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Dec. 27th, 2011 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
barking_iguanaCongress Really Is As Bad As You Think, Scholars Say
The type of person who is in the House has changed a lot. In its overall operations, the federal government has been by far the least corrupt level since the 1880s. But that's at the because of the civil servants. Congress has always been full of frustrating but small-scale, tolerable corruption. Not tolerable as in you don't care, but as in it wasn't their main focus and didn't prevent them from doing their jobs. A lot of them might arrange a few sweetheart deals where someone who benefited by their actions funneled money to a personal friend of the congressman, who then paid for stuff for the Member. But if you were there mostly for the money, you were scorned by everyone else and you would probably somehow lose a primary or if necessary a general election before you gained enough seniority to do much real damage.
What drove them wasn't money, but power. Sometimes for the thrill of it, sometimes for the status, and surprisingly often because they thought they were putting that power to good use and strove very hard to do just that. They were also, on average, smart. Not geniuses, but possessing a well-rounded intelligence; able to deal with the theoretical, the practical, and the personal.
About the best that could be said for the current House is that like their predecessors, they're really not in it mostly for personal money. Though to the extent they like status (at least as much as ever) they now see personal wealth as the way to establish and exhibit that status. Unfortunately, while they're not necessarily into luxury, the quest for money has become all-consuming. Most of them don't like that. But without the campaign contributions, they don't get to keep their jobs, no matter how well the do everything except raise money.
What's worse (or maybe nothing's worse, but this is up there) is that those smart, purposeful people who used to run see that it's now all about raising money, so stay away. What we get instead are a bunch of people who need constant approval to satisfy their demanding but fragile egos. They're smart at reading people, but frequently ignorant and often without the general intelligence to overcome their lack of knowledge. They're quick, but shallow. That has the obvious cost of not coming up with or recognizing good ideas. It also has the less obvious cost of being much more dependent on lobbyists for information, especially since the party hierarchies are so much weaker than they used to be. The GOP caucus has fought back against the last trend with some success. But the Democrats in the House barely exist as a coherent institution, whether they're supposedly in control in any given year or not.
All in all, I think control by K Street is even worse than party bossism. And the GOP isn't actually dong any better than the Democrats in that regard, because the Leadership plays K Street's tune and tells its member to dance.
Mann isn't the only one dusting off the history books for an analog to the current impasse.I'd be more hopeful if the failures of the institution were somehow against the grain of the quality of the individuals. But I've been following congress in some detail since the 1970s. More earlier than now, but I still keep up enough to make comparisons.
"I think you'd have to go back to the 1850s to find a period of congressional dysfunction like the one we're in today," says Daniel Feller, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Tennessee.
Feller, who specializes in the Jacksonian, Antebellum and Civil War periods, points specifically to 1849-1860 when Congress sometimes struggled for months to even elect a speaker of the House.
Other periods of governmental deadlock include Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction presidency, Woodrow Wilson's conflict with Congress over the League of Nations and the fights between President Truman and the "do-nothing" 80th Congress in 1947-48.
"None of those involved the level of conflict within Congress itself that we see today," Feller says.
In the pantheon of also-rans for least effective Congresses, Mann would add a contentious period circa 1910 when long-serving Republican House Speaker Joseph Cannon was ousted from his post mostly by renegades in his own party. There were also bruising fights over the Depression-era New Deal.
In fact, Mann points out that despite its pejorative "do-nothing" moniker, the Truman-era Congress actually did manage to pass one historic package of legislation — the Marshall Plan, which threw an economic lifeline to a Europe devastated by World War II.
"There have been plenty of times when the rhetorical heat has been high, sometimes higher than now," Feller says. "What's most amazing today is not fiery words, but the inability to do necessary business."
The type of person who is in the House has changed a lot. In its overall operations, the federal government has been by far the least corrupt level since the 1880s. But that's at the because of the civil servants. Congress has always been full of frustrating but small-scale, tolerable corruption. Not tolerable as in you don't care, but as in it wasn't their main focus and didn't prevent them from doing their jobs. A lot of them might arrange a few sweetheart deals where someone who benefited by their actions funneled money to a personal friend of the congressman, who then paid for stuff for the Member. But if you were there mostly for the money, you were scorned by everyone else and you would probably somehow lose a primary or if necessary a general election before you gained enough seniority to do much real damage.
What drove them wasn't money, but power. Sometimes for the thrill of it, sometimes for the status, and surprisingly often because they thought they were putting that power to good use and strove very hard to do just that. They were also, on average, smart. Not geniuses, but possessing a well-rounded intelligence; able to deal with the theoretical, the practical, and the personal.
About the best that could be said for the current House is that like their predecessors, they're really not in it mostly for personal money. Though to the extent they like status (at least as much as ever) they now see personal wealth as the way to establish and exhibit that status. Unfortunately, while they're not necessarily into luxury, the quest for money has become all-consuming. Most of them don't like that. But without the campaign contributions, they don't get to keep their jobs, no matter how well the do everything except raise money.
What's worse (or maybe nothing's worse, but this is up there) is that those smart, purposeful people who used to run see that it's now all about raising money, so stay away. What we get instead are a bunch of people who need constant approval to satisfy their demanding but fragile egos. They're smart at reading people, but frequently ignorant and often without the general intelligence to overcome their lack of knowledge. They're quick, but shallow. That has the obvious cost of not coming up with or recognizing good ideas. It also has the less obvious cost of being much more dependent on lobbyists for information, especially since the party hierarchies are so much weaker than they used to be. The GOP caucus has fought back against the last trend with some success. But the Democrats in the House barely exist as a coherent institution, whether they're supposedly in control in any given year or not.
All in all, I think control by K Street is even worse than party bossism. And the GOP isn't actually dong any better than the Democrats in that regard, because the Leadership plays K Street's tune and tells its member to dance.
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Date: 2011-12-28 03:57 am (UTC)Significantly, Texas is now the second most populous state, not NY as when we were younger.
NJ of course has a prominent honor subculture, the Mafia.
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Date: 2011-12-28 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-28 06:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-28 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-30 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-30 11:50 pm (UTC)