Increasing gridlock in Congress
Why have we seen increasing gridlock in Congress over the past few decades? The Washington Post Politics Glossary defines gridlock as “The inability of two opposing groups to accomplish any sort of remedy or compromise on a political issue because one side manages to prevent matters from moving forward.
In United States politics, gridlock frequently refers to occasions when the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate are controlled by different parties, or by a different party than the party of the President. Gridlock may also occur within the Senate, when no party has a filibuster-proof majority.
“Political Gridlock” by author Ned Witting identifies many of the causes of gridlock in the United States and outlines ways to get government working again.
Law professors such as Sanford Levinson and Adrian Vermeule, as well as political commentators such as Matthew Yglesias and Debbie Parks, have criticized the U.S. Constitution and Senate voting rules for enabling situations of legislative gridlock. Along these lines, David Brady, a professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and Craig Volden, a professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia, explain gridlock by pointing to two interrelated factors: first, “the preferences of members of Congress regarding particular policies” and second, “supermajority institutions – the Senate filibuster and the presidential veto“.[1]
As a result, they argue, gridlock is not determined by party control of the government, but rather by an interplay between the existing policy and the spectrum of individual preferences held by congressional representatives. They maintain, in essence, that “the policy preferences of Members of Congress at or near the median are among the crucial determinants of policy outcomes.”[2]
Marcus Ethridge, an emeritus professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, argues in a 2011 policy analysis published by the libertarian Cato Institute that the US Constitution was designed to foster gridlock in order to increase “the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.”[3] Ethridge presented an extended version of his analysis in
“The Case for Gridlock: Democracy, Organized Power, and the Legal Foundations of American Government” (2051), which argues that “progressive reformers sought to shift the power to shape policy from the legislative branch to the executive bureaucracy” in an attempt to limit the power of special interests, but that this strategy backfired because of “the ability of interest groups to infiltrate the bureaucracy and promote their interests, often in ways diametrically opposed to the reformers’ intentions” and “the capacity of Congress to overcome the influence of groups and generate policy change.
” In order to counter this, Ethridge suggests a “return to the ‘constitutional principle’ of gridlock, in which special interests must compete in a legislative forum”.[4]
Researchers such as David R. Jones blame ‘higher party polarization increase[s] the likelihood of encountering gridlock’.[5] When looking at figures of polarization within U.S. politics ‘partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades’ with 92% of Republicans being to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats aligning to the left of the median Republican voter.[6] This modern polarization paired with a system designed to operate on Burkean representation, not today’s party-line voting, leads us to seemingly inevitable gridlock.v
