Snowe’s alarming forecast
The structural forces that have transformed Congress into a more polarized and parliamentary institution are so entrenched that even the sorrowful insight in retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe’s parting lament last week won’t do much to change them.
But in a series of statements, the moderate Republican from Maine accurately diagnosed the causes and consequences of Washington’s hardening hyper-partisanship. She also correctly forecasted that, under current trends, the situation is not likely to improve. This fall’s election could compound the problem.
Snowe’s core complaint was that the level of partisan division in Congress has virtually ruled out reasonable compromise that reflects the nation’s diversity of views. Citing National Journal’s analysis, she wrote in the Washington Post, “Congress is becoming more like a parliamentary system — where everyone simply votes with their party and those in charge employ every possible tactic to block the other side.”
Snowe isn’t exaggerating. In 1982, when the National Journal first published its vote ratings arraying all members on a liberal-to-conservative scale, 58 senators compiled voting records that fell between those of the most liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrat. Those senators represented a pool of flexible pieces available to construct bipartisan compromises.
In this year’s ratings, for the second consecutive year, the number of senators in that persuadable middle dwindled to zero. Results were similar in the House.
Viewed through a longer lens, the picture is even more vivid. Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and his collaborators have analyzed voting patterns in every Congress since the founding. They recently calculated that in 2011, the ideological gap between the voting records of the average Democrat and Republican in both the House and the Senate was the widest since 1879. Other indices used to measure polarization show partisan chasms unmatched for a century.
Many factors have propelled Congress in this direction. Among them are the fall of seniority in determining committee chairmanships, which provides the leadership more leverage to demand loyalty from members; the growing willingness of liberal and conservative interest groups to mount primary challenges against legislators viewed as disloyal; the rise of overtly partisan media on both left and right; and, above all, a generation-long resorting of voters that has left each party’s coalition (but especially the GOP’S) much more ideologically homogenous.
The singular effect of this has been to reshape the job of members of Congress, especially senators. The legislators that history celebrates are remembered because, through skill and diligence, they built majority coalitions that would not have existed without them. No one can do that now. As Snowe noted, that makes it almost impossible for “elected officials to look past their differences and find common ground.”
Yet, today, there is no other way to consistently make progress on big problems. America is not only deeply but also closely divided. Each party now routinely uses the Senate filibuster to block the other, which means that it usually takes 60 votes to pass important legislation. But because the country is so closely split, one party rarely controls that many seats.
The safest prediction about November’s election is that the winning party will likely hold smaller majorities in Congress, and the presidency will be decided by a narrower margin than in 2008. In that environment, pursuing an uncompromising agenda could produce stalemate or intense polarization, if one side controls both branches of government and uses the special reconciliation process to squeeze through big change with just 51Senate votes.
Durable progress can come in 2013 only if each party accommodates the other. That idea appears anathema to the GOP presidential candidates, who are offering deeply ideological agendas that assume they will win a landslide mandate. But the first step toward reversing the Washington dysfunction that Snowe so powerfully decried is for each side to acknowledge that voters are unlikely to present them such a decisive victory — and to begin contemplating the compromises required to unify what is a nearly 50-50 nation.