Three reasons Congress is broken
By Robert G. Kaiser May 23, 2013
Robert
G. Kaiser is an associate editor of The Washington Post and the author of “Act of Congress: How
America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t,” published
this month.
Why is Congress so helpless and so hopeless?
We’ve heard all the fashionable explanations: partisan gridlock; special
interests and the impact of their campaign contributions; gerrymandered House
districts; an excessively partisan president; a benighted Republican Party
dominated by tea party radicals.
But the real cause is deeper: Congress is a
human institution with a distinct culture, and the modern version of that culture
is hostile to creative problem-solving. If we have a mediocre Congress — even
when it manages to accomplish something — it is because of the people in it and
the culture they have created.
The men and women who now run for Congress
have special features. Most of them are much wealthier than their constituents.
Surprisingly few have strong policy interests or experience. Most are willing
to spend a day or two or three each week asking strangers for money on the
telephone, a demeaning but obligatory exercise. Most have internalized an
ethical code that allows them to solicit campaign contributions from people
directly affected by legislation they vote on. This is not rare or even unusual
— it’s standard.
I’ve witnessed the transformation of
congressional culture over the past decades from a variety of perches at The
Washington Post, including two tours of duty as a reporter on Capitol Hill.
I’ve long been intrigued, and often baffled, by our legislative branch. Then in
2009, I got lucky. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.)
agreed to let me watch them produce
what became the Dodd-Frank
bill, which reordered the regulation of America’s financial sector.
They allowed their staffs to talk to me regularly, on the record, over 19
months. I was able to gather a reporter’s favorite commodity: the inside
skinny. And I saw the culture of the modern Congress at work.
The events I witnessed were not exactly
typical, because they produced a consequential result. This was due to special
circumstances: the large Democratic majorities in the 111th Congress (2009-2011),
elected in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,
and the effective leadership of two experienced legislators who held key
chairmanships: Dodd at the Senate Banking Committee and Frank at the House
Financial Services Committee.
Nevertheless, I saw how Congress actively
undermines the best of legislative practices. Consider three aspects of that
congressional culture that affected the course of Dodd-Frank — and are even
more influential today, when Congress appears deadlocked on virtually all
fronts.
Politics trumps policy
The crash of 2008 posed an obvious policy
question: How could regulation of the financial sector be improved to prevent
similar catastrophes? Most of the answers that eventually made their way into
the Dodd-Frank bill were provided not by Congress but by the Obama
administration.
Frank immediately accepted the bill the
administration wrote as the appropriate framework for reform. It changed
somewhat as it moved through the House, but not much. Dodd did offer some new
ideas: for example, unifying the four existing bank regulators into a single
new agency. But no other senator embraced Dodd’s plan, so he soon abandoned it
and accepted the administration’s approach. Overall, the big policy questions
were mostly settled by the administration.
Why? Because large, bipartisan majorities in
both chambers never understood the arcane financial issues at the heart of
regulatory reform, nor tried to master the subject. Theoretically, the
lawmakers had an opportunity to wield enormous power and transform the biggest
sector of the American economy. But very few were interested. “This notion that
members of Congress are power-hungry — absolutely the opposite,” Frank observed
at one point. “Most members like to duck tough issues.”
The politics of reform, by contrast, was a congressional
preoccupation from the outset. Beginning in early 2009, Frank was talking about
political implications with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and White House chief of
staff Rahm Emanuel, who both thought a strong bill would help Democrats.
Emanuel repeatedly told Frank that White House polls showed strong public
support for reform. When pressure from hometown bankers and financial industry
lobbyists weakened some Democrats’ resolve in the summer of 2009, Frank warned
them to hang tough. “If you kill this bill now, you’ll get creamed,” he told
the Democrats on his committee. “You’ll get primary opponents. It will be ‘the
people against the banks,’ and ‘the Democrats caved in again.’ ”
Politics mattered for Dodd, too, but in a
different way. He believed that a big bill of this kind was unlikely to be
enacted without strong bipartisan support, which he pursued for months. He
discouraged Democrats who wanted to make regulatory reform a partisan issue.
But he also refused to vitiate the bill to satisfy Republicans who wanted a lot
less regulation than he did. Ultimately, he got a smidgen of bipartisanship —
just enough to get the bill through the Senate. Three Republican senators voted
for cloture, to cut off debate and allow a final vote; four Republicans voted
for the final bill.
Politics — and ideology — dominated GOP
attitudes toward reform. In the House, Republicans ruled out any cooperation
with Frank and the administration from the outset. House Republicans produced
an alternative plan to demonstrate that they could agree on some response to
the crash, but their proposal had no teeth and was never seen as anything more
than a public relations exercise. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, never offered
an alternative of their own.
Republican leaders in both houses used
financial reform as a fundraising tool. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Senate
Republican leader, and John Cornyn (Tex.), chairman
of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, traveled to Wall Street to
persuade — with considerable success — financiers to give more to Republicans.
John Boehner (Ohio), the Republican leader of the House, similarly sought to
attract Wall Street money by opposing the administration’s regulatory
proposals. Republicans, including McConnell, repeatedly attacked the Dodd-Frank
bill for provisions it did not contain and kept doing so when their errors were
pointed out.
Staffers do most of the work
Ted Kennedy said as much in his 2009 memoir.
“Ninety-five percent of the nitty-gritty work of drafting [bills] and even
negotiating [their final form] is now done by staff,” he wrote, marking “an
enormous shift of responsibility over the past forty or fifty years.”
In the case of Dodd-Frank, 95 percent might
understate staff members’ share of the work. After Dodd and Frank
themselves, the two most influential people in shaping the legislation were
unknown to most Washington cognescenti: Amy Friend,
chief counsel of the Senate Banking Committee, and Jeanne Roslanowick,
staff director of House Financial Services Committee. They and their staffs
were responsible for every aspect of producing the final legislation: writing
provisions (most based on Obama administration drafts), vetting the contents
with interest groups of all kinds, looking for glitches or omissions, and
hearing out the recommendations and complaints of hundreds of experts,
lobbyists and affected parties.
Very few lawmakers left fingerprints on the
legislation. Most of them voted for or against Dodd-Frank — nearly all along
party lines — without remotely understanding its provisions.
Staffers can’t vote, but lawmakers can’t
legislate without the work done by staff. In some circumstances this feature of
the modern Congress can help rather than hinder the House and Senate, because
staff members tend to believe in compromise when elected officials often do
not. But a compromise reached by staff won’t work on its own; lawmakers have to
vote for it.
Issues, even the big ones, are no longer
really debated
In the “world’s greatest deliberative body,”
there is little deliberation. The Senate Banking Committee never held a proper
markup of the Dodd-Frank legislation, and did not debate its provisions or
consider their impact. The House markup was ritualistic and formalized; it did
little to alter the bill, with one interesting exception — an amendment
exempting auto dealers from the purview of the new consumer financial
protection agency.
The final law has a number of radical
provisions that were not debated in either body. One example: It created a
Financial Stability Oversight Council consisting of the heads of many
regulatory agencies and chaired by the Treasury secretary. It can instruct
regulators to force firms to abandon practices it considers too risky and can
even shut down a firm it deems a threat to the stability of the financial
system. If, one fine day, the council uses that unprecedented power, the
consequences could be dramatic. But this was never really debated during the
legislative process that produced the bill.
Floor debates in both houses consisted
primarily of political posturing. Lawmakers did not engage in a serious
philosophical discussion about the proper role of regulation in the financial
sector or in a practical discussion of how regulation might make the system
safer. Instead, the two parties swapped slogans and catchwords. During the
floor debates on final passage in the House, the galleries were never full and
often empty.
Frank and Dodd were both remarkable leaders,
nurturing support, solving tactical problems and, in Dodd’s case, finding just
enough Republican allies to bring home a bill. They were old-school legislators
who loved the process and knew how to make it work.
Both have now retired from Congress. Those
filling their roles have neither their brainpower nor their political skill.
Too few senior lawmakers in Congress have comparable talents. Bright, serious
people who understand policy still do run for and serve in the House and the
Senate, but they are a small minority. Service in Congress is losing its
allure.
It is difficult to imagine that the House and
Senate giants of the recent past would run for those jobs today. Would Everett
McKinley Dirksen enjoy begging for money? Would Howard Baker have put up with
it? Or Philip Hart or Paul Douglas? Peter Rodino or
Lee Hamilton? Would any of them enjoy the life of a modern member of Congress,
working three- or four-day weeks in Washington and flying home every weekend,
flitting from subject to subject and mastering none? I doubt it.
The culture of Congress is the problem. It
took more than three decades for this culture to evolve, and it is now deeply
entrenched. That is why the current Congress is unable to function. It is
revealing that the only issue now offering any hope for compromise is
immigration — because many Republicans fear the political consequences of
failing to act. Once again, politics trumps policy.
This dysfunctional culture won’t be altered in
an election cycle or two. Because of it, our Congress is broken.