The Council on Foreign Relations Doesn't Get It

(cross-posted at tpmcafe.com)

A press release has arrived from the Council on Foreign Relations: A new Council report shows that "the current climate of partisan politics is weakening American leadership." Seems about right to me. We've seen America's role in the world weakened by a war of choice supported by deception, we've had our fiscal position eroded by massive tax cuts for the wealthy that leave us at the mercy of our Asian creditors, we've sent John Bolton to represent us in the United Nations, etc. The report calls for "bipartisan foreign policy" and says "the United States should work with all?not half?of its collective foreign policy brain and talent if it is to maintain primacy in today?s globalized world."

Right on. I open the links in the e-mail eagerly. The Council on Foreign Relations has a lot of smart people, and they've probably got something useful to say about why this happened.

Indeed. The very first culprit identified in the rise of one-party foreign policy and the weakening of America is (drum roll, please):

The congressional schedule! Yes, that's it: "The jam-packed Tuesday-through-Thursday schedule for members of Congress means that fewer Democrats and Republicans actually know and relate to one another in Washington." The report's first recommendation for Congress is that committees "consider holding a monthly lunch meeting without staff or press." I look forward to the historian who will someday trace the decline of America as a world power to not enough monthly lunches.

The schedule isn't the only factor in the "complex variety of social, cultural, and technological changes" at work. The report does discuss partisan redistricting and the incumbent advantage in campaign finance. There's also the blogs: "It has become part of the game to have a proffered policy and its sponsor trashed in the media and disparaged in the blogs before it receives any traction."

And here's one you probably didn't think of: Democrats. The report explains that it's the narrowness of Republican control of the House that causes one-party rule, because "the tighter margin of control has given Democrats a reason to hope that they might win back majority status every two years." Yes, that means what you think it means: "Until [1994], it was in the interest of the minority to cooperate with the ruling party as it was hard to imagine anything other than minority status."

It's not exclusively the uppity Democrats' fault, of course: "On the flipside, this narrow control also makes it imperative for the majority party, now the Republicans, to demand party loyality. Otherwise, the Republicans have no hope of enacting the most controversial parts of their legislative agenda. Consequently, the whip machine simply cannot allow the level of dissent that Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, for example, could afford to endure when he led the House with much larger majorities."

Italics are mine, to draw out that the report is alleging that Republican leaders have no choice but to twist arms and break kneecaps as they did on CAFTA and Medicare -- because, after all, they are entitled to enact "the most controversial parts of their agenda" -- whereas Democrats make the choice to act as a meaningful opposition instead of going along and lending their names to policies just so they can be called bipartisan.

This is offensive stuff, and the empirical assumptions are all wrong as well: The Republicans did not cooperate in Democratic policy before 1994; the Democrats have not had a realistic hope of winning back the House in most of the cycles since 1994; and Tip O'Neill most certainly could not "afford" to allow dissent among Democrats. Democratic defections gave Reagan a working majority in Congress on the 1981 budget and tax bills and at many other points. O'Neill would have vastly preferred to lead a more disciplined opposition to Reagan but it would not have occurred to him to enforce control "Hammer" style. It just wasn't done.

More to the point, narrowness of party control should be expected to encourage more cooperation and mutual respect, not less. House Democrats before 1994 did mistreat their Republican counterparts because they expected always to be in the majority; Republicans have returned the abuse many times over. But the Senate has traditionally been more civil and cooperative because every chairman knows that tomorrow he might be back in the ranking member's seat; most sitting Senators have seen their party win or lose control of the body a couple of times. They are more often reminded why they should treat others as they wish to be treated themselves.

This 47-page report on one-party rule in Congress somehow completely fails to mention

* The abuse of conference committees to drive through legislation written by a small group controlled by one party.

* The use of closed rules in the House to prevent amendments.

* The explicit "majority of a majority" rule under which the Speaker of the House refuses to move legislation that has bipartisan majority support unless it has support of a majority of Republicans alone.

* The abuse of the budget reconciliation process to drive through policies that lack bipartisan support and cannot be amended.

* Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, Bill Frist, Roy Blunt, the K Street Project, the Medicare bill, lobbyists writing legislation, the role of the Iraq invasion in eroding U.S. influence in the world, John Bolton, CAFTA, the list goes on...

I suspect that monthly lunches will not help much if these practices don't change.

If the problem is one-party control of policy, how could it be possible that the responsibility does not fall mainly on the one party that holds control and created the current system? How is it possible to rationalize that the problem of one-party rule is not the one party but the "narrowness" of its majority?

It's tempting to ascribe bad faith to the main author of the CFR report, who is identified as a former Washington Times reporter and Republican House staffer. But the project had a bipartisan advisory council, and I choose to see it as another example of just not getting it. Much in the report might have been true in the late 1990s, when that "pox on both your houses" approach made a little more sense. But it's simply not the nature of the problem today, which is a radical discontinuity from the rules and assumptions of the past. Not-getting-it is a story in itself. One reason that the Republicans have been able to so completely rewrite the rules of partisan control is that it's so radical, so sweeping, that most longtime Washington observers just can't see how much their basic assumptions about how the game works have changed.

As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write in their fabulous new book, Off-Center: The Republican Revolution & The Erosion of American Democracy, "the problem is not just polarization. It is unequal polarization -- unequal between Democrats and Republicans, unequal in its effects on the governing aims of liberals and conservatives, and unequal in in its effects on American society."