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.

Priorities

Last Sunday a comet or asteroid hit Jupiter, leaving a hole in the clouds about the size of the Pacific ocean. Good thing that Jupiter's gravitational field captured this object - it helped to keep us safe. But what is worrying is that an object that size was completely undetected until it hit.

As I pointed out in my March posting Why aren’t earth-crossing asteroids a priority?, any rational ordering of priorities would put a lot more money toward finding and tracking all the dangerous earth-crossing asteroids in our neighborhood. The odds of being hit by a large (1km+ in diameter) asteroid aren't large in any given year, but the consequences are enormous. If the one that hit Jupiter last Sunday had hit us instead, probably all life on earth would have been extinguished. One would think that might warrant more attention and money than it seems to get.

Gay marriage

I see that the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in America is once again grappling with the issue of ordaining openly-gay clergy and blessing same-sex marriages, a thorny and explosive issue in most Christian denominations.

Whatever the theological and scriptural arguments for each side of this issue, I find it interesting that the major monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – have historically all had an almost pathological fascination with controlling sexuality. Celibate clergy, all-male rabbis, the burka, honor killings (killing female relatives who may have “dishonored” the family with their alleged sexual transgressions), and endless teachings focused, not on the quality of relationships, but on prescribed and proscribed sexual practices. A dispassionate alien observer could not help but think that these male-dominated religions must all live in terror of the reproductive capabilities of women.

If these religions had ever put anywhere near as much money, energy and real emphasis (as opposed to lip service) on controlling violence, on helping the poor, on social justice, or even on addressing the common dysfunctions in “normal” heterosexual relationships, the world would be a much better place.

Of course most people aren’t rational about this subject – they can’t be, having been indoctrinated since childhood in whatever religious tradition happened to be around them. As the Jesuits astutely noted “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”. (as I said – a male-dominated religion). Childhood indoctrination, implanted before there are well-developed rational faculties to examine and question what is being taught, follows us all throughout our lives and shapes our world-view until we die.

But if people were rational and un-indoctrinated, they might see that the issues of confirming gay clergy or solemnizing same-sex marriages are very minor and largely irrelevant in the face of the real pressing world issues of the day, and hardly worth all the fuss and controversy they seem to generate and all the energy that is wasted on them.

Recommended: Will the Current Proposals Fix Health Care?

I recommend David Broder's editorial in the Washington Post, Will the Current Proposals Fix Health Care?.

The problem isn't that the first-cut proposals coming out of the Congressional committees aren't perfect. A first-cut is just that - a first try. The problem is that the president and the Democratic Congress are rushing to get a bill through before the administration's honeymoon is over, so we may get stuck with the first-cut -- yet another hastily-assembled and poorly-thought-out bill just like the stimulus package.

Health care certainly needs fixing, but if all we get is a bigger deficit and higher taxes, and yet no fix to the fundamental health care problems, then in a year or two we will be far worse off than we are now.

Another scary chart

As long as we are showing scary charts, here is one just issued by the Congressional Budget Office:

And by the way, this doesn't include the $1-3 trillion (depending on who you ask) new health plan......

Democrats got away from being accused of "tax and spend" policies when Clinton was president, because he really governed as a centrist. But under this administration the liberals have so far gone full force back to tax and spend.

The Obama Team chart

Here is the chart the Obama team used months ago to argue for a stimulus bill:


Note the actual unemployment numbers in maroon. Nuff said.......

Excuse me….. ??

From Time Magazine’s website:

“On July 14, Goldman Sachs posted second-quarter profits of $3.44 billion, more than the company made in all of 2008 and about on par with the precrisis gilded age, while announcing that it had set aside $11.4 billion this year to compensate workers, or $386,489 per employee.”

Excuse me? The government bailed them out with billions when the crisis hit, and now only a few months later, while unemployment soars and the nation remains in a deep recssion, Goldman Sachs is back to their pre-crisis obscene executive payouts?

Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi has reported

“… [T]he number of [current and former] Goldman Sachs employees who are in the government is so—it’s so enormous that it would be impossible to list on this program. But just briefly, you know, there were two Treasury secretaries who were very important: Bob Rubin during the Clinton administration and Hank Paulson during the Bush administration. Bush’s Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten, was a former Goldman Sachs banker. The guy who administered TARP, Neel Kashkari, was a Goldman banker. The current head of the NYSE, the World Bank, the Canadian National Bank, the number two guy at the Treasury, the head of the Commodity Futures Exchange Commission, which regulates the commodities market—all these people are ex-Goldman bankers. And because of that, they have access to these, you know, contacts in government, and they’ve always been able to get whatever they want from government, whenever they want…”

Sounds to me like a cozy deal between the government and Goldman Sachs. Sound to me like something is rotten in Washington.......