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A Victim of Divided Government
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19767 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,539 Words |
| Author
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James L. Sundquist
James L. Sundquist is a senior fellow emeritus at the
Brookings Institution. His most recent book is Constitutional
Reform and Effective Government (1986). |
Last November, Americans were told by journalists and pollsters alike that the people were in a mood to "throw the rascals out" of Washington. They saw the nation's capital as a city full of bumblers, unable to come to grips with the budget deficit, drugs and crime, the loss of American preeminence in the would economy, or any other problem that one might name. And they blamed Congress more than President Bush, whose public standing remained exceptionally high.
But there was little the people could do. In any congressional election, the individual voter has a crack at just one lone member of the House and only one of the 100 senators (and, in each election, one-third of the states have no Senate race at all). Incumbent legislators are ordinarily highly respected in their own communities and, if they have been in office long, will be friends, or at least acquaintances, to a high proportion of their constituents. So only one senator and only 4 percent of House members running for re-election in 1990 were defeated.
In a very real sense, Congress is unaccountable. The people cannot reform it by altering its makeup, for the country as a whole has no opportunity to pass judgment, with its votes, on the Congress as a whole. This, it should be noted, is a deficiency peculiar to the U.S. government; in parliamentary systems, when the people select a new parliament, they approve or reject the party or coalition that controls the government as a whole, since the legislative majority is responsible for both the executive and legislative branches.
The inherent problem of unaccountability in the United States has been compounded, in recent years, by the phenomenon of divided government--that is, a Republican president sharing power with a Congress controlled by his political adversaries, the Democrats. During the first century and a half of the Republic, divided government was a rarity. Most people identified with a political party and voted the straight party ticket (in the nineteenth century, the form of the ballot compelled straight-ticket voting), and, with rare exceptions, an incoming president could count on the support of a Congress organized and led by his party colleagues. The government could then be truly held accountable--through the medium of the political party. Between the first inauguration of Grover Cleveland in 1885 and second of Dwight Eisenhower in 1957--a span of nearly three-quarters of a century--not once did an incoming chief executive have to contend with a Congress controlled by the opposition party.
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