Authors: Hedrick Smith
Voters added the most fractious division of all: the gridlock of divided government. Often they gave the White House to one party and control of Congress to the opposite party. The Constitution had ordained permanent struggle between the legislative and executive branches. James Madison justified giving the president and Congress separate powers and constituencies, arguing that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
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But the conflicts built into our system of checks and balances have been exacerbated to the point of periodic paralysis in the past three decades—by split partisan control of government.
The partisan division of government is a crucible for repeated stalemate unless there emerge leaders of uncommon wisdom and political skill, both in Congress and the White House. Normally we seem doomed to inconclusive quarrels; no struggle, however great, settles policy permanently. Year in, year out, we are burdened with endless ventilation of the same spent themes: the deficit, defense versus social spending, arms control, abortion, free trade versus protectionism, military intervention abroad, the role and size of government.
“Issues are like snakes—they just refuse to die!” Howard Baker blurted out. “They keep coming back, time after time.”
This pattern predates the Reagan presidency and will endure after Reagan leaves the White House. Our national political irresolution derives from the ambivalence of voters on many central issues and from the lack of an overarching political force to organize and manage government. It takes an effective, durable governing coalition to make our government work. But over the past three decades, governing coalitions have been exceptional interludes, not the norm of American politics. Our recent history is a story of episodic spurts of cohesive action followed by long periods of stalemate and disarray. Governing has become a political football game of grunting line play fought between the forty-yard lines. Touchdowns are rare.
One basic problem is that we have no majority party. The old New Deal Democratic coalition has been broken up without being replaced by a solid Republican majority. Effective political parties are vital to governing, to giving shape and coherence to policy-making. Yet the public disdains and discounts parties, the Constitution does not mention them, and the Founding Fathers were wary of what James Madison
called the “dangerous vice” of partisanship and “sinister combinations.” The separation of powers was devised to foil the tyranny of the majority, namely, a government in the hands of a single party.
Yet American history shows that our system of separated powers functions most effectively when there is a single party to articulate a cohesive program and carry it out with sustained majorities over several years. And in practice, even the founders divided quickly into the Adams-Hamilton Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans.
In the first 160 years of our Constitutional history, responsible, single-party government was the norm eighty percent of the time. Only three presidents, John Quincy Adams in 1825, Zachary Taylor in 1849, and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, took office facing a different party in control of part or all of Congress, and each was hampered seriously. But mostly, our governmental system thrived on party rule—until the past third of a century.
Consider our six most recent presidents: Confronted by Democratic majorities in both houses, Richard Nixon was often embattled on domestic policy, especially on spending issues and his impounding of funds appropriated by Congress. Gerald Ford, after a lifetime on Capitol Hill, began his presidency by telling Congress, “I do not want a honeymoon with you—I want a good marriage.” But Ford wound up in a war of vetoes, sixty-nine in just two and a half years, many overridden. Ronald Reagan, too, after his stunning 1981 victories, had to backtrack on taxes and job-creation bills in 1982 and 1983 and fought Congress in his second term on budgets and foreign policy, especially after the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986. Even Jack Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, armed with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, had little success in passing their programs because they were not good at coalition building.
That overall record moved Ford to write in late 1980, “We have not an Imperial Presidency but an imperiled presidency.”
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In three decades, there were only two periods of strong president-led coalitions. One was in 1964–65, when Lyndon Johnson masterfully marshaled Democrats to pass Kennedy’s unfinished legislative agenda and his own Great Society program. The other, of course, was Reagan’s conservative coalition, which bent history in the opposite direction, cutting taxes and checking the growth of government. Reagan had a brief reprise with the tax-reform bill of 1986, when tax rates were cut still further. Until the Iran-
contra
scandal broke, Reagan had restored
enough vigor to the presidency to rebut the Cassandras lamenting that our system of government had become unworkable.
But it is also striking that this very popular president failed to institutionalize his agenda. Reagan’s great personal popularity did not engender enduring public agreement with his positions on defense spending, Social Security, military aid to the
contras
, or abortion. Indeed, opinion polls showed that Reagan not only failed to pull the public to the right during his presidency but that the electorate actually drifted leftward: The consensus for a big defense buildup melted away; support for governmental activism in areas like education rose; people came to feel that deregulation had gone too far on health, safety, and the airlines.
Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who embedded the New Deal legacy in the American system, Reagan failed to embed the opposite legacy of erasing government programs or pushing policy into the private sector. His dream of shifting big federal programs to the states did not materialize. In sum, Reagan bowed to perpetuation of almost all government programs, and David Stockman accused him of being less radical than he sounded—of waging a “phony war on spending.”
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Hugh Heclo, a Harvard University political scientist, rendered a more temperate verdict: “Reaganism is devoted to reducing the domestic presence of the federal government. The paradox is that Ronald Reagan’s genial exertions may have served only to entrench and in some cases expand that presence.… Much as F.D.R. and the New Deal had the effect of conserving capitalism, so Reaganism will eventually be seen to have helped conserve a predominantly status quo, middle-class welfare state.”
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Paul Weyrich, a leading New Right conservative, agreed that there had been “no Reagan Revolution,” but he suggested that divided government was the real reason: “The Republican Party spent $1 billion on national elections during the past decade,” he said. “The conservative movement spent another $200 million, and business PACs and individual contributors over $300 million, supporting national Republican candidates during the same period. That is more than $1.5 billion spent on national elections with very little to show for it. Why? The first reason is that many conservatives are monarchists at heart. They
love
the Presidency. They think that if you own the Presidency, that is all that really counts.… A few conservatives have now come to the conclusion that Congress is just as important.”
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For eight years Reagan faced Democratic majorities in the House (from 51 to 103 votes), majorities largely committed to protecting the status quo or to snip government only at the margins. In Reagan’s first
year, Congress supported him on eighty-two percent of his issues—a high success rate, though less than Eisenhower and Johnson in their heydays. Despite his landslide reelection, Congressional support for Reagan in 1985 and 1986 fell below sixty percent, almost as poor as for Nixon and Ford at their low ebbs.
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In retreat in 1982 and 1983, Reagan struck some one-shot bipartisan compromises on Social Security, the MX missile, and tax increases. But from then on, his ideological rhetoric and his uncompromising position sharpened the combative instincts in Congress, tightening the vise of stalemate.
My purpose is not to dwell on Reagan’s problems but to suggest that they are endemic to our system. Reagan’s conflicts with Congress did not originate with him, nor will they end with him. The gridlocks of divided government are now almost inevitable under a Republican president.
On January 20, 1989, Republicans will have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty years. The Democrats ruled the House for that entire period. Going further back, Eisenhower enjoyed Republican majorities in both House and Senate for his first two years, and then had six years of opposition control of Congress. The pattern was the same under Nixon and Ford.
“At such times, the normal tendency of the U.S. system toward deadlock becomes irresistible,” political scientist James Sundquist commented. “Harmonious collaboration, barring national crisis, is out of the question. The President and Congress are compelled to quarrel. No presidential proposal can be accepted by the legislature without raising the stature of the President as leader. Similarly, no initiative of Congress can be approved by the President without conceding wisdom to his enemies. The conflict, bickering, tension, and stalemate that characterized the 14 years of divided government were inevitable.”
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Sundquist was writing not long before Reagan took office. Reagan’s two terms made it not fourteen—but
twenty-two
—years of partisan division during the last thirty-six years, nearly two thirds of the time. Democratic presidents have other problems holding together the factions of their diverse party and forming governing coalitions. But since 1952 Republicans have been better than Democrats at winning the White House, and if that continues, the pattern of divided government is likely to persist—unless significant changes are made in our political system.
Blame-Game Politics
Divided government leaves a Republican president and a Democratic Congress with two basic options: bipartisan collaboration or partisan warfare and blame-game politics. It takes a sustained commitment to bipartisan compromise both by the president and congressional leaders to overcome divided government. During the Reagan presidency, which bears lessons for the future, bipartisanship withered and partisan divisions became more intense—hardening the arteries of government.
Politics is like physics, action begets reaction. As political scientist Thomas Mann observed, any president “shapes the climate of politics in Congress.”
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Eisenhower, as a moderate Republican, not only worked with Democratic leaders but often set a climate of tolerance and cooperation. Richard Nixon sharpened the partisan edge, Reagan even more so. As an ideological president, bent on imposing his agenda and scoring partisan points, quick to blame Congress for stalemates, and more rigid in his second term than in his first term, Reagan polarized the politics of Congress. His highly partisan style aggravated the deeper neuralgias of divided government.
But Reagan had no monopoly on partisanship. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill struck back with partisan war cries and maneuvers aimed at blocking or embarrassing Reagan. Except for one-shot compromises on MX, Social Security, tax reform, or putting Marines into Lebanon, Speaker Tip O’Neill challenged Reagan head-on for six years. Jim Wright, as speaker in the 100th Congress (1987–88), was even more aggressive in opposing Reagan. Moreover, with Democrats back in control of the Senate, Wright had a powerful ally in Majority Leader Robert Byrd.
According to
Congressional Quarterly
, the Congress that faced Reagan in 1985–86 was the “most partisan in at least three decades.”
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Partisan majorities fought each other more frequently than at anytime since the Truman presidency. Reagan had scored well in 1981 by combining highly partisan voting by Republicans with the defections of thirty or more Democrats. But further into the Reagan presidency, fewer and fewer Democrats defected to Reagan.
The brutal 1986 battle for control of the Senate and the onset of the 1988 presidential campaign deepened the partisan divide in 1987. Whenever they could, Speaker Wright and Majority Leader Byrd garnered Republican support to override Reagan’s vetoes of an $87.5 billion, five-year highway bill and a $20 billion clean water bill in 1987,
to oppose Reagan on trade measures, or to press Reagan to accept a tax increase to finance his defense buildup. But the Democratic leaders also pushed partisan causes: bills to reform campaign financing or to oppose Reagan’s use of the Navy to protect Kuwait’s Persian Gulf shipping, or the battle over Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. The Democratic leaders knew Reagan could veto their bills, but they pushed ahead anyway—just as Reagan had long pushed a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, knowing it would not pass. The purpose on both sides was less to solve the issues than to reap credit with the voters and put blame on the other side.
The very fact of divided government invites politicians to play the blame game—to engage in maneuvers which have little chance of implementation but which dramatize their side’s virtue and the opposition’s villainy. With power politically divided, it is hard for voters to know whom to hold responsible for failure: the president or Congress, Republicans or Democrats. In this situation, the incentives of the power game reward tactical squeeze plays, finger pointing, damage control, and partisan posturing. The temptation for both sides is to protect their sacred cows and to gore the other side’s oxen. The gambits have become familiar: budgets passed at the eleventh hour, Congress forcing the president to swallow unpalatable provisions in omnibus bills, or the president melodramatically shutting down government so that TV networks can dramatize “congressional irresponsibility.” These are blame-game politics staged for the fans at home.
The blame game usually distorts sensible government, because its goal is not solving problems but scoring political points. A favorite tactic is known as “positioning.” It is rampant in election years. To pick one memorable example: After the highly publicized deaths of two athletes in mid-1986, the public panicked over crack, a new form of cocaine. Fighting drugs became the hot issue. All sides genuinely wanted to do something about drug abuse, but rather than jointly developing a sensible program, the rival parties maneuvered for maximum public credit. House Republicans, eager to divert attention from a sagging economy, picked the war on drugs as their campaign issue. Then Democrats, led by Speaker O’Neill, one-upped the Republicans with a bigger program. Finally, President and Mrs. Reagan tried to top the Democrats with a joint appearance on nationwide TV. The politics of fighting drugs made daily headlines in the campaign homestretch. But after the election, the issue dropped out of sight and very little new action was taken to fight drug abuse, despite all the hoopla. By early
1987, even Republicans were berating Reagan for penny-pinching on the drug war.