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Introduction: What's Wrong With Congress?
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19764 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1991 |
603 Words |
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Almost everything, say the American people in poll after poll, citing everything from Congress' backhanded attempts to raise its salaries to an inability to control spending and balance the budget to the $500 billion savings and loan scandal. And yet the same dissatisfied people reelect almost every member of Congress (some 96 percent last November) in election after election. What causes so great a discrepancy? And what can be done to produce a more responsible and accountable Congress?
Brookings Institution scholar James L. Sundquist faults our political system, arguing that because the electorate has no opportunity to judge Congress as Congress, the legislative branch is in a very real sense unaccountable. This inherent problem of unaccountability has recently been compounded by the phenomenon of divided government--a Republican president (Eisenhower through Bush) usually sharing power with a Democratic Congress.
Therefore, reforming Congress through such devices as term limitation, campaign finance reform, and simplifying its structure do not go the heart of the problem. Better government, argues Sundquist, will occur only when unified party government is restored as "the normal state of affairs," when one political party or the other controls both branches of government, as was the case during the first 150 years of the Republic.
To bring about party government, suggests political analyst William Pascoe, there must be more partisanship and "ideological warfare" between Democrats and Republicans. He sees such an ideological inclination among the new leaders who will dominate the Senate and House in the coming years. A more partisan debate, says Pascoe, will allow voters to make better-informed choices on who they want their representatives to be and what they want those legislators to do once they are in office.
Partisanship will require members of Congress to give up, at least in part, the role that most of them have been happily playing in recent years--that of ombudsman rather than legislator. According to University of Nevada Professor John Marini, today's congressman is a "coadministrator" of the federal bureaucracy who avoids risks by not taking positions. But it is critical in a democracy, he asserts, to debate vital issues in a public forum. Only in this way can those charged with such responsibility be made accountable to the American people.
There is one policy area, however, that should be openly debated but not in
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