Two longtime congressional observers try to point toward a better future for our national legislature. Excerpt from the talk on May 17, 2012.

THOMAS MANN, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Co-author, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks

NORMAN ORNSTEIN, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Co-author, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks

JOSEPH TUMAN, Professor of Political and Legal Communications, San Francisco State University; Political Analyst, CBS 5 TV – Moderator

 

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Tom and I met 45 years ago at the University of Michigan. We have been friends since, and we’ve been partners in a whole series of projects and books over more than four decades, during which time we’ve been immersed in the politics in Washington at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, but particularly in the corridors of Congress. We wrote this book because, in the more than four decades that we have been there, we haven’t seen it this bad. Believe me, we’ve seen some bad times. We’ve seen dysfunction in Washington.

When we first arrived, the city – and the country – were riven down the middle by the Vietnam War. The passions were high. I remember distinctly a moment in our first year there. We were working on Capitol Hill as congressional fellows of the American Political Science Association – George McGovern on the floor of the Senate taking his own chamber to task for the war and saying, “The walls of this chamber reek with blood,” which brought a collective gasp; you didn’t talk that way. A short while later Bob Dole, then a freshman senator, took to the floor and just ripped the bark off of McGovern. But before that year was out, I saw the two of them walking arm in arm in the corridors of the Senate. They forged a friendship, which remains to this day – both of them now in their upper 80s – over the question of hunger. They shared a passion for dealing with the problem, coming at it from very different perspectives.

But it wasn’t unusual to find those kinds of relationships, just as the divisions over Vietnam were not partisan ones. Some of the strongest supporters of President Nixon’s approach to Vietnam were Southern conservative Democrats; some of the strongest opponents were moderate liberal Republicans, many of them from right out here on the West Coast.

The world has changed since then. Now the level of polarization, partisan and ideological – the tribalism that we have that’s not just in Washington but has metastasized out into the states – alarmed us enough that we wanted to issue a kind of clarion call. We’ve written a number of books that have lamented the loss of the regular order in Congress. We have been passionate crusaders, but mostly on process issues. This time, having spent 40 years building reputations – in part as people without axes to grind, not pushing for one party or for a particular ideology – we figured it was time to spend some capital. While we see a larger structural problem – parliamentary parties that are now far apart, internally cohesive and oppositional – one party has been much more culpable of late, and it’s what we refer to as “asymmetric polarization.”

We’re going to take some heat for that, and it’s going to be a little difficult for us in the future to have the same credibility across the board, but we felt it was necessary because the stakes are so high. We are hoping that this book will have enough resonance that it will become a part of the larger conversation in the campaign.

MANN: We wrote a piece in The Washington Post Outlook section that was put online three days before it ran in the Sunday section and five days before the official publication date for our book. It was a summary of one feature of [our] argument. We had a very clever editor who gave it a title: “Let’s just say it: The Republican Party is the problem.” 

Well, that piece went viral. Within 24 hours, The Washington Post online stopped counting their comments. We put a little pressure on their servers. We’ve lived and worked in Washington, but never have we found something we’ve said or written the focus of argument and attention, and always preceded by “the widely respected and fair-minded, nonpartisan Mann and Ornstein.” People really just couldn’t dismiss it as part of the partisan rhetoric that poisons our politics. We haven’t had one Republican elected official speak out on the record denouncing what we have said. We’ve had hundreds of emails from people, some really long and thoughtful and poignant, and many were self-identified Republicans who were distressed about what had been occurring within their own party. They watch the coverage in Washington, and what they see is either a “Crossfire” show or intensely partisan news outlets. Then our traditional news organizations, fearful of being charged with political or partisan bias, sort of find the norm of balance. You get a quote from someone here and someone there, and that sort of does the story.  Someone made the comment that one of the most under-reported and least understood transformations in American politics has been that of the Republican Party, over three decades but then over the last three, four years. 

The two basic themes of [our] case are as follows.

One is the mismatch between our contemporary political parties and our governing system.

The second is the fact that one of our parties doesn’t really believe in the legitimacy of the other, and the other doesn’t believe in working with the other and wants to negotiate a hundred years of economic and social policy in the name of dealing with the crisis of deficits.

ORNSTEIN: If you look at what happened in Indiana with [Republican Senator] Dick Lugar’s [primary] defeat by Richard Mourdock, a good part of the thrust was condemning Lugar because he had worked hand-in-glove with President Obama. They neglected to say what it was that they’d worked together on, which was ridding the world of loose nuclear weapons that otherwise would fall into the hands of terrorists.

We don’t want to remove or destroy the Republican Party; we want a vibrant, important party that can be there competing with Democrats. This isn’t about ideology. Richard Lugar is no moderate; he’s a very conservative fellow by his voting record. Bob Bennett, who lost in Utah, was one of the five most conservative in voting records. The difference is, they were problem solvers, and now we’re leaching out the problem solvers.

Speaker [John] Boehner said they were going to use the debt limit yet again for hostage taking. We’ve had political games played with [the debt limit] over many years, but the leaders were never going to let the full faith and credit of the United States be jeopardized. It’s not as if we have the strongest economy and can weather these storms. You’re playing with the future of the country in a way that we just haven’t seen.

TUMAN: What makes [you] credible in making this argument for the book is that you come at this from different places, certainly in terms of the perception of your affiliations with your employers. Are you really different at this point, or have you gravitated toward one another in terms of your views of policy and ideology?

MANN: Brookings is not a left-wing organization. I suppose there’s a certain progressive orientation among many of the people there, but our job is to understand the intersection of process and policymaking. For 40 years I’ve built a career being an analyst of American politics and the constitutional system, and that’s what’s driven me. And that’s why – working alone and with Norm over all these years – we’ve been listened to by people on the Hill on both sides of the aisle. There’s a moderation in our whole orientation and, I hope, an honesty and integrity about the way we go about our work.

ORNSTEIN: Our different institutional identities have worked to our advantage in many of the projects that we’ve done. I also think we rise or fall on the quality of what we’ve said.

We have really tried to reach a goal, wherever we’ve spoken, [whereby] people would come up afterwards and say, “I’m not sure where you’re coming from.” We are now not going to be able to do that as much. We got, from the Washington Post piece, a lot of liberal blogs that started out by saying, “We’ve been saying that for years, and nobody paid attention to us!” It was an “emperor has no clothes” moment, because it came from people who started without that sense of, “We’d dismiss it right off the bat.”

TUMAN: What do you think might be a solution toward increasing opportunity to develop [collaborative] relationships, [both in Congress and at] the state level?

Mann: Efforts to deal with dysfunctional government tend to attach themselves to ideas that aren’t very promising, and could actually do more harm than good. One of those was the idea of a third-party independent presidential candidate. A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, an amendment to limit terms – terrible ideas. We have examples from the states. Do we really want to carry California rules on budgets and taxes to the whole country? You are a model for dysfunctional fiscal policy. 

There’s also the idea, prominent among academics, “Relax. We’ve been through tough times, pre-Civil War” – that’s a nice period to compare ourselves to – “and it’ll adjust over time.” We think that’s irresponsibly complacent.

One thing that people rally to is, “Let’s get all private money out of politics and fund our elections publicly.” We can’t get it [out] because of the nature of our Constitution and how it’s interpreted by the courts, and especially the Roberts Court. There are many forces operating in our politics. We need to reform money in politics, but full public financing cannot work in [our] era.

Ornstein: Let me talk for a minute about term limits. It relates to a broader problem in the society, which is this yearning [to] purge the system of politicians. To use the old joke, if the framers were alive today and heard that, they’d be rolling in their graves. They were politicians. They understood that you want people who respect the institutions that are political institutions, who work within a set of rules and boundaries that are the regular order.

You’ve got to understand other people’s points of view, put yourselves in their shoes. The idea in this extended republic was [that] you were going to bring people together; they would see each other, talk to each other, understand each other and then work together, and even if they didn’t agree on things, they would come together enough, and discuss and deliberate enough, that people would believe the legitimacy of the decisions that were made. Term limits work against that at every level. You don’t bring in the kinds of people who have commitment to institutions or longer-term things.

TUMAN: What can the average voter do to change this dysfunction?

MANN: One [idea] is to maximize citizen participation in the elections. If you have a 90 to 95 percent turnout, as opposed to 50 to 55 percent, you get to the polls people who don’t have as searing a set of beliefs, and who tend to be a little more open to someone who’s willing to talk to a member of another party. We have lots of ideas, some of them really radical, including mandatory attendance at the polls. The Aussies do it; they have since 1925, producing turnout above 90 percent in every election since then. It changes the conversation. Instead of mobilizing and demobilizing efforts, it’s addressing broader audiences and talking about more substantive problems. We have lots of ideas on that side of things, but there are other ways, even electoral reforms.

Ornstein: We have to get voters to look at the world in a different way and behave in a different fashion. If somebody pops up and says, “I’m not like the rest of those clowns,” don’t listen to them. Focus on trying to get candidates whose orientation is toward understanding that there are problems and that you’ve got to work with others to solve those problems.

Don’t believe every negative ad. Negative ads dominate this process because there is an automatic assumption that they’re all a bunch of scoundrels. We’ve got to guard against that.

Mandatory voting is a steep uphill battle in a country where we don’t like mandatory anything, but I think it’s going to happen at some point when people come to realize that if we have politics dominated by a sliver of voters who represent the bases, it’s not going to work.

A 95 percent turnout in and of itself is not such a wonderful thing. The former Soviet Union had that all the time; it didn’t represent function in the system. Chicago gets to 110 percent, on a good day. The difference is, as Australian politicians of all stripes will tell you, that if you’re not in a system that’s driven by the bases, politicians focus on the voters in the middle. You don’t talk about guns or gays or abortion; you talk about jobs and education and the economy and the climate, and the big things that matter. If voters come to believe that politicians actually are intent on trying to figure out how to solve those problems, then you’re likely to get a greater interest and a sense of efficacy about the system.

TUMAN: [With the rise of] super PACS and independent expenditures, money is more important than ever. If we increase voter participation but we don’t address money, won’t money’s influence be even more pernicious than before?

MANN: There is no silver bullet. We’ve got to work on a whole host of things. We have an agenda of changes on the money side that tries to attack the flight from disclosure, the utter fraud of so-called “independent spending” activities. We have to get more individual donations, and we have ideas for doing that as well. It’s difficult reaching a huge nation like ours. A lot of money in and of itself is not a bad thing; it’s the source of the money, and the opportunities for all interests in the society to have their views represented.

ORNSTEIN: Tom and I have spent a lot of years working on campaign reform. We did a working group that had something to do with the McCain-Feingold law that passed, and we’re quite proud of that. We were dismayed with the Citizens United decision, which demonstrates that the dysfunction and tribalism isn’t just in Congress or in state legislatures; it’s in the Supreme Court as well. It’s also the Federal Election Commission; it’s now an IRS that isn’t enforcing its own regulations. We’re right in the middle of it, and we see how much this is corrupting the process. It’s the new Gilded Age.

Absent a change in the Supreme Court, we’ve got to try to find ways to energize agencies. We’ve called on President Obama to use his recess appointment authority to replace five members of the FEC whose terms have long expired. That alone would have a significant impact in creating a sense of enforcement of the rules.

As Tom said, there’s no magic bullet in the money world – you’re not going to suddenly have sweetness and light because you take private money out of campaigns – but leaving the system as it is is a formula for utter disaster.