Congressmembers do have power, but it’s...weirdly distributed at the veto points? There is some horse trading, but it’s maximally in the “you gotta trust me it’s there” black-box aspects of the system (e.g., the famously opaque negotiation inside the NDAA process).
But power has definitely drained away from individual members; the standard account is roughly that a combo of 0) Increased transparency into Congress via things like C-SPAN and cable news generally, 1) leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House), 2) reduction in earmark-like things that enabled side deals to get bigger deals done, and 3) increased party polarization due to nationalization of party identities (measured through such things as DW-NOMINATE scores) were the key drivers,
Re: 0) and 3), Matt Yglesias occasionally mentions Secret Congress as one way of how things still get done in the legislature: namely, if there’s no public scrutiny on a topic, then it doesn’t necessarily get embroiled in partisan conflicts, and then politicians are actually willing to cooperate, strike deals, and pass legislation. Whereas any public attempts at legislating quickly become or look like zero-sum conflicts (if one side wins, the other side loses), so there’s little incentive for politicians to cooperate or make compromises, and then due to a plethora of veto points (like the filibuster), the default outcome is that no legislation gets passed.
One thing I recall is the (informal) Hastert Rule. Namely that in the House, nowadays leadership often doesn’t even bring bills up for a vote unless a majority of their party is in favor. Whereas if all bills came up for a vote, then you could imagine that even in a D/R-controlled legislature, occasionally a bill might pass that 100% of the minority and 20% of the majority would vote for.
Yup, this is very much part of it. But overall, it’s the tightening of a thousand screws rather than One Weird Trick.
In the House, in addition to the tradition changes that MondSemmel mentions, successive speakers over time have modified the formal House Rules iteratively to (generally) consolidate more power under the Speaker in a bunch of bureaucratically technical but important ways. (E.G., the Federalist Society on the right argues that Gingrich’s decision to cut committee staff sizes and impose term limits for committee chairs nerfed the power of committees relative to the Speaker https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/navigating-the-rules-of-the-people-s-house). Note that some view the current Speaker as intentionallychoosing to begin to reverse this trend as part of commitments he voluntarily made to his side of the aisle to somewhat empower individual Members, but this is seen even by his biggest fans as only a first step, and certainly not universally agreed upon even within his own Party.
In the Senate, similar trends are combined with a slow but fairly steady erosion of the scope of the filibuster (as well as the maximization of procedural hacks around the filibuster, such as how to use reconciliation), which de facto increases the power of the Senate Majority Leader in closely-divided Senates (most have been for the past 20 years). But this is not as far along as in the House, and various Senate Majority Leaders have approached this question differently, even within the same party, so bright line conclusions are harder to draw here. (E.G., Reid and Schumer had somewhat different approaches from each other, as do McConnell and Thune)
Can you elaborate on how the erosion of the filibuster empowers the party leaders? I figured the filibuster empowers the members (because there are ~never 60 votes for anything) to veto/stop arbitrary legislation, and thus any erosion of the filibuster would weaken the members’ ability to veto/stop legislation and thereby empower their ability to enact legislation instead.
Also, it’s my understanding that a majority of Senators could at any point abolish the filibuster, but they never want to no matter which party is in power, because it empowers individual Senators.
I’ve heard the earmark thing before, is there a good writeup about it?
It feels like it should be worldview-quake-y to many people, if-true. (in that “get rid of earmark pork” might have seemed like an obvious thing to do to reduce corruption but alas turns out it was loadbearing)
It seems intuitively reasonable to get rid of earmark pork, to require all bills to address a “single issue”, and to grant the executive a line-item veto.
But actual result of all these practices is to make legislative bargains harder to strike. Pork was occasionally used to secure key votes. Single-issue bills make it harder for legislators to strike actually enforceable deals, where the entire deal is passed atomically or not at all (reducing “betrayal”). And a line-item veto allows removing key aspects of a legislative deal.
I’m not saying that any of these things are good or bad. (Personally, I think some are good and some are bad.) But if your legislature isn’t based on deal-making, you may instead get very tight party control. Again, tight party control might be good or bad. And true-multiparty parliaments often seem to have even tighter party control, despite having more parties.
Personally I suspect the most important reason democracy works is that if the public is broadly dissatisfied, elections provide a cheap change of leadership (relative to things like civil war). It’s worth trying to reform obvious corruption and empirical problems. But there are no guarantees, and the actual process of governance can be pretty messy.
So my inclination is to ask, “Is the current executive/legislative coalition/legislative rules clearly broken? Then let’s try to fix it, and gamble on something that sounds better.” TL;dr: Re-roll on a 1 or 2, but don’t hold out for a 6.
Congressmembers do have power, but it’s...weirdly distributed at the veto points? There is some horse trading, but it’s maximally in the “you gotta trust me it’s there” black-box aspects of the system (e.g., the famously opaque negotiation inside the NDAA process).
But power has definitely drained away from individual members; the standard account is roughly that a combo of 0) Increased transparency into Congress via things like C-SPAN and cable news generally, 1) leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House), 2) reduction in earmark-like things that enabled side deals to get bigger deals done, and 3) increased party polarization due to nationalization of party identities (measured through such things as DW-NOMINATE scores) were the key drivers,
Re: 0) and 3), Matt Yglesias occasionally mentions Secret Congress as one way of how things still get done in the legislature: namely, if there’s no public scrutiny on a topic, then it doesn’t necessarily get embroiled in partisan conflicts, and then politicians are actually willing to cooperate, strike deals, and pass legislation. Whereas any public attempts at legislating quickly become or look like zero-sum conflicts (if one side wins, the other side loses), so there’s little incentive for politicians to cooperate or make compromises, and then due to a plethora of veto points (like the filibuster), the default outcome is that no legislation gets passed.
can you expand on “leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House)”?
One thing I recall is the (informal) Hastert Rule. Namely that in the House, nowadays leadership often doesn’t even bring bills up for a vote unless a majority of their party is in favor. Whereas if all bills came up for a vote, then you could imagine that even in a D/R-controlled legislature, occasionally a bill might pass that 100% of the minority and 20% of the majority would vote for.
Yup, this is very much part of it. But overall, it’s the tightening of a thousand screws rather than One Weird Trick.
In the House, in addition to the tradition changes that MondSemmel mentions, successive speakers over time have modified the formal House Rules iteratively to (generally) consolidate more power under the Speaker in a bunch of bureaucratically technical but important ways. (E.G., the Federalist Society on the right argues that Gingrich’s decision to cut committee staff sizes and impose term limits for committee chairs nerfed the power of committees relative to the Speaker https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/navigating-the-rules-of-the-people-s-house). Note that some view the current Speaker as intentionally choosing to begin to reverse this trend as part of commitments he voluntarily made to his side of the aisle to somewhat empower individual Members, but this is seen even by his biggest fans as only a first step, and certainly not universally agreed upon even within his own Party.
In the Senate, similar trends are combined with a slow but fairly steady erosion of the scope of the filibuster (as well as the maximization of procedural hacks around the filibuster, such as how to use reconciliation), which de facto increases the power of the Senate Majority Leader in closely-divided Senates (most have been for the past 20 years). But this is not as far along as in the House, and various Senate Majority Leaders have approached this question differently, even within the same party, so bright line conclusions are harder to draw here. (E.G., Reid and Schumer had somewhat different approaches from each other, as do McConnell and Thune)
Can you elaborate on how the erosion of the filibuster empowers the party leaders? I figured the filibuster empowers the members (because there are ~never 60 votes for anything) to veto/stop arbitrary legislation, and thus any erosion of the filibuster would weaken the members’ ability to veto/stop legislation and thereby empower their ability to enact legislation instead.
Also, it’s my understanding that a majority of Senators could at any point abolish the filibuster, but they never want to no matter which party is in power, because it empowers individual Senators.
I’ve heard the earmark thing before, is there a good writeup about it?
It feels like it should be worldview-quake-y to many people, if-true. (in that “get rid of earmark pork” might have seemed like an obvious thing to do to reduce corruption but alas turns out it was loadbearing)
This is a good summary by Vox, which in turn points to a bunch of deeper writeups if helpful https://archive.is/o6qj8
It seems intuitively reasonable to get rid of earmark pork, to require all bills to address a “single issue”, and to grant the executive a line-item veto.
But actual result of all these practices is to make legislative bargains harder to strike. Pork was occasionally used to secure key votes. Single-issue bills make it harder for legislators to strike actually enforceable deals, where the entire deal is passed atomically or not at all (reducing “betrayal”). And a line-item veto allows removing key aspects of a legislative deal.
I’m not saying that any of these things are good or bad. (Personally, I think some are good and some are bad.) But if your legislature isn’t based on deal-making, you may instead get very tight party control. Again, tight party control might be good or bad. And true-multiparty parliaments often seem to have even tighter party control, despite having more parties.
Personally I suspect the most important reason democracy works is that if the public is broadly dissatisfied, elections provide a cheap change of leadership (relative to things like civil war). It’s worth trying to reform obvious corruption and empirical problems. But there are no guarantees, and the actual process of governance can be pretty messy.
So my inclination is to ask, “Is the current executive/legislative coalition/legislative rules clearly broken? Then let’s try to fix it, and gamble on something that sounds better.” TL;dr: Re-roll on a 1 or 2, but don’t hold out for a 6.