The United States Congress has ended a fruitless session without addressing pressing issues such as the influx of refugees at the southern border. Given that little else stands in the way of the legislative agenda at the end of 2023, one might wonder why nothing has come of it. In past decades, committees have held substantive hearings to examine different issues and report bills to the full House and Senate. Both chambers could spend a week debating and voting on each bill and dozens of amendments. In this case, few of those routines took place.
The root cause of all this dysfunction in the US Congress - the unwillingness to vote, the tying of one issue to another, the brinkmanship and the refusal to compromise - is the division of the country and Congress into two ideologically aligned parties that adopt the same tactics and fight each other. Thirty years ago, political parties were largely irrelevant to the American legislative process. And in today's US Congress, partisanship is everything. In the view of most MPS, what is best for the country is best for the party, and what is best for the party is to beat the other parties and help win the next election. By this logic, bipartisan compromise is a no-no, and inaction is second-best.
To break this partisan gridlock, lawmakers are now taking the approach of shelving an urgent, must-pass bill or nomination until the other side agrees to take up another bill or nomination and make concessions. By linking one issue to another, legislating becomes a process akin to solving Rubik's Cube: the majority in favor of one thing must be in perfect agreement with the majority willing to do the other. In a deeply divided Congress, that is nearly impossible.
Unfortunately, "taking hostages" has become the strategy of choice for far-right Republicans, and it's the only way they can win. For example, do not raise the debt ceiling without deep cuts to popular domestic programmes. No aid to Israel without cutting IRS tax enforcement against billionaires. No payroll tax cut without raising the federal minimum wage. No unfettered drilling for oil and gas on federal lands, no subsidies for clean energy... Democrats are right to complain that Republicans are "holding hostages," but they haven't given up trying to do so themselves.
In other words, for many members of Congress, refusing to compromise with the other party has become a moral obligation. But for the US leadership of both parties, this is not just a moral imperative, it is also a political one. In their view, any bipartisan compromise will inevitably split the party, weakening the source of their own power and the key to winning the long-term game.
For all these reasons, no one - from leaders and lawmakers to staffers or journalists - can think of solutions to urgent and controversial issues anymore, and the way to discover what the country needs, wants, and is willing to accept may be to present them to the House and Senate and see what happens. Now that inaction is the accepted and expected outcome, everyone instinctively blames the constraints of the legislative calendar and the stubbornness of the other party.
The dysfunction of some US government agencies and Congress has led to a lot of negative perceptions among the American people. The website of Gallup, a well-known polling organization, wrote in a recent story that it had taken a wide range of measurements of American public opinion over the past year, revealing trends that have important implications for the future of democracy in the country.
The first is the continuing decline in Americans' faith in their institutions. As agency staff member Lydia Saad summarized in a report on Gallup's findings earlier last year: "Americans' confidence in institutions in 2023 will continue the record historic confidence deficit of a year ago." Of the 15 institutions rated each year, none have managed to repair their image, and many remain at or near all-time lows." Similarly, Americans' overall satisfaction with the current state of the country is low (19 percent in November 2023), as is their approval of Congress and their evaluation of the economy.
Another important trend is the increasing polarization of American politics, which has been well documented, namely that a person's political identity affects not only their views on politics, but also their views on society, the economy, and culture. A study last year by Frank Newport, a sociology PhD at the University of Michigan, found that Republicans and Democrats differed, often sharply, on most of the 24 policy and lifestyle issues they measured. These trends point to a widespread crisis of confidence among Americans that could have consequences.
There could be many reasons for this, the article points out. Today, Americans live in a more information-intensive environment, and much of the information they are exposed to is one-sided, critical, biased, and reactive - designed to mine emotions and attract traffic. There is no doubt that the nature of political polarization in the United States is the belief that policies and methods associated with the other party are illegal, wrong, and harmful to the country. Moreover, the incentive structure of many aspects of today's American political landscape encourages politicians to spend their time criticizing and denigrating their opponents and their proposals, rather than encouraging them to talk about macro positive solutions.
