Government Gridlock a Bug or a Feature?
I posted yesterday about my efforts to learn more about the United Kingdom’s efforts to reform its House of Lords. At the moment, it looks like that effort is going nowhere, because a small number of Conservative members of Parliament are refusing to support it. Whether or not that’s a good thing depends in part on whether you think it’s important that a democratic government be responsive to its citizens. Should our elected officials see their job as going what the people want them to do? Or should they see it as doing whatever they think is right, and then hoping to convince the people later? The knee jerk reaction might be to say the latter, but America’s system, in part by design and in part by accident, is set up much more along the latter lines.
One reason for this is that in our government, it is almost impossible for a majority at an given time to actually elect a set of government officials who will follow their desires. Look at all of the roadblocks that exist between a popular majority and the final enactment of a law. (Some of this may be obvious or common knowledge, but I think there’s value in looking at all of htese peices of information as a total package.)
- Lawmaking power is split between a legislative branch and an executive branch. Congress must pass a bill and the president must sign it before it becomes a law. If the two disagree, they can block each other, so neither one gets to enact its preferred policy.
- This is exacerbated by the staggered terms on which these officials are elected. We vote for president every four years. These tend to be the highest profile elections we have with the highest turnout. But members of one chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, are elected very two years. So every other House election happens in a year without a presidential election. These elections tend to have have lower turnout and often result in the party that doesn’t control the presidency gaining power in Congress. To compound the issue, members of the other house, the Senate, are elected to six year terms. Every two years, one-third of the seats in the Senate come up for election. So whatever the public wants at any given election, there’s two-thirds of the Senate that wasn’t necessarily elected with that goal in mind. If the public’s desires are consistent, that’s no big deal, but if the public changes its mind about something, it’ll be six years before the Senate will fully reflect that change.
- The Senate also gives each state an equal number of votes, regardless of population. So even if the entire population of the state of California wants something, the states of Utah and Alaska could override that desire.
- The president is not actually elected by a national popular vote, but by an electoral college that assigns a number of votes to each state in such a way that it is possible, although unlikely, that someone could lose the popular vote and still win the presidency.
- On top of all of these built-in structural features, the Senate has developed a number of traditions and procedures that allow a minority to slow down or even block a bill. CHief among these are the filibuster, in which three-fifths of the senators must vote to stop talking about a bill before it can be voted on. So 59 out of 100 senators can support a law, and that law will not pass.
- When a law is finally passed and signed, it can be reviewed and overturned by a Supreme Court whose members hold lifetime terms, meaning that a law passed today will have to meet the approal of justices appointed 20 or 25 years ago.
These structural and procedural systems make it very hard for any party or any president to make major changes in our system. Once those changes go through, it’s very hard to undo them. Some people say that this a strength of our checks-and-balances system – the government will not swing wildly from one policy to another based on which party has won the most recent election, but will be required to stay in a rough consensus area and only make changes after the voters have had a long time to think about and approve those changes. It is much harder to get a radical government when the government’s power is split, and if all those different power-holders agree on something then the public can have more confidence about it.
Other people call it a weakness, because not only is it hard to react quickly to changing circumstances, the voters have a hard time assigning responsibility for the good and bad results of the government’s policies. If they don’t know who gets the credit and who gets the blame, they can’t be sure of who to re-elect and who to get rid of.
I have my own opinions, which I’ve shared before and which I’ll probably share again when I look at the UK’s latest efforts for Lords reform. But for now I wanted to get this stuff down for future reference and invite your thoughts on that opening question: Should government officials be trying to do what the people want them to do, or do they have a different kind of responsibility?
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.