Authors: Hedrick Smith
“We have to re-establish the link between the Congress, the president and the party,” former Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker said approvingly. “A four-year term for House members, coterminous with the president, would create an astonishing togetherness between the House and the president.”
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Even allowing for some hyperbole, this option would give all presidents
somewhat more favorable balances of power in Congress than under the present system. This approach might soften the sharpest edges of divided government, but it would not eliminate the problem. Simultaneous elections alone do not guarantee unity and harmony. Eisenhower had a Republican Congress in 1952, but in the five other Republican presidential victories since then (Eisenhower once, Nixon twice, and Reagan twice), the Republican president faced Democratic control of one or both houses of Congress on the day he took office. Moreover, an eight-year term for senators seems awfully long.
OPTION 2: THE TEAM TICKET
Option 2, a more radical attack on divided government, is what Lloyd Cutler, former White House counsel to President Carter, calls the “team ticket.” That means putting president, vice president, senator, and House member on a single slate and requiring a straight party-ticket vote. This revision would insure the president’s party would control Congress.
A second variation, aimed at unifying party government, would give “bonus seats” in Congress to presidential winners, to assure them of a party majority in Congress.
Quite obviously, the “team-ticket” idea involves radical surgery on the Constitution, to make our system more like the British and other European parliamentary systems. As a practical matter, I doubt that either American politicians or the electorate would favor such a radical change. Sustained paralysis of American government could bring us to that. But our political predicament is not yet that dire and the European parliamentary record not that enviable. After all, Reagan did manage to pass his budget and tax cuts in 1981 and the tax-reform bill went through in 1986—evidence that major action is possible in a divided government, even if not very often. Moreover, there is a very serious drawback to the “team ticket” idea. While it makes one party more accountable for national policy, it also raises the risks of “tyranny of the majority”—a party majority—so feared by the Founding Fathers. This risks compounding the dangers of excessively aggressive presidents.
But there are less radical steps—short of changing the basic balance of the Constitution—to strengthen political parties and the links between presidents and their party members in Congress. They involve changes in the presidential nominating system and the rules of campaign financing.
OPTION 3: BRING BACK THE PROS
Option 3 is to give more say in the selection of presidential nominees to each party’s leaders and officeholders across the country: senators, governors, members of Congress, mayors of big cities. The aim is to move professional politicians back into the nominating process, balancing delegates chosen in popular primaries. Under this option, the party’s officeholders, and nominees for major offices, would automatically be unpledged delegates to party conventions, free to throw their weight to whichever candidate they felt best served the party. Their involvement would require the contenders to take more time to develop networks of support among professional politicians. Also, with more voice in picking the nominee, the elected politicians would have more reason to cooperate with him as president.
The Democrats have already moved part way in this direction because of their bad experience in 1980. President Carter wrapped up the 1980 nomination by winning a majority of delegates in the primaries. But by the Democratic convention in the summer of 1980, congressional Democrats felt certain that with Carter leading the ticket, their party was headed for heavy losses—and it was. Many senators and House members, fearing for their seats, wanted another nominee. But under the party rules, there was no way to pick another nominee. If there had been several hundred uncommitted delegates, mainly officeholders, change would have been possible. After this episode, the Democratic party rules were changed for the 1984 convention, so that eighty percent of the Democratic members in Congress got seats as uncommitted delegates. It would be better to make it one hundred percent, and to add governors, big-city mayors, and party nominees for important offices, perhaps giving them all double-weighted votes.
Another approach, assuming that the country is moving toward a national political primary, is to give the party pros a voice before the primary. Thomas Cronin, a Democratic activist and political scientist at Colorado College, has suggested that the parties hold national conventions in the summer of election years. At these conventions, elected politicians and party activists would screen would-be contenders and pick two or three to run in the primary. That way, the ultimate victor would have the support of political peers and of the popular vote.
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Obviously, such steps would make it harder for an outsider such as Carter to win the nomination. But they would help insure that any nominee had solid backing from the party network and improve the links between a president and his party leadership.
OPTION 4: STRENGTHEN PARTIES
Option 4 is to strengthen the role and cohesive force of political parties by changing campaign finance laws so that more campaign funding is routed through the parties and less through political action committees. There are all kinds of changes that could be made to achieve that. One is to restore the one-hundred-percent tax credit for small donations to parties by individual voters (up to one hundred dollars); another is to raise the current ($20,000) ceiling on individual donations to parties by individuals; a third is to raise the limit on how much parties can donate to individual Senate and House candidates. In each case, the point is to give the parties more money and more leeway in using it, to increase their importance to their candidates and their potential for cohesive influence on candidates after the election.
OPTION 5: TELEVISION SUBSIDIES
Option 5 is to use parties as the major conduits for a “television subsidy” to candidates. Television time is the gold coin of the modern campaign. Some reformers have recommended setting up a television fund: a bank of hundreds of hours of television time, gathered by a levy on TV stations across the country as a public service cost of their lucrative operating licenses.
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To strengthen the national parties by making members of Congress more dependent on them, the Committee on the Constitutional System recommended that half of each party’s television time be allotted to the national parties, to distribute among their candidates, and half given to the candidates—both incumbents and challengers.
A “television subsidy” would strike at one of the most alarming problems in our political system today: the enormous electoral advantages of incumbents, especially in the House of Representatives, an advantage heavily tilted for Democrats.
The single most important step to break the prevalent pattern of divided government is to restore genuine, two-party competition across the country for seats in the House. With good reason, Tom Mann cites the argument that a “responsive and responsible government requires at least an occasional change in party control of the House.”
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The present incumbency advantage of House members is so great and there are so many safe seats that fewer than fifteen percent of the nation’s 435 congressional districts produce a serious contest in most elections. This situation largely insulates the House from national political trends. It guarantees the continued Democratic lock on the
House—now thirty-four years in duration. Control of the House is unaffected by partisan changes in voter sentiment nationwide, and that insures a partisan divided government every time a Republican is elected president. Beyond that, the lack of authentic competition in so many elections undermines the essence of representative government.
The automatic advantages of incumbents are well known by now: large staffs, free mailing privilege, congressional radio and television studios, and TV satellite feeds. Political consultants reckon that package is worth $500,000 in campaign funds for each incumbent, not to mention the heavy pro-incumbent tilt of donations by political action committees.
If genuine competition is to be restored to House elections, some subsidies are necessary for challengers—for example, some postal privilege and a partial financial subsidy to offset the built-in subsidies of incumbents. But the single most important need of challengers is visibility—simple exposure to the voters. Without it, challengers are licked before they start.
No medium is more important to challengers than television, and probably no step would be more important in creating a genuine choice for voters than a television subsidy to challengers as well as incumbents. For example, each congressional district could be allotted a subsidy of an hour or two in prime time for each major candidate, during the final month before the election, to be used solely for live appearances (no media spots) of no less than ten minutes each, in order to insure some discourse on issues.
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Such an approach is especially important in the House because so few House races are real contests. If incumbents were less confident of reelection, they might be more loyal to their parties—especially if their parties had more funds and television time to spread around.
Flushing Out “Partisan Cholesterol”
The institutional fixes that I have mentioned—and of course, there are more—are unlikely to materialize soon. Even if there were a Democratic sweep in 1988, the odds are strong that the ills of divided government will resume over the longer run. In that case, the experience of the past few decades, and particularly the Reagan presidency, teaches that the vital process of coalition making requires a more genuine commitment to collaboration across party lines on the most important issues: in short, old-fashioned bipartisanship.
Bryce Harlow used to say that excessive partisanship was the “cholesterol” that clogged the arteries of the American system because of the
enmities and bad tempers it produced. Harlow, a gruff, battle-scarred Texan, had personal ties across party lines with Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn, the Democratic leaders in Congress. Often during Eisenhower’s final two years, Harlow made a point of getting the president to invite Johnson and Rayburn for some quiet talk over a drink.
“The second floor of the White House, just the four of us,” Harlow recalled to me, not too long before he died. “Yeah. I’d bring ’em down about once every six weeks to flush out the political plumbing so that the president and the leaders of Congress could do business if they had to in a crisis.”
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Admittedly, that was the old power game, where fewer hands had more control. But the lesson of those quiet sessions in the White House is still important. During his two terms, Ronald Reagan did not huddle regularly with the House speaker or the Senate majority leader to work out genuine compromises on major issues, whether the budget or sending the Navy into the Persian Gulf. Nor did Carter or Nixon do it much. And therein lie many of our political problems: the failures of presidents more consistently to forge durable compromises with congressional leaders.
It is not sufficient, as Carter did, simply to declare an energy policy and then try to force it on Congress; or to try, as Reagan did, to impose budget priorities, Iranian arms deals, the
contra
war or strategic defenses. That merely activates political high blood pressure and blame-game politics.
Frustration with the stalemates and trench warfare of divided government prompted Theodore Sorensen, former aide to President Kennedy, to propose what he called
A Different Kind of Presidency
in 1984. Sorensen advocated bridging the stalemates of government with a bipartisan ticket in presidential campaigns: president from one party, vice president from the other party, cabinet drawn from both. As a precedent, he cited Abraham Lincoln’s tapping Andrew Johnson, the Democratic governor of Tennessee, for his Republican running mate in 1864, to help heal the political schisms of that era. “Our problems require more than partisan answers,” Sorensen argued. “They are more important than party labels. Both parties share the blame for our present plight. Neither can solve the problems alone.”
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One difficulty with Sorensen’s proposal is that Andrew Johnson’s experiences as president, warring with a recalcitrant and militant Republican cabinet and Congress, is hardly an inspiring model. As for modern times, Republican John Anderson, running as an independent candidate, tried a bipartisan ticket in 1980, with Democrat Patrick Lucey as his running mate; they came in a distant third. Short of a
national calamity as severe as the Civil War, it is hard to imagine either the politicians or the public adopting Sorensen’s bipartisan ticket.
The basic notion behind Sorensen’s proposal, however, is sound. The most prickly and difficult issues almost invariably require unpopular decisions, and bipartisan agreement is needed. Neither political party wants to bear the onus alone for inflicting the pain of raising taxes or for checking growth of massive, popular middle-class programs. The result is that those necessary steps do not get taken.
“Which political party, which branch of government, which president, wants to be held responsible for cutting the expansion of or eligibility for the indexed middle-class entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, or the funds for repairing our crumbling infrastructure, or the pay and pensions of those who serve in our armed forces?” Sorensen asked. “Who will change the popular tax and credit laws that encourage borrowing and consumption at the expense of U.S. savings accumulation and capital formation …? Who will accept the domestic political pressures involved in galvanizing the industrialized nations into harmonizing their economic, monetary, trade, credit, subsidy, exchange rate and development assistance projects?”
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