, has pushed America too far in the opposite direction. He writes:

Obsessed with thwarting anything resembling tyranny in the post-Hoover, post-Watergate era, we Americans have allowed faction to run riot. Today the chief danger to the nation is not rogue bureaucrats but a locust plague of in-and-outer lobbyists who worm their way into the civil service and the staffs of the White House and Congress, making policy on behalf of their private sector employers and clients.

When Congress tailors legislation to the whims of oil companies and Newt Gingrich draws fire for accepting $1.6 million from the very government-sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) he blames for the financial crisis, it’s not a stretch to think that someone who has spent his entire career at a single agency might have less of a conflict of interest. Lind writes that “A middle-aged power broker whose next career move is retirement is more likely to ask what private sector lobbies can do for his agency — not what his agency might do to please his future employers.”

Beyond Hooveresque abuses of power, Lind does not address the downside of vesting so much authority in unelected bureaucrats. Even if the GOP’s hatred for federal employees could be overcome, the general public would likely be skeptical of surrendering its ability to throw the bums out. Such a system would perhaps be efficient, but would it be democratic? Philosopher-kings are all well and good until they turn into demagogue-tyrants. Like Harold Meyerson’s push to abolish the filibuster, Lind’s suggestions could be a case of “be careful what you wish for.” Just as minority rights are a nuisance to those in the majority, powerful civil servants look less appealing when, say, Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie” Brown is heading up the agency. Given the corrupting influence of lobbyists, however, I suspect this would be a risk Lind is willing to take.

“Risk” is the common thread that links Lind, Orszag and Meyerson. While Meyerson would undoubtedly object to any prescriptions designed to dampen the voice of voters, he shares with the other two authors the belief that American democracy has become dysfunctional. Each attacks the problem from a different angle, and each puts forward remedies unlikely to be adopted anytime soon, but all three would agree that the status quo is not a viable future for the American experiment.