Per the AP:
In a single week, the Republican chairs of three House committees announced they would not be seeking reelection, raising questions about whether the chaos that has reigned this Congress is driving out some of the GOP’s top talent.
That’s an odd development. Congressional committee chairs are, historically, some of the most powerful people in Washington. They often craft major legislation by force of will. So why are so many walking away from what should be a career-defining perch?
“Well, the work to productivity ratio may have had a little bit to do with it,” said Rep. Mark Green, the now-outgoing chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Green is no pro-democracy Republican, having supported efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But on the productivity issue, at least, he has a point. The 118th Congress (which started in January of 2023) is on track to be the least productive in modern history. There are lots of reasons for this paralysis: divided government, divided Congress, a razor thin House majority, a fractious Republican conference hijacked by extremists, worries for members’ personal safety, and so on.
But more than anything, the incentives to govern are disappearing (especially for Republicans).
When compromise is a dirty word
New America’s Lee Drutman and Protect Democracy’s Farbod Faraji have a great op-ed in the Boston Globe today that dissects the collapse of the border/Ukraine deal and why compromise has become so hard (and for Republicans in particular). Their diagnosis:
The more divisive our politics, the more unproductive our policymaking. The more unproductive our policymaking, the more anger and frustration fuels more blame and division. Immigration and foreign policy are complicated subjects. They cross-cut the parties in ways that could facilitate creative, bipartisan dealmaking — and in an earlier time, they would have. But they are also high-profile issues.
…
The tragedy is not that Republicans and Democrats are unable to agree on these issues. They absolutely could — look no further than the bipartisan bill they put forward on Ukraine and border control. The policy disagreements between the parties on most issues are smaller than we’re led to believe. The tragedy is that the two parties don’t — or won’t — seek common ground, even though the deals are hiding in plain sight.Unfortunately, the binary structure of the political conflict today — it’s always “us-versus-them” — has made fighting to win power more important than fighting to resolve disagreements.
Read the op-ed here. It’s a tight encapsulation of this political moment.
After you read, let’s also go deeper. We’ve always had a binary structure to our politics, at least on the surface. So why has Washington only become so “us-versus them” in recent decades?
I see three factors.
Rural Democrats and urban Republicans have declined
First, as our friends at FairVote have studied, congressional elections don’t look like they used to. Per Politico: “Eighty-four percent of House seats [in 2022] were decided by 10 or more points or were uncontested, and the average margin of victory in contested races was 28 points.”
That is not a hallmark of a healthy democracy. When it comes to providing accountability to lawmakers, uncompetitive and uncontested elections are only marginally better than not having elections at all.
But it’s not just lost accountability. Uncompetitive elections also reflect the reality that Democrats and Republicans alike seem to represent fundamentally different places, cultures, people and priorities. As Ronald Brownstein writes, we’ve split into two nations:
The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.
At the same time, it’s not like blue nation Republicans and red nation Democrats disappeared — there are still more Trump voters in California than any other state! They just are almost never a local majority anymore. And so they get weeded out by our winner-take-all electoral system.
Cross coalitional lawmaking has collapsed
Not too long ago, Congress used to function like an invisible multi-party system, with shifting allegiances and voting blocs that never clearly mapped onto the two parties. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed in the Senate by 27 Republicans and 44 Democrats over the objections of six Republicans and 21 Democrats.
(For a longer history of the invisible multi-party system of old, I recommend this paper.)
But then in the 1990s, something changed. The dark clouds in this chart by Clio Andris et al. are the lines connecting elected representatives who vote together often. A stunning transformation.
Clio Andris, David Lee, Marcus J. Hamilton, Mauro Martino, Christian E. Gunning, John Armistead Selden, in PLOS ONE
Put a different way, Congress used to be a complex ideological milieu loosely sorted into two parties. Like blues music and rock music. Some distinction, lots of overlap, plenty of complexity. Now Congress votes like sports teams—fully opposed and with little common ground.
(To be clear, most scholars agree this pattern is asymmetric — with Republican electeds drifting away more sharply than Democrats — but the effects are the same regardless).
Legislating on hard issues has become, well, harder
There are plenty of issues where 55, 60, 70 percent of the country roughly wants the same thing. Climate change and social security and border security and guns and immigration reform and aid to Ukraine and, yes, voting rights. But not everyone in Congress, or the country, agrees with the majority view.
In the past, that disagreement was often mixed up between the two parties. And so some portion of each party could come together to strike a deal. That made many of the obstacles to majority rule (unanimous consent and the filibuster in the Senate, the “Hastert rule” in the House, and so on) less of a barrier to lawmaking.
But now, minority disagreement on almost every hard issue is concentrated in one party. And in a polarized, nationalized political environment, that’s it. Speedbumps become impermeable roadblocks.
Importantly, this is where the feedback loop kicks in. As legislating has gotten harder, we’re losing the dealmaking and negotiating glue that used to hold Congress together. No longer able to focus on complex policy questions, our elected officials spend more time sparring and less time compromising.
As Lee and Farbod conclude: “unless the country does something to break the two-party doom loop… the United States will get exactly what it is getting now: escalating toxic partisan conflict with no resolution in sight.”
If polarization is the problem, how do we fix it?
I’ll confess that I have basically no idea how we fix polarization directly, in the electorate as a whole. It seems to be a big, global, angry, multifaceted beast of technological, economic, demographic, social, and media change, along with a healthy dose of racial backlash and resentment. (If you have actionable ideas, we’d love to hear them.)
But when it comes to adapting Congress to that polarization, and reducing the divides in our political system as a way to reduce electoral polarization, I see two clear paths.
First, re-empower political minorities. If the root of our democracy crisis stems from the flattening of political geography into blue and red nations, let’s fix it by helping Democrats get elected in red areas and Republicans get elected in blue areas. Doing so could help bring back some of the ideological complexity — and moderation — that we lost.
Really big thing to understand: we cannot do this just by fighting gerrymandering or implementing ranked-choice voting or any other reform that works within our current winner-take-all electoral system. There simply aren’t enough blue nation Rs or red nation Ds to be a majority in their area. For example, take Massachusetts, whose current delegation is now 9 Ds and 0 Rs. It does not matter how you draw districts in Massachusetts, you will always have 9 districts where Democrats win. It’s mathematically impossible to do otherwise.
The only way to reliably elect more politically diverse voices is to draw proportional, multi-winner districts where voters can win representation without winning a majority of the vote.
Second, add more parties to the mix. More parties, counterintuitively, could help Congress find new ways to get things done. In fact, political scientists say the number of parties is arguably the most important feature in a country's politics.
I can already hear you saying: “how on earth could adding even more parties help politicians get to consensus? Are you insane?”
But that’s exactly the point—with more parties, consensus across all the parties in Congress would no longer be necessary. Today, with rare exceptions, Congress has no choice but to operate functionally as a two-party coalition between Republicans and Democrats, certainly to set and pass national policy, and usually to just keep the government running.
With three, four, five parties—representing more diverse ideological groups, like free-market liberals and pro-democracy conservatives —there would be more permutations, more ways to assemble a governing coalition of 60%+ that doesn’t have to include all of the parties. We obviously don’t know exactly how the gritty details would work. Things like committee assignments and leadership elections and constituent services would all look different (and certainly present new challenges) in a multi-party context. But the important thing is, with more parties, not all of them have to be cooperative. One or two could remain intransigently in opposition, doing everything they can to make life difficult for the governing majority. And Congress could still function.
So not consensus. Pluralism.
The big fix: proportional representation
Thankfully, we can achieve both of these goals with the same reform. Proportional representation.
I know, proportional representation sounds complicated, but it’s not really. At its core, it’s about switching from a system where each election chooses one winner to one where each election chooses multiple winners, elected proportionally (more on the how here).
The potential benefits of this switch, at least according to many political scientists, could be enormous.
And to be clear, I get how a long essay on “moving past the two-party system” can sound somewhere between naïve and “unhinged Reddit comment.”
Today’s electoral system only allows for two parties, period. It’s the only outcome that has ever been able to survive the way we currently design our elections. But instead of understanding and challenging the causes and limitations of that reality, we’ve learned to take it as gospel, as a fundamental part of American politics. But it isn’t. Proportional representation is completely compatible with our Constitution and would require zero amendments.
Fun fact: Thomas Jefferson invented one of the main methods of proportional representation almost a century before its widespread global adoption.
The hard truths about third parties and a “contingent election” in 2024
Speaking of our current electoral system only allowing for two options. Two prominent possible third-party presidential candidates—Joe Manchin and Larry Hogan—have publicly decided against running.
Perhaps part of their thinking? The uncomfortable reality that a successful third-party bid, by No Labels or someone else, could accidentally trigger a constitutional crisis through something called a “contingent election.” It sounds boring. It very much wouldn’t be. There is a high likelihood that, if no candidate gets to 270 electoral votes and the arcane procedure is triggered, it could lead to chaos on a degree we’ve never before seen in the U.S.
We’ve been worried about this possibility for a while, and turns out we’re not the only ones. A high-profile and bipartisan group of former Members of Congress (including Republican Senators Jack Danforth and William Cohen) recently wrote No Labels to share a simple warning: “A contingent election would be calamitous.”
Read about their letter in Axios.
Representatives Tom Coleman and Steve Israel, two of the signatories, have an op-ed in The Hill summarizing these concerns:
We urge No Labels to re-evaluate the wisdom of a presidential campaign not because we fear change, want to limit voter choice, or believe that our respective parties should be protected from electoral competition. Nor do we fail to grasp that our nation faces extraordinary challenges at home and abroad, and that many voters are frustrated with the status quo.
Rather, we urge caution because even the best case scenario for any third party campaign presents a dangerously high likelihood of triggering a contingent election. And we know that this process would likely disrupt the peaceful and orderly transition of power in January 2025 and irreparably harm our democratic institutions. With such high stakes, a “unity” ticket gamble would be reckless.
What else we’re tracking:
Jerusalem Demsas explores why the quiet assimilation of Ukrainian refugees has been so different from the experience of asylum seekers from Latin America: “To call this moment a ‘migrant crisis’ is to let elected federal officials off the hook. But a ‘crisis of politicians kicking the problem down the road until opportunists set it on fire’ is hard to fit into a tweet, so we’ll have to make do.”
An increasing number of voting rights lawyers are turning to state voting rights acts to protect minority voting rights. NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang has the story of one suit in Nassau County, NY that could be a template.
Heartbreaking story in Oklahoma: a nonbinary teen is dead after being attacked in a girls’ bathroom. More on the broader context—including violence-fomenting elites and online extremism—here.
Lots of debate in recent weeks about whether Jack Smith’s opposition to Trump’s delay strategy represents a “rush to trial.” That’s not what’s happening, explain Genevieve Nadeau and Kristy Parker in Lawfare.
Local elections officials are significantly more worried about political interference than they were pre-2020, per CQ Researcher.
New podcast alert. The 19th (which you should be reading) has a new pod, The Amendment. The first guest is Nikole Hannah-Jones.
On political violence, a reassurance and a warning from Rachel Kleinfeld and Jared Holt: “worries [about a repeat of January 6th] overestimate Trump’s current abilities to command large crowds—let alone inspire people to inflict mass violence on our democracy. But they also under-account for the erosion in public safety and health that has occurred since the Capitol riot via a steady drip of smaller acts of political violence.”
If you’re in DC (or nearby), tickets are still available for this weekend’s top-notch Principles First Summit. My colleagues Amanda & Beau will be speaking (along with so many other awesome people). Go say hi!
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, one of three global indices of democracy, has their 2023 numbers out this week. Another bad year. Declines almost across the board. Only 8% of the world’s population lives in a “full democracy.” (If you’re reading in the United States, that number does not include you.)