Bleakonomics: How Lessons Stemming from "contract with America" Are Paralyzing Congress and Hijacking America's Future

There can be little doubt that the atmosphere in contemporary Washington has grown highly partisan and exceedingly conflicted in recent decades. While partisan debate is a rich tradition that can often yield well developed and thought out legislation, it can become a major problem if the discord becomes so heated that lawmakers from different parties become unwilling to work together to address problems facing the American people. What is the point of having elections, and sending elected officials to Washington, and using tax-payers dollars to fund the salaries of lawmakers and thousands of Congressional staff, if the men and women we send to Washington are not going to set aside their differences to pass the laws we need? There is no point in that whatsoever.

The inclination to let partisan strife stand in the way of progress through legislation is most damaging in the United States Senate, where a supermajority is needed to pass most major legislation due to the three-fifths majority necessary to end debate on a bill, a process termed "invoking cloture." Long considered to be less partisan and more prone to reaching political compromise than the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate's reputation as a body whose members put partisan interests second to the priorities of the chamber as a whole has long disappeared. The evidence of increased Senate conflict is demonstrated plainly by the sharply escalated number of cloture votes being taken in recent years. While the number cloture votes being forced in the Senate has trended steadily upward since the early 1970s, in the 110th Congress the upper chamber fully doubled the previous filibuster record set in 2001-2002. This indicates that not only has the Senate become more internally conflicted, but the legislative body is trending steeply more so in recent years.

The problems facing America currently are very serious. Internationally, we are engaged in two costly and ongoing wars, while also trying to prevent the nuclear destabilization of Asia. Domestically, credit markets have completely dried up due to the banking crisis, the unemployment rate is approaching 10 percent, close to 50 million Americans lack health insurance, the national debt is skyrocketing, and social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security are fast becoming irreversibly insolvent. With the United States facing all these problems and others, it is extremely concerning to think that lawmakers might be unable to set aside politics to answer the call for legislative solutions.

The American people have taken notice of Washington's inability to get things done, and have voiced their collective displeasure in the voting booth. The Republican Party, which enjoyed strong majorities in both houses of Congress just two and a half years ago, has seen their sizeable majority status seized by Congressional Democrats in just two short election cycles. While the American people might feel for the time being that they have mandated change, and that positive legislative outcomes will flow from the sizeable political shift, there is plenty of reason to believe that the worst is still yet to come. While the control of Congress may have changed hands, neither major political party has learned the tough lesson that compromise is needed for Congress to function adequately, let alone optimally.

Even with the strong warning that was sent to Congress by the 2006 and 2008 elections, the political parties do not appear to be interpreting these warning as a call for civility and compromise in lawmaking. In terms of the level of political conflict, it remains business as usual in the 111th Congress at best. You could actually make the case that the parties are digging in their heels now more than they ever did previously. Democrats and their supporters are emboldened by the possibility of a veto-proof majority in the Senate and the possibility of enacting what many in their political base are calling "real change." Many in this camp are also still sore about what they consider to be years of uncompromising GOP control and scoff at the idea of making policy concessions when enjoying such a large majority and perceived momentum going into the next election cycle. Republican lawmakers are showing no willingness to compromise either. They blame their electoral defeats on a very unpopular President George W. Bush and are looking forward to the day when the American people will stop blaming him and his GOP brethren for the country's ills. They also enjoy the most ideologically cohesive group they have had in years, and they have just witnessed how quickly a political party's fortunes can be turned around when the winds of change blow. Many in this camp are still nostalgic about the days when a permanent GOP majority seemed within grasp, and they think they can return to prominence by getting back to the real values of the Republican Party and avoiding compromise.

The American people may have voted for change, but they are not getting a change in the way Washington does business. Neither the American people nor members of Congress have realized that the problem with our dysfunctional political system is not that the wrong party came into power; it is that those in Washington came to believe they did not need to compromise with those holding different views in order to have success. As a result, the necessary lessons have not been learned, and things are bound to get worse for the American people before they get better.

So how did America get itself into this mess? How did we reach a point where so many large problems in our country have gone long ignored, and despite lawmakers recognizing the gravity of the problems we face, they lack the political will to compromise with the opposition party to reach workable legislative solutions to those problems? I think the root of our current predicament can be traced back to 1994, and the ultra successful "Contract with America," which earned Republicans control of the House for the first time in four decades. This period was critical in the development of our political system because it rewrote the political rulebook and it ushered in a new period of incivility, of which we are only just now seeing the full effects.

In Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner controversially theorized that the legalization of abortion following the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, led to a drop in the crime rate in the 1990s. I make no judgment on the credence of their argument as it related to abortion and crime, but I will use similar logic to make an argument about why Congress, a body that is no stranger to conflict, is now finding itself crippled by partisanship and its members' unwillingness to compromise.

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