Congress is bicameral; it is made up of 2 houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. This arrangement for the legislative branch of government was one of the compromises devised by the founding fathers at the Philadelphia convention. This essay will discuss whether Congress is the broken branch or not.
The idea of increased partisanship as a result of ideological polarisation of the parties since the 1980s is an argument that supports the above statement that the Congress is a broken branch. In 1960 the South was intact, whether you were black, white, liberal or conservative you would vote Democrats, so they were sometimes known as yellow dog democrats meaning that even if the Democrats put up a yellow dog as an election candidate they would still vote democrats. In the 1960 election, of the 106 members of the House of Representatives from the South, 99 were Democrats. All 22 southern senators were also Democrats. However the South disintegrated as statistics from the 1992 and 1996 election show that the Democrats could not even win the South with a presidential ticket made up of 2 southerners, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Partisanship has been fuelled by the growth of partisan media outlets, gerrymandering and ideological interest groups.
The increased role of partisanship has also led to an increase in party votes. The 2 mainstream parties in America, Democrats and Republicans have very different views of many major issues. For example where Republican believe in strong national defence, the Democrats believe that they should advocate scaling down American military and reduce the money spent of military intelligence. Republicans also seek to restrict and limit social welfare spending, are prolife, oppose gun control, support broad tax cuts, support nuclear family values, favour choice in education (pro-vouchers), favour prayers in public schools and supports reduction in trade barriers. However the Democrats on the other hand, favour expansive social welfare programmes, are prochoice, favour gun control, favour targeted tax cuts, support homosexual causes, oppose prayers in public schools and sensitive to loss of jobs by American workers. These clear differences mean that now people vote based on their ideologies rather than a label that such a person living in such an area has to vote for a certain party. A 2/3rds majority is required to override a veto in Congress, and if they fail to compromise it may lead to problems. An example is the passage of the recent health care legislation.
Another argument to suggest that the Congress can be argued to be a broken branch is that the Congress has lost its ability to truly represent people. Although many congressional politicians enter into the career with pure intention of representing their people, many become corrupted once their career develops. They spend their time fundraising and campaigning and their careers are often short if they fail to find ways to pass new legislation and keep their names in spotlight. When this along with the fact they have to raiser large amounts of money is combined, political decisions end up not being based on right or wrong but rather on the effect it will have on the next election.
The Tea Party minority has too much power in that when they take action (within Congress) it often results in a government shutdown. Irrespective of their intentions, many Americans feel that it is not right for Congress to have that much power and create new laws and at the same time have the ability to manage the money that maintains those laws. Many feel that funding the government is too simple yet too complex an issue to be decided by the people sitting in Congress who have very different experiences and opinions. Not only this but also effective congressional oversight seems to disappear when the president and the congressional majorities are of the same party, such as major weakening of the checks and balances system. This is often resolves by the electorate with loss of a majority status in congressional elections. For example this happened in 1994 during the Clinton administration and in 2006 during Bush’s government.
However Congress is argued to be the central source of power under the Constitution. An extensive system of internal and external checks and balances limits it activities and the activities of the other branched of government. In order to encourage this procedure it required majorities to be built from coalitions of minorities
Fakiha Chohan