The ideal of bipartisanship has dwindled in Congress and in Washington over several decades. The Dirksen Congressional Center in Pekin is holding an event to highlight the importance of that quality in helping government work well.
That's at 4 p.m. Thursday at Bradley University’s Alumni Center. Panelists are former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, former U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, former Rep. Bob Dold, and Ron Elving, NPR's senior editor and correspondent on the Washington desk.
Elving said in a WGLT interview that after four decades in Washington watching the sausage being made, the ideal of bipartisanship is scarcely even honored in the breech.
“I think we have reached a point now where it almost has disappeared. We may see a smattering of votes in the House today from each party that don't go with the party leadership, but it will only be a smattering, and it will probably not be particularly important,” said Elving.
He said bipartisanship comes from the idea you accommodate the other party before you come to a vote, so you would never push the opposition too far.
“That idea had a great deal to do with making the country work when it worked, and I'm not saying it's always been perfect, until now, we've had ups and downs,” said Elving. “When it has worked, it has worked because the parties could work together.”
He compared bipartisanship to the two wings on an airplane. You need support from both wings to get airborne. The place bipartisanship thrived most consistently was on appropriations committees.
“On the Appropriations Committees, Republicans and Democrats were usually balanced pretty well. It wasn't a lopsided committee, and in both the House and the Senate, they were primarily interested in putting together appropriations bills that would pass, and they wanted to make sure that everybody on the committee was taken care of, and then they would build out from that to coalitions that could pass the appropriations bills. What we've seen in recent years and with these government shutdowns is largely the breakdown of that process, the bipartisan trust that enabled the government to simply fund itself,” said Elving.
There are many causes for the erosion of that trust over the last several decades. Just to name a few:
- The tendency of parties to create safe seats, and thus less pressure to move to the center.
- A long-term pronounced decline in the share of true swing voters.
- Technological shifts, splintering of media landscape that allows and even encourages siloed thinking.
- The end of personal relationships between lawmakers because of the permanent campaign and fundraising cycles.
- The nature of a closely divided electorate tends to make compromise less achievable. People and parties want to give up absolutely nothing because it might lead to a key advantage in a campaign.
- The media's tendency to frame stories in a binary way.
“Every single one of those things has mattered. And they, of course, interlock, to form the restraints that we have in the current Congress,” said Elving.
Personal relationships
An underappreciated and almost always overlooked factor is personal relationships between members of Congress for generations were based largely on their private lives when they moved to Washington and brought their families with them.
“A lot of this had to do with the commonality of sending your kids to school together,” said Elving. “They saw each other in other contexts … the high school play. They saw each other at sports events for their children. And that is an enormous source of good human feeling. That is one of the ways that real friendships could form.”
He said when he worked in the Senate in the 1980s every senator had at least one good relationship across the aisle.
“I worked for a senator. Had three or four Republican friends. He was a Democratic senator. He had three or four Republican friends who I knew he liked better than most all the Democrats.”
Now, almost all the members go home most weekends and very few move their families to D.C.
A number of things have been proposed to cut this Gordian knot of interlocking forces that discourage bipartisan behavior.
Most are mechanical or sound like political science. He said the idea of multiple-member districts has some appeal. There’s historical precedent dating back to the 1700s.
“Many states elected a slate of candidates statewide for the House, the way they do for one senator. And if they had five seats in the House, they would elect five people from the state, and those five people could have whatever kind of allegiances they might have, but they certainly weren't all going to be the same because the vote would represent the variety, the diversity, of the entire state,” said Elving.
Today, many states are closely divided. Wisconsin, for instance is nearly 50-50 yet it has often had 6-1 or 5-3 delegations in the House. In the state legislature, it has been even more dramatic where Republicans held a 65%-70% share of the seats.
Full-state House districts would avoid gerrymandering.
“Illinois is an extreme example, too. They reduce the number of Republican possibilities to a minimum,” said Elving. “Why shouldn't every Republican in Illinois have an equal chance of electing somebody to the House?”
Barriers to change
He said the idea has not proved popular because it could cost powerful people their jobs, and neither party wants to give up its advantage in their respective stronghold states.
There could be unintended consequences if the proposal were enacted, Elving acknowledged. If you have statewide races on the House side, you inject a lot more money into campaigns, not that it’s cheap to run now.
For almost a generation, starting with Watergate in the 1970s, the nation moved to restrain political spending. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision ended that trend, he said, allowing elections to have unlimited amounts of money spent by individuals through political action committees.
“We live in an age of billionaires and centi-billionaires, people with $100 billion and more. Tiny fractions of that amount of money would be enormously effective if applied to statewide elections for the house more so than the Senate. The money question is quite real, and it may be ultimately the best argument against going to statewide election of House members or getting rid of districts,” said Elving.
He also noted individual personalities have inflected the national partisan or bipartisan climate, which can nationalize many issues from time to time in the nation’s history.
“That can be a very bad thing. And it also undermines the basic idea of the House and the basic idea of Congress, which is that there would be, in some sense or another, equal representation for all parts of the country,” said Elving.
