Reforming the Political Infrastructure

People scratch their heads over how we got into, and how we get out of, the stalemated politics that led to the “fiscal cliff” crisis these last few days; the answers go back a long way.  In a political science course I took years ago, the professor was fond of remarking on how our current American political structure is a fossil of 16^th and 17^th century Tudor and Jacobean England.  Any political structure has strong points and flaws, and our founding fathers were consumed with correcting the perceived flaws of the England they knew, from religious establishment to arbitrary monarchy to “rotten boroughs” to a “House of Lords” based on  inherited privilege.  So they created a political landscape of separation of powers, fixed terms of office, small electoral districts with residency requirements, substantial powers reserved to states, veto powers both in congress and in the presidency that require compromise, and a legal framework within which boundaries of action are determined not by a powerful president or opinionated congress, but by a court. All these served well to avoid the flaws of Tudor England; James Madison was one of the great political visionaries. But even Madison’s vision could not foresee the changes that time, demographics and technology would generate in the American body politic. For example, the America Madison saw was a young, agricultural America, replaced nowadays by an aging, urban country with vastly different needs.  What he and others created was for their time and for only the future as they could understand it.  And what they created has led inevitably 230 years later to a two party system prone to extreme factionalism that produces the kind of crisis we’ve just been through, with more promised to come.  In short, the failures of the political process these days result not so much from the failures of individual politicians as from a creaky political infrastructure built to solve the issues of 16^th century England, and will not go away until that infrastructure is fine tuned for the 21^st century.  Like our roads and bridges, politics will continue to fall apart until some major repairs are initiated.

Three major infrastructure features dominate our political problems these days.  First, the fixed terms and residence requirements for electoral districts mean that individual senators and representatives derive their power from a combination of local interests and affluent funders. They are immune from the many national party disciplines found in a parliamentary system, and as a consequence, national parties operate actually as a confederation of politicians whose real power derives more from local than from national interests. That’s why the Congress is such a mob scene these days.   This assures that only two parties will be significant at any given time – the party most likely to be elected and the party next most likely. It also assures that a coherent national strategy from each party for solving political issues during crisis situations will not exist.

Second, the residence requirement for electoral districts combined with the redistricting power of state legislatures at each census cycle has produced so many “gerrymandered” districts that congressional races are no longer determined by the general election, but by the primaries. State legislatures are generally beholding to one or another broad ideology, either red or blue, and ensure districts will elect according to that point of view.  But individual districts are often dominated by narrow views that only loosely fall within the ideas of the national party. Thus, primaries are dominated by party extremists who produce their own form of “rotten boroughs”, districts in which a splinter group of extremists can guarantee continuing election without regard to what their national party or the general electorate feels.

Third, the fixed terms two, four or six years in length for our representatives, president and senators encourage lengthy, expensive election campaigns which invite funding by special interests and consequent corruption. Third parties are forced out of the process by the residency requirement for candidates and by the sheer expense of it.  In a parliamentary system, by contrast, lack of fixed terms produces short, relatively inexpensive election campaigns.   The most expensive campaign, a separate election for the presidency, is eliminated altogether.  That, combined with national party discipline, which can involve placement of candidates in highly favorable or unfavorable districts as chosen by party leaders, means the role of special interests not interested in compromise is much more subdued, and room is created for the growth of third or fourth parties capable of forcing compromise and coalition in the national legislature.

We need, for real reform, to find changes that will encourage the growth of third parties, promote the development of unified strategies by national parties which can be voted up or down, reduce the expense of elections, and strengthen the role of national parties in planning solutions to our problems. We need not, and should not, “throw the baby out with the bath water.”   Changes might include, for example, making residence only within a state the requirement for the House of Representatives, thereby enabling placement of candidates by a state organization of each party, setting a fixed short campaign length to reduce expense, or limiting gerrymandering by establishing national standards for the creation of election districts subject to review in federal court. Whatever we do, the goal should be to strengthen the ability of the congress to reach solutions to national problems without excessive impasse.  The problems and issues of our 21^st century world move too quickly for us to continue 17^th century methods for their resolution.