Five Lessons on the U.S. Congress
The Box Score
Lesson #1. True power is on Capitol Hill, not Pennsylvania Avenue.
Lesson #2. Playing defense is easier than playing offense.
Lesson #3. Members of Congress are not great teammates.
Lesson #4. Congress is polarized and gridlocked.
Lesson #5. The congressional bark is (sometimes) worse than its bite.
The complete game
Lesson #1. True power is on Capitol Hill, not Pennsylvania Avenue.
In “Five Lessons on the Modern Presidency,” I argued that while Americans tend to focus on the president, the true seat of power is up on Capitol Hill. It is worth summarizing that argument here:
The U.S. Constitution sets the rules of the political game, and those rules put Congress in the lead position. The U.S. Congress, not the president, holds the two most important powers that exist in any polity: (1) they make the laws, and (2) they control the money. All other political duties are trifling by comparison. In fact, the Constitution gives Congress so much power that it could effectively govern the country on its own. Presidents, by contrast, have a limited set of formal powers and, try as they might, cannot run the country on their own. Presidents are certainly not powerless; no person with the ability to annihilate all humanity with a push of a button can rightly be called “powerless.” But in terms of formal constitutional authority, the executive branch undoubtedly comes in second. This constitutional order is also reflected in numbering (the legislature is Article I of the Constitution; the executive branch is Article II) and urban planning (L’Enfant designed Congress to be the visual and geographic center of D.C.).
Although the Framers intended Congress to lead, one can argue that things have changed. Many scholars, myself included, believe the balance of power has shifted away from Congress to the president and the courts. I will take this up in Lesson #4.
While congressional power might not be what it once was or what the Framers intended, it is still formidable. At the end of the day, money is power, and Congress controls the money. You’ll see this theme throughout this blog, most notably in “A Useful Threat.”
Lesson #2. Playing defense is easier than playing offense.
Members of Congress are two-way players: they play offense to get a bill passed and defense to kill a bill. Playing defense is far easier. Consider the standard how-a-bill-becomes-a-law process described below. The offense must win all twenty stages, while the defense needs just one stop.
1. Bill put on House subcommittee agenda
2. Bill voted favorably by the House subcommittee
3. Bill put on full House committee agenda
4. Bill voted favorably by the full House committee
5. Bill put on House Rules Committee agenda
6. House Rules Committee gives Bill a favorable Rule
7. Bill put on the House floor schedule
8. Bill passed by House floor
9. Bill put on Senate subcommittee agenda
10. Bill voted favorably by the Senate subcommittee
11. Bill put on full Senate committee agenda
12. Bill voted favorably by the full Senate committee
13. Bill brought to the Senate floor by unanimous consent agreement
14. Bill overcomes a Senate filibuster
15. Bill passed by Senate floor
16. Different House and Senate versions of the same bill are reconciled in conference committee
17. Both chambers have an up-or-down vote on the reconciled bill
18. The president signs the bill. If he vetoes it, then…
19. Bill has to be overridden by both chambers of Congress by a 2/3rds vote.
20. This process must be completed within a congressional term (two years); otherwise, the bill dies.
Playing defense is so easy that only around 4 percent of bills become law; more recently, that figure has dropped to 1 or 2 percent.
Lesson #3. Members of Congress are not always great teammates.
Before we get to Congress, let’s talk a little about teamwork in sports. Every coach faces the same dilemma: to win, you need players who care more about the team than themselves. However, the players might be motivated by something else: playing time, fame, the next contract, moving up the draft board, being recruited, or pleasing their overbearing father.
Every sports fan knows a team that underperformed because their roster was full of prima donnas (I’m looking at you, 2003-04 Lakers). But before we get all sanctimonious about the importance of teamwork and self-sacrifice, ask yourself: would you rather be the third-string quarterback on a Super Bowl-winning team or a Hall of Fame quarterback who never won the championship? I suspect most of us would prefer wearing a gold jacket to watching our teammates hoist the Lombardi Trophy.
Coaches use a variety of tactics to get players to put team above self. They create team-bonding experiences, heap praise upon role players, and talk ad nauseam about the importance of teamwork. If a star player(s) still doesn’t buy into the team concept, the coach either benches/cuts them or resigns themselves to living with a temperamental star.
Political parties in Congress face a similar challenge. Parties are strongest when acting as a team, but members of Congress have incentives to act as individuals. Let’s see how this works.
In his seminal work on the U.S. Congress, David Mayhew argued that all members of Congress were “single-minded seekers of reelection.” Sure, lawmakers might be interested in making good public policy or gaining power, but you can’t make policy or gain power in Congress if you’re not in Congress. Therefore, the primary motivation for all lawmakers is to get elected and stay elected.
Mayhew argued that lawmakers maximize their reelection chances by doing three things:
1. Advertising. Members of Congress are experts at marketing themselves to constituents. Think of all the emails, texts, and mailers you receive from your representative or senator. Most members advertise themselves by spending far more time in their district/state than in Washington, where you can find them at your local diner, county fair, or ribbon-cutting ceremony pressing the flesh and kissing the babies. Sports and advertising go hand-in-hand. We’ll explore this in greater depth in the next post, but consider the example of Senator Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) S. Res 375, which congratulated the Alabama Crimson Tide football team for winning the 2018 National Championship. Commemorating a sports team on the House or Senate Floor is usually good for an article or two in the local paper, so Congress does a lot of this sort of thing.
2. Credit claiming. Members of Congress like to take credit for stuff that makes our lives better. But credit claiming has to be plausible or the member risks ridicule. For example, Salud Carbajal represents California’s 24th District, where I live. Although Rep. Carbajal voted for the CARES Act of 2020—the $2.2 trillion stimulus response to the Covid shutdowns—he cannot credibly claim to have passed the bill all by himself (the bill passed 419-6 in the House and 96-0 in the Senate). However, he can, and does, claim credit for the $1.16 billion that went to Central Coast businesses. The desire to claim credit incentivizes members of Congress to provide goodies for their districts—called pork or earmarks—that is great for the folks back home, but doesn’t do much for the nation as a whole.
3. Position taking. I wrote about position taking in “Five Lessons on the Modern Presidency” and “Get That SOB Off the Field,” but here is a brief reminder of how the tactic works. Members of Congress maximize their reelection chances by doing things their constituents want. If their voters want a tax cut, they vote for a tax cut. If their voters do not want Donald Trump impeached, they vote against impeachment. If there is a split in the district—say half the voters want action on climate change and half want more drilling—they hedge by saying things like “we’re looking into the matter.”
Note two things about position-taking. First, it doesn’t matter what a member of Congress thinks; they simply mirror what their constituents think. Second, the member of Congress does not need a policy “win” to achieve their goal. Being on the right side of the issue is more important than passing a law for the reelection-minded politician.
I will talk more about how position-taking relates to teamwork in a bit, but first, we need to take a slight detour and talk about the rather unique nature of political parties in America.
Compared to most other democracies, the United States has a weak party system. This weakness comes from American parties not controlling the ballot. As long as a candidate meets some minimal criteria, they can run as a Republican or a Democrat and there is nothing either party can do about it. For example, many in the GOP didn’t want Trump to be their nominee in 2016, but he ran and won anyway. Rick Caruso changed his party affiliation to Democrat and entered the LA mayoral race, much to the chagrin of “real” Democrats. In 2009, Senator Arlen Specter (PA) switched parties in the middle of his term, eventually giving the Democrats a super-majority in the Senate and allowing them to pass the Affordable Care Act.
Other democracies do things differently. In strong party systems, the party has absolute control over the ballot; if the party doesn’t like you, you are not on the next ballot. Therefore, there isn’t much incentive for politicians to do things the party doesn’t like, such as vote against them on important matters. And, as a result, parties exercise an iron fist of discipline, and defections from rank are rare.
So, what tools do American party leaders have to encourage their members to act as a team? (And when I talk about party leadership in Congress, I mean the Speaker of the House, Majority and Minority Leaders, Majority and Minority Whips, etc.) Not many. Leaders can threaten to stick wayward members on undesirable committees, bury their pet bills, or pull campaign donations. But these are more annoyances than real coercive powers. Indeed, some members wear their party’s punishment as a badge of honor.
Why might a member of Congress go against their party? Breaking rank happens when lawmakers are cross-pressured, meaning one thing is telling them to vote one way, and something else tells them to vote another. Those “things” might be their party, interest groups, the president, other members of Congress, their aides, their conscious, or, most importantly, their constituents. There is no problem when all these things line up, which they increasingly do in our hyperpolarized era. But the lawmaker can find herself in a pickle when her party wants one thing and her constituents another.
When push comes to shove, constituents usually win. Voters have what the member of Congress most desires: votes. That makes us, my fellow citizens, the boss. Party leaders have little coercive power, interest group money isn’t enough to buy off politicians, the president can’t fire members of Congress, and most lawmakers stopped listening to that little voice in their heads long ago. As such, cross-pressured lawmakers usually chose voters over their party.
There are some caveats to the idea that constituents are more important than anything else.
First, lawmakers have different conceptions of “constituents.” Are one’s constituents all Americans? Every person in the state or district? Every voter? Only those people who voted for you? Primary voters? Big-money donors? How lawmakers define “constituency” affects how they govern.
Second, constituents, however defined, have to care about the issue. Imagine a lawmaker’s party or a supportive interest group wants him to vote in favor of H.R.8165, a bill that deals with retreaded tires. Who cares about retreads? But on big issues—e.g., abortion, COVID-19, critical race theory, transgender rights, prayer in public schools—the voters win out.
Third, a member of Congress must want to stay in Congress. In a subsequent post, I’ll talk more about former NFL-star-turned-congressman Jon Runyan (R-NJ). I interviewed Runyan in 2013, a week before he announced his retirement from Congress. It was clear from our conversation that he was sick of the place. After he announced his retirement, Runyan voted against the GOP on several important measures, including a partial-birth abortion ban. I doubt Runyan would have cast these votes if he wanted to stay in Congress.
Fourth, there is a limit to some lawmakers’ moral flexibility. Liz Cheney (R-WY) was smart enough to know that her impeachment vote and participation on the Jan 6 select committee would cost her a seat in Congress. But Cheney had enough integrity to fall on her sword in the effort to save America.
Fifth, politicians don’t simply react to public opinion; they shape it (or at least try to). For example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) doesn’t just mouth progressive talking points; she tells her supporters what to think. I’ll have more to say on representation and leadership in a subsequent post.
Finally, although the U.S. still has a weak party system, parties are stronger now than ever. The figure below from CQ/Roll Call shows that party unity—i.e., the frequency in which partisans vote with their party—is at or near historic highs. In other words, there are more team players in Congress now than there used to be. We’ll see why this is the case in the next section and future posts.
Let’s bring the analogy full circle. Athletic teams and political parties are at their best when all members pull in the same direction. But athletes and politicians have incentives to go their own way. Whether or not you can get athletes or politicians to act as a team has consequences for winning on the court or in the chamber.
Lesson #4. Congress is polarized and gridlocked.
This lesson will be the subject of a future post, so I’ll just hit on a few highlights here.
Polarization is the defining feature of recent American politics, and it won’t go away anytime soon. Polarization’s cousin is congressional gridlock, i.e., the inability to pass bills, even those that enjoy widespread support. It, too, has settled in for the long haul. None of this is good news.
The technical definition of political polarization is intraparty homogeneity and interparty heterogeneity. In simpler terms, Republicans tend to look like other Republicans (politically speaking), Democrats look like other Democrats, and Republicans and Democrats look nothing alike. Polarization can occur at two levels: in the government or in the public.
Polarization in government has been evident since at least the mid-1990s. The figure below offers a stark visual of the 113th House. The X-axis is NOMINATE scores, ranging from -1.0 (the most liberal member of the House) to +1.0 (the most conservative). We see that Democrats are on one side, Republicans are on the other, no one is in the middle, and there is no overlap between the parties. This is polarization.
Whether the American public is polarized is a more complicated question. You’ll get the long answer in a subsequent post, but the short answer is, yes, we’re polarized too. The Pew Research Center provides an excellent animated video showing that a relatively moderate America has morphed into a radically polarized one in just over 20 years.
Now, back to government. With its separation of powers and checks and balances, the American political system makes it difficult to pass legislation in the best of times. Indeed, if you wanted to write rules that would ensure little got done, you couldn’t do much better than the U.S. Constitution. To the extent our governmental system works at all, it works best when a bunch of moderates are willing to compromise. The figure above shows you how many moderates there are in the U.S. Congress.
Still, polarization and gridlock are not necessarily bad things. There are many benefits to polarization, not least of which is that it makes voting easier (you pretty much know what you’re going to get when you vote Republican). Gridlock can sometimes be frustrating, but it can also prevent a tyrannical government from trampling on the rights of the people. And let’s be honest, we all want a little gridlock when we’re in the minority.
I think it is important to consider whether the good of polarization and gridlock outweighs the bad. I don’t think so, and I’ll go into why in a future post. So what now? We can either decide to stop being so polarized or adopt a political system better suited to dealing with this new reality. I think the first option is impossible, so we’re left with the second. In a future post, I invite you to join me in thinking through what that new system might look like.
Lesson #5. The congressional bark is (sometimes) worse than its bite.
We’ve learned that Congress passes very few bills, but that might not really matter. The congressional bark is sometimes as bad as the bite.
The mere possibility that Congress might pass a law detrimental to their interests is often enough to get an offending party to act. As I wrote in “Introduction to Politics and Sports,” the threat of the American government is a lot like Barry Bonds in that respect. Bonds was great not just because of the record number of home runs he hit, but also for those he might have hit. Just as Bonds’ power meant pitchers took his threat seriously—he is MLB’s all-time leader in walks—the American government’s power means that sports governing bodies must take politicians’ threats seriously. Among other things, we’ll see how this threat helped convince MLB to get serious about steroid use and forced the NFL to recognize the dangers of head trauma.
Sometimes Congress does bite and enact laws that affect how we watch and play sports. Nothing has changed the sporting landscape like Title IX, which mandates gender equality in high school and college sports. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 allows sports leagues to package television contracts and blackout games. And the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act established the U.S. Olympic Committee and allowed the professionalization of Olympic sports.
Not only can Congress legislate, but it can also hold hearings to publicize wrongdoings in sports. Indeed, some of the most significant moments in the intersection of politics and sports have happened at congressional hearings. In 2009, the House Judiciary Committee grilled NFL commission Roger Goodell on the link between football and CTE. Several contentious hearings in the 2000s exposed the widespread use of steroids in baseball. In the 1950s and 60s, Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) held highly publicized hearings on antitrust issues in baseball and corruption in boxing.
Finally, there are those curious cases when the dog neither barks nor bites. We tend to focus on the big things Congress does—e.g., gun control, the Affordable Care Act, Covid relief—but the stuff they do in the shadows can be just as important. Very quietly, Congress has given professional sports millions in tax breaks, many written in such a way that it is nearly impossible to find them. We’ll also consider these cases in a future post.
