The apparent dysfunctionality of Congress is the hot topic of the year in Washington, so amid all the hullabaloo of Holidays this past week, I couldn't help reading two thoughtful articles on the topic. One of them I tend to agree with (from the Washington Post), and the other, from the AARP Bulletin, I have problems with. Let's tackle the AARP article first, with a jaundiced eye, then the Washington Post in a later post, and then see if we can make anything out of this mess.
The AARP article is a valiant effort containing a lot of food for thought that unfortunately, and possibly naively, relied heavily on an interview with Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, to explain some things. The article cited campaign financing as an issue (it is.), and special interest lobbying (though that has been present from the beginning.) But Norquist, who like most one-issue zealots believes his issue and solution is the answer to life, the universe and everything, thinks government is dysfunctional because it has grown too large (surprise!), and that problems will go away if we cut government and taxes. He believes that demographic shifts have created large blocs (such as the liberal urban northeast versus the conservative south) having highly differing views about what needs doing. Not only that, he thinks the extreme polarization of views that creates the dysfunctionality is a "good thing", because it means in his view that a majority is emerging supporting the goal of cutting government and taxes.
Of course, the fact that he heads up the organization devoted to cutting taxes and has made that his life's goal may have influenced his views somewhat. For on the face of it, his observations are silly. The U.S. is, after all, only the 4th largest democracy in the world, behind China, India and Russia, and while the other three each have problems, they are not the dysfunctional issues faced by the U.S. Also, mobility in America is such now that 20%, down in this recession from its usual 25%, of Americans move each year. America is a mixing bowl, not a set of isolated compartments, and is more so each day. And the pace of communications, also cited, is an issue only because the technology that generates the pace has not yet been adequately directed towards the problem.
Perhaps a better statement of the first issue Norquist raises is to ask whether a republic structured like the U.S. has an inherent size limit, and in order to grow bigger must somehow change the way it does business. In fairness to Norquist, he knows that structure is an issue with regard to size, and his solution is to limit the role of government. Of course, though he doesn't say so in the article, to a conservative that means getting out of regulating, staying hands off from education and welfare, and otherwise staying far away from all those things that the Preamble to the Constitution terms Promoting the General Welfare. As I've mentioned before, Alexander Hamilton, the great Money Man of the founding fathers, obviously considered promoting the general welfare an entirely legitimate role of the Congress under the Constitution and worth spending tax money on.
To shed a little light on the structure issue, let's take a peek at Federalist Paper #51, by James Madison, which addresses the whys and wherefores of the structure of government under the Constitution. By way of a quibble - the AARP article lays on Jefferson the responsibility for the structure of American government, but in fact Jefferson was in France 3000 miles away during the Constitutional Convention, which was chaired by Madison, and in fact played no role and grumbled afterwards that he would have done some things differently.
Our (and Madison's) concern is with the purpose, not the efficiency, of the structure. Let us be clear: Madison (in my view, the real father of the Constitution) defines the primary function of the structure of government as the preservation of liberty, not the efficient processing of the wants and needs of the people. To secure that liberty, he requires that the structure be made up of independent parts, each capable of thwarting the decisions of other parts. His greatest fear is of "the tyranny of the majority." For Madison recognizes that we are each at some time in some fashion a part of many minorities, subject to the uncaring will of strangers, that "men are not angels" and that majority will does not always coincide with justice. His, and the Constitution's, solution for preserving liberty in the face of the factionalism he knows will arise, is to force compromise through the inability of any one faction to seize all the reins of government. And that creates a necessary dysfunctionalism, when all parties are not yet ready to compromise. In the current logjam, government is operating exactly as it was designed to operate. An immediate solution is for Norquist and for others from all parties to seek honestly a compromise acceptable to all. The problem is Norquist, not the government.
Norquist's vision is directly counter to the purpose of American government as conceived in the Constitution. To get his way with tax reduction, he would sacrifice liberty, and liberty is the sine qua non of American government.
But even after immediate solutions are found, ongoing dysfunction exists, and the fact that Norquist is wrong does not make it go away. How to reconcile liberty with the increasing scope and size of government is in fact a major issue. To deal with that and other parts of the puzzle will require subsequent posts.
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