The problem with Congress

I’ve been pondering the increasing dysfunction in Congress. This isn’t new, and it isn’t just because Congress has a Democratic majority. The problem of a dysfunctional Congress has been growing for decades, under both parties, and even with the collaboration of both parties. But watching how ineffective Congress was at protecting our civil liberties in the past administration, and has been the past few months at trying to craft an effective stimulus bill and an effective climate bill, and watching the problems it is now having trying to craft a health bill, has brought this to the fore.

The common “political religion” or ”political mythology” of America is that the democratic system of free elections is the best system the world has ever seen, and everyone ought to adopt our system. That was certainly the guiding principle of the previous administration, naïve as it has proved to be in some cultures.

And certainly history has little good to say about the more autocratic systems that have existed throughout the world. It’s probably true that a wise elite could rule better than an uninformed electorate, but no one has ever found a way to ensure that the elite are always wise, nor to ensure that the elite can resist the corruption that, as Lord Acton reminded us, inevitably flows from power.

Nor do I think this is the problem of the politicians currently in office. They are doing exactly what the people who financed their election them want them to do, and are responding (for the most part) quite rationally to the pressures on them. No, the problem lies with the election process itself.

In theory, a democracy ought to operate much like a free market. Lots of politicians offer their wares (political positions), and the free market of consumers (voters) chooses freely among them. Those that produce effective results get more business (get elected and re-elected), while the less competent get eliminated (voted out of office).

In practice that is not what happens in American politics. Perhaps it once did, but it certainly doesn’t happen that way now, at least not in Congress. Between gerrymandering districts and the massive advantage that incumbents have in raising campaign money and getting media exposure, it is exceedingly hard to replace a sitting member of Congress. Why else would a Congress whose public approval rating regularly hovers around 20% still get almost 95% of its members re-elected every election?

Money is at the root of the problem. In today’s America media exposure is what wins elections, and media exposure costs money. In the past few elections Congressional incumbents generally have raised 3-4 times more campaign money than challengers, and that translates to much more media exposure. On average, a candidate challenging an incumbent House member in 2004 was outspent by $700,000. The average Senate challenger was outspent by about $4 million.

In addition, incumbents have large government-paid staffs, the Congressional franking privilege (free postage), constant opportunities for free media exposure, and the support of wealthy donors, private and corporate, who hope to influence a sitting member. All in all, it means that unless a sitting member of Congress voluntarily retires or get involved in a big public scandal, they are almost assured of permanent re-election - and even public scandals are often not enough to unseat them.

As a result, the democratic “free market” is not operating as it should. Of course, even with these problems solved, it may well be that the average American voter is not conversant enough with the difficult and complex issues of today’s political world to make good choices. As near as I can tell, the majority of American voters (excepting readers of this blog, of course) understand complex world issues at the “sound bite” level (which is what all that expensive campaign media disseminates), and vote mostly based on emotional issues, candidate image, and party labels.

Still, the system clearly isn’t working as it should, and part of the solution has to be to level the financial playing field between incumbents and challengers, so that elections are based of the candidate’s positions, qualifications and records, and not on the amount of their campaign spending. And certainly the gerrymandering of Congressional districts to create “safe” seats for one party or the other ought to be eliminated.

Here, for example, is the shape of the 4th Congresswoman District in Illinois, carefully designed to make it a safe Democratic seat:


In any case, it is clear that our current system is not up to the task of managing a major power in an increasingly complex world, and we had better find a solution soon or we will soon go the way of past empires.