The Great Debate

As the 112th Congress came to a close last year, bipartisanship made a rare showing. The U.S. inched its way up to the fiscal cliff, but Congress voted to yank the country back, with 85 House Republicans voting not to reinstate the Bush tax cuts for individuals who earn more than $400,000. It was a rare moment of bipartisanship, however begrudging, for a Congress that has steadily become more polarized in the past 30 years.

Using a statistical analysis of some 35 million individual campaign contributions from 1980 through 2012, we assembled Congress’ polarization ratings. Rather than base legislators’ ideology on how they vote, we instead infer ideology scores from the patterns of contributions made by their supporters. In deciding which candidates to support, the typical donor is strongly influenced by his ideological views. As a result, they give almost exclusively to like-minded candidates with similar voting records. The massive quantities of data on contribution records (with over $6 billion dollars contributed to federal elections during the 2012 election cycle alone) make for an exercise in big-data and politics.

When you put all the data together, Congress’ modern history of polarization looks something like this:

The huge gap between the parties is apparent. We may hope that senators and representatives reach across the aisle, but the aisle is now as wide as the Grand Canyon. (The last chart for the Senate and for the House shows the forecasted distribution of ideology for the 113th Congress.)

Both houses in the 113th Congress should be the most polarized in American history. A big burst of additional polarization is anticipated for the Senate. The change for the House is smaller, reflecting the minor changes in House partisan balance after the elections. Polarization stabilized somewhat following the 2006 and 2008 elections as the Democrats engaged centrist candidates to contest formerly Republican districts. But the arrival of the Tea Party in 2010 led to a burst of polarization in the ensuing Congress. The 2012 rush reflects Republicans being replaced by liberal Democrats.

A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week unanimously ruled that President Barack Obama violated the Constitution when he made recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last year.

The court agreed with the argument outlined in an amicus brief submitted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), myself and 40 of our Republican colleagues. We argued that the Constitution does not empower the president to determine when the Senate is in recess.

The court  ruled that any other interpretation of the Constitution would give “the president free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction.”

The new Congress next year will likely inherit high-stakes standoffs over many complicated issues, from financial credibility to immigration. Our elected leaders must be able to make difficult trade-offs and craft policies that reflect the best expert knowledge.

In its current dysfunctional state, however, Congress cannot have nuanced deliberations or make knowledgeable judgments. One big reason is that it no longer has the capacity to produce unbiased public-interest information.

In the mid-1990s the mechanisms that produced the information and statistics that Congress had relied on to produce bills were virtually disassembled. Under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, many support panels that supplied information and analysis to Congress members were disbanded or curtailed.

President Barack Obama recently said Congress should “seize the moment” and summon a majority to push immigration reform. There is only one problem – Congress already did that.

Majorities in the House and Senate backed the DREAM Act, a bill creating a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children, during Obama’s first term. The bill died, however, when a minority of Republicans filibustered it. So even if a new immigration majority materializes next year, Republicans can just filibuster again. Unless Erika Andiola gets her way.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is due to hear arguments  Dec. 10 in Andiola’s case – an ambitious and erudite lawsuit from Common Cause – which argues that a small band of senators have turned the filibuster into an unconstitutional assault on our democratic government.

[Updated to correct date of Daschle defeat.] For the second time in less than a decade, the Senate Democrats are finding themselves with a leader facing political extinction. Tom Daschle, Harry Reid’s predecessor as the leader of the Senate Democrats, lost his own reelection race in 2002 in 2004, having become minority leader after the 2002 elections. For Democrats, this is not an unprecedented experience.  In the 1950s, back-to-back Democratic leaders also lost their seats.

Checking out the relatively short history of the Senate Leader position shows that the Democrats have been more willing to choose vulnerable members. There have been only 11 Senate Democratic leaders (the position officially came into existence in 1920), and four have lost reelection campaigns.

Republicans have, in some ways, a happier success rate. The first Republican leader, though unofficial, was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who died in office in 1924. Including both of those men, of the Republicans’ 17 leaders (one was only acting), only one lost his reelection campaign, James Watson of Indiana in the FDR tidal wave of 1932. In other ways, not so happy. Five of their leaders have died in office (as opposed to only one for the Democrats).

The following is a guest post by Joshua Spivak, a lawyer and a research fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Center for Government Reform at Wagner College.

With Republicans making a serious push to take over the Senate in November, a rare but important development may prove to be the key to the post-2010 Congressional landscape: the Senate may feature two elected members not beholden to the major parties — Independent s Joseph Lieberman and Charlie Crist.

In a closely divided Senate, having two Independents could play an outsized role as powerbrokers and creators of a moderate bloc. It would also be only the second time since World War II that two Independents occupied the Senate.

Wall Street’s diminished influence in Washington was made plain yesterday when the Senate voted to approve financial reform legislation by 59 votes to 39.

Industry lobbyists will point out the bill only just managed to scrape the required votes needed to end debate and forestall a filibuster. It fell far short of a lopsided bipartisan majority.

But the formal tally on HR 4173 (Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act 2009) as amended by S 3217 (Restoring American Financial Stability Act 2010) conceals a much wider bigger majority of 63-37 for enacting far-reaching reforms.

Senate Democrats have beaten back an ambitious, industry-supported amendment to the derivatives portion of financial reform legislation.

If passed it would have significantly weakened the administration’s efforts to tighten regulation of over the counter derivatives markets.

Yesterday’s vote went largely along party the lines (39-59). But Senate Democrats attracted support from moderate Republicans Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Charles Grassley (Iowa), making that part of the bill effectively filibuster proof.

Just a few minutes after the Senate failed for a third time in as many days to reach the 60-votes needed to approve a cloture motion on the financial reform bill (failing 56-42), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rose to his feet and asked the chamber’s presiding officer:

“Mr President, I now ask unanimous consent the motion to proceed to S 3217 be agreed to.”

After the president officer asked for objections, and heard none, he replied “Without objection, it is so ordered,” according to the Congressional Record.