The end of Congress

This is going to require your patience, but there’s a point here, so hold on, please.

Part of the reason William Cohen left the Senate in 1996, he said in his farewell address, was because of “a growing frustration with the decline of civil discourse and the increase in personal animosities that now permeate much of what passes for political debate. Too many hours are devoted to endless motion without movement, interminable delay without decision, and rhetorical finger-pointing without problem-solving. More than a few confuse unbridled arrogance with reasoned argument.”

Sen. Bill Bradley left the same year because, he said, “In the end, our democracy is losing its most essential ingredient: the willingness of citizens to accept the legitimacy of the process itself, especially if they are not complete winners. Driven by groups whose professional survival depends on the endless fight, citizens are discouraged from accepting that they might be in the minority on a particular question, or that they need to compromise their position with others whose interests are different.”

Sens. Howell Heflin of Alabama and Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island also left that year and had a slightly different view of the culprit behind “the endless fight.” Sen. Heflin said, “Ironically, as more and more information about government has become available over the last decade, the alienation of the citizenry has increased. Despite the C-SPAN cameras, the proliferation of constituent-service staff and the plethora of news, both written and broadcast, people still feel that they are somehow cut out of the political process. This … undermines the very legitimacy of our democratic form of government.”

The result of the electronic coverage, according to Sen. Pell, “has been a climate that exploits the natural confrontational atmosphere of the democratic process by accentuating extremes without elaborating on the less exciting details. It is a climate that encourages pandering to the lowest levels of public and private greed, a prime example of which is the almost universal defamation of the taxing power, making it virtually impossible to conduct a rational debate over revenue policy.”

In a New York Times opinion piece Sunday, Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers, who retired last week after 24 years in the Senate, tied some of these thoughts together by considering the twin effect of special-interest pressure and moment-to-moment coverage. “Before government was conducted in the sunshine, senators could vote as they pleased, good or bad, with little voter retribution on individual issues,” Sen. Bumpers writes. “But in the 1970s national associations by the dozens were setting up shop in Washington. … These groups developed very harsh methods of dealing with those who crossed them. Suddenly, every vote began to have political consequences. Congress began to finesse the tough issues and tended to straddle every fence it couldn’t burrow under.”

Here are three examples of why these observations matter and why members of Congress must — must — find a way through the resulting divisiveness before it becomes an acceptable part of congressional culture.

Sen. Bumpers points to the first example. Eight of the required 13 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget last October were folded into a $550 billion omnibus bill “that was drafted and agreed to not by Congress itself, but by six or eight senior members and a few White House staffers.” Members of Congress, who were unable to agree long enough to pass these separate appropriation bills, either agreed to the omnibus package or shut down government.

Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist offers a second example in his year-end report on the federal judiciary. The political parties, in order to out-tough each other on crime, have over the last decade federalized crimes already covered by state law. This has greatly increased the caseload for federal courts and at the same time led to increased confusion about sentencing guidelines, according to the chief justice. These problems cannot be settled, however, because the Senate and the White House are deadlocked over who should sit on the commission, which previously operated for 14 years, assigned to sort them out.

Congress’ acute sensitivity to an issue — crime — but its inability to compromise long enough to appoint members to a long-standing commission to address the problems around solving it is exactly what the retired senators are talking about. Like a budget created by a handful of people, the lack of consensus to help the judicial branch do its job feeds a distrust of government that grows daily.

It is too simple to say that campaign-finance reform or term limits or banning cameras from Congress will cure the problem. Growing out of the paralysis might require procedural changes, but it will more likely require more of the members of Congress themselves.

More must be willing to protect the process of government and endure the angry phone calls and write-in campaigns. More must avoid being entrapped by special-interest groups that are willing to let all of government fail as long as their issue is addressed. More must be willing to protest a government being nitpicked to death.

The third and best example of a dysfunctional Congress are the current impeachment proceedings, which will begin in the Senate today. Whichever course the Senate takes in this matter, its members must be aware that the public was denied anything like civil discourse in the House. The public deserves better. It deserves from the Senate reason over anger, compromise over confrontation and a thoughtful conclusion over political gain.

Not only President Clinton is on trial; the future of Congress depends on a just process in the Senate.