Congress gets Canadian
One strange development in 2017 was how U. S. politics became a lot more parliamentary while Canadian politics became at least a little congressional. As North America’s economies prepared to start growing apart, North America’s politics seemed to be converging.
With Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and an at least nominal Republican in the White House, the way politics has worked in Washington since November 2016 is that the Republicans figure out what they want to do and, when they can agree, push it through Congress without even a look-see toward the Democrats.
That’s pretty much how a parliamentary system works when the governing party has a majority. It’s how majority government in this country has traditionally worked (even if — read on — a more independent Senate may be changing things). The majority party figures out what it wants to do and pushes its program through Parliament.
Three-fold control isn’t always how the U.S. system works. In fact, the same party has held the presidency and both houses of Congress only 42 per cent of the time since 1945. But that’s the way it’s functioning — or dysfunctioning — for now.
When I began to get interested in U. S. politics, Lyndon Johnson was president and his watchword was “Come, let us reason together.” Sometimes presidents have no choice but to work with the other party. Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush the Elder never had a double congressional majority. Sometimes even when the president’s party does run both chambers, he tries to bring members of the other party along. Doing so makes legislation more popular and therefore more permanent.
There have also been times when party designations didn’t mean much, policy- wise. For much of the 20th century, conservative Democrats voted like Republicans, while liberal Republicans often sided with Democrats. Bipartisanship, or at least partial bipartisanship, was a hallmark of the U.S. congressional system.
These days, however, there’s almost no “working across the aisle.” The Republicans decide big questions in their House and Senate caucuses and then try to get them passed. Senate rules that allow some things to go through with a simple majority rather than 60 votes reinforce that strategy.
Of course, even when the U. S. is in parliamentary mode, its system doesn’t work exactly like ours. In some ways it works better. Intra-party policy debates take place out in the open and with the help of the press. Individual senators and congressmen periodically draw lines in the sand that leadership can’t cross if it wants their votes. In some ways, that’s a lot healthier than how we do it, which is by largely private back and forth among ministers, the prime minister and backbenchers. Rumours of dissent do get out now and then but caucus secrecy often seems as binding as cabinet secrecy and it’s a rare backbencher that publicly threatens to vote against the party line if he doesn’t get his or her way.
Ironically, what keeps the U. S. system from channeling ours more directly is that its president isn’t as imperial as our prime minister is (“ironically” because the idea of an “imperial presidency” was coined by the American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). At times, President Donald Trump has tried to intimidate different senators into voting his way, but generally without success. Partly because of his low popularity ratings, they seem insufficiently afraid of him, as some senators clearly were of Lyndon Johnson. By contrast, our prime minister, though a much more amiable sort, has power almost of life and death — of political life and death, that is — over his ministers and backbenchers.
On the other hand, and this is how our system may be becoming more congressional, he no longer controls the Senate the way he used to. It was always a puzzle why senators, appointed essentially for life and removable only for cause, would kowtow to their party leader. But kowtow they usually did. Not any more though. The senators formerly known as Liberal have developed minds of their own, which they are increasingly and shamelessly feisty about exercising — despite their utter lack of democratic legitimacy. New, officially independent senators seem to think and act the same way. Because of our senators’ newfound spunk, however illegitimate, we may see our prime ministers acting more like U. S. presidents: making public deals with senators, whether individually or in groups, so as to get their legislative agendas through.
The big puzzle about Trump’s first year in office is why someone so evidently non- ideological didn’t broker legislative deals across parties. After this coming November, he may have no choice. In which case U.S. politics will go back to being at least slightly consensual, unless the players decide gridlock serves their interests best. As for us, with the Senate imposing itself, we may have to get consensual, too.