As one who frequently complains about Congress and its maddening ways, I nonetheless note that through decades of profound change in the way it functions and in the nature of the people inhabiting its halls, Congress has pretty much retained the same old dismal image: it can do no good, it is full of greedy fools, etc. Now, with proposed term limits and other measures originating in the states, yet another wave of efforts is under way to reform it. I wonder, first, whether this one will prove any more effective or enduring than other attempts at reform over the years and, second, whether it would make any difference to our age-old, deeply satisfying and almost universally held contempt for Congress if it did.
In my adult lifetime there have been three broad phases of Congress, each quite different from the other, each supposed to represent an improvement over the last, and each, I am bound to say, as unpopular with me and the several million other critics of Congress as the one that came before. When I came here in the early 1960s, it was still the era of the all-powerful committee chairman and the ruling leadership junta. Liberal legislation was regularly strangled in committee or otherwise murdered, sometimes simply made to disappear or, if it actually showed signs of living beyond infancy, either bargained into pointlessness or filibustered into oblivion. Legislators who defied the will of the leadership were punished. I was idealistic enough to believe the techniques employed for thwarting opposition were antidemocratic and in themselves wrong (I still do); I was also naive enough to believe that if the hold of these particular men on power was broken, all would be well.
Was I ever wrong. When the reign of the geezers–conservative Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans-was ended, two things happened. The hitherto suppressed good guys, my much admired liberal dissenters who had been so badly dealt with by the leadership, took up many of the same blocking and strangling techniques that had been used against them, in furtherance of their own legislative agenda. And, with reforms that weakened the power of committee chairmen and other functionaries, there was a kind of dissipation of purpose that went along with the dissipation of authority. This was the forerunner of the third phase, the scattershot, ungovernable Congress we are witnessing now. It is an atomized Congress, reformed to a point where there is very little in the way of central authority, where power remains in some strongholds, but is mainly idiosyncratically exercised. And it’s every legislator for himself.
My gloomy point is that, as usual, you can attribute much of the unfortunate outcome to positive, upbeat developments that by any standard must be considered progress. Advances in communications technology and in air transport have enabled the legislators to deal much more directly and frequently with their constituencies, to have less need for the publicity and promotion that were once in the gift of party leaders to bestow or withhold. Ditto with money: the members raise their own–24-hours a day, it sometimes seems. But thanks to what I stubbornly still regard as improvements and reforms in financing laws, they have ended up as much as ever in thrall to special interests, so new reforms of the reforms are desperately needed. And thanks to far greater autonomy on the part of the individual members–surely, a good thing in itself–there has been a corresponding plunge in the ability of party leaders to enforce the kind of discipline that in fact is generally necessary to get good legislation passed or to get squalid practices curtailed.
The analogy is of course with the Soviet empire whose dismantling we all agree was a wonderful thing that liberated millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union itself and which has also inevitably and hideously led to a resurgence of the bitterest kind of ethnic conflict in the affected areas. I don’t say the old authoritarian dispensation in Congress was the moral equivalent of Stalinism (though there were days, at the time, when I might not have been so sure). But I do see a similarity in the welcome freeing of an institution from an unfair grip of power that in turn has the unintended side effect of producing, at least for a time, indiscipline verging on chaos.
At a minimum this suggests to me that it is off the point to belabor the party leaders in Congress for their failure to lead in the old style. Yes, there are qualities of temperament that might account for some of the problems now, ways of behaving that are not as rough or ruthless as may sometimes be required. But especially in the case of the Democrats, given the state of their national party, it seems to me misdirected to think these congressional problems are a function of deficient leaders. Nor do I think they are a function of excessive seniority or of anything else the term-limit legislation could cure.
The awful phoniness on view at the Clarence Thomas hearings, the pervasive wooden smiles and meaningless phrases to which Americans are treated by so many of their politicians nightly on TV, the shamefully self-interested deals that are cut in legislative maneuvering, the abuse of power-all this is the province of some, but assuredly not all, the members of Congress; much of it comes straight from home with them and their earlier careers there; and you won’t get rid of it with term limits. The campaign-financing law needs urgently to be revised. So do some of both the House and the Senate’s internal rules. So does the nature of contemporary campaigning itself. But as always it comes down to good people. To me it seems odd for voters to complain about the people they themselves keep sending to Washington and to decide that only through legal prohibition on extended service can they get the bad ones out or send the good ones there.
