After a week of snow hell that has left the city a dysfunctional mess, it is tempting to see a parallel between the gridlock on Washington's unplowed streets and the historic logjam on Capitol Hill.
The United States is mired in debt and deficits as far as even a bionic eye could see, and there is almost zero chance the 111th Congress will do anything about it. The health-care system is a voracious blob that consumes 17 per cent of the nation's economy, yet leaves almost 50 million people uninsured and millions more without adequate coverage. And still, meaningful health-care reform appears about as likely as reversing the aging process. Bridling the bankers should be a no-brainer (and a just reward) after the ravages Wall Street has inflicted on Main Street, but for all their tough talk, legislators still can't seem to bite the greasy hand that funds their campaigns.
Is this the worst Congress ever?
If you tend towards the affirmative, it's probably just as likely that you place most of the blame on the Republicans. The GOP minority in the Senate has taken obstructionism to new heights, putting this Congress on track to shatter the record for the number of filibusters used in a single two-year cycle. Raw partisanship has come to so dominate the legislative process that political analysts are suddenly postulating that the United States has become a de facto parliamentary system stuck in a permanent impasse.
Now there's a scary thought. If this and future Congresses can't get their act together, America's relative decline is certain to accelerate and it won't just be the United States that pays the price. The entire world economy will be destabilized if it loses the United States as its rudder. The entire planet could boil over without U.S. leadership, although that just became a heck of lot less likely with subzero weather in the Carolinas leaving the GOP's climate-change deniers in a gloating mood.
When the current batch of Republican congressmen and senators arrived on Capitol Hill a little more than a year ago, they adopted an obstructionist strategy because they had nothing to lose. The party ranks had been so decimated after the 2006 and 2008 elections, and the Democratic majorities in both chambers so hell-bent on reversing the legacy of George W. Bush, becoming the Party of No was merely a recognition of the GOP's inability to actually affect legislative outcomes.
Indeed, Republicans aren't to blame for this Congress's failure to enact health-care reform and climate-change legislation, overhaul the financial regulatory apparatus or address the deficit. Democrats are so divided on these issues that they have done a good job sabotaging President Barack Obama's agenda all by themselves.
Rounding up the 60 Senate votes needed to override a Republican filibuster and get a health-care bill passed in December involved such unsightly sausage-making - such as bribing conservative Democratic senators with money for their states and pet causes - that a disgusted American public turned on the initiative. As a result, proceeding with a final House-Senate bill even if they had the votes in Congress would have been political hara-kiri. Democrats would have received an even more severe rebuke in November's midterm elections than the upbraiding they're already expected to endure.
When electors in Massachusetts sent the 41st Republican senator to Washington in last month's special election, they empowered the GOP beyond its wildest dreams. With Mr. Obama posting the lowest year-one approval rating of any modern president - an ominous 46 per cent according to a New York Times/CBS poll out yesterday - the Republicans now have everything to gain by being obstructionist.
A STICK IN THE PRESIDENT'S SPOKES
Is that so bad? Most Americans (and even more non-Americans) seem to think so. Yesterday's poll showed that American voters yearn for bipartisan compromises in Congress, credit Mr. Obama for trying to build them and condemn the Republicans for putting a stick in the President's spokes. In fact, Mr. Obama's approval rating makes him look like Mother Teresa compared with the lawmakers. A record three-quarters of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is acting.
Yet the petty partisanship of some Republicans, who have resorted to filibustering anything that moves, should not obscure the fact that GOP attempts to block key planks of Mr. Obama's agenda are entirely consistent the desire of a majority of Americans for smaller government and some sober second thought on health-care reform, also borne out in the NYT/CBS survey. Those attitudes have hardened since Mr. Obama's election. If anything, the American public is telling the Republicans: "You go, GOP!"
Or, as the congressional scholar Norman Ornstein puts it: "We send people to Washington to solve problems but we don't want people whose business it is to solve problems doing it."
The only thing that's unusual about the current impasse is that it is the result of rigid party discipline, at least on the Republican side. The U.S. system encourages gridlock, at least on a temporary basis, with the expectation that it ultimately produces more perfect legislative outcomes. What looks like dysfunction is really American democracy in all star-spangled splendour.
"The Canadian conception of the American system is that it's weird, distorted, broken, and nothing ever gets done," says Mr. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who spent much of his youth in Canada. "But the system was designed not to operate well. It was designed to make it difficult to enact sweeping legislation. Difficult, but not impossible."
The filibuster is nowhere mentioned in the U.S. Constitution - rather, it is a procedural rule created by the Senate itself - but if the Founding Fathers were around today, they might have wished they had invented it themselves. For everything else that the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, which were written to promote its adoption, say about the Senate indicates that the Fathers explicitly meant to make it hard to legislate. "The violence of faction," as James Madison labelled it in Federalist No.10, was the enemy. Just as a strong central government was a tool to control the violence of faction, or tyranny of the majority, that might occur within individual states, the Senate was meant to ensure that individual states would not be railroaded by a tyrannical majority in Congress.
'INJURIOUS AS WELL AS BENEFICIAL'
It's not an accident that Wyoming (population 544,000) has as many senators as California (37 million). Allotting every state two senators, regardless of its population, "is at once a recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in individual states, and an instrument for preserving that residuary sovereignty," Madison wrote in Federalist No.62. Legislatures in no fewer than 36 states (many led by Democrats) have threatened to challenge Mr. Obama's proposal to force Americans to buy health insurance, calling it an overextension of federal powers. The senators in Congress who stand with them are merely doing their constitutionally mandated job.
Madison also conceded that this "complicated check on legislation may in some ways be injurious as well as beneficial." Just as the filibusters of Southern Democrats against their own party's 1964 Civil Rights Act were not the Senate's finest moment, the systematic GOP filibustering of anything Mr. Obama touches smacks of an abuse of procedure.
In the bad old days, senators invoking the filibuster actually had to stand on the floor of the upper chamber and talk as long as they could - no pee breaks allowed - if they hoped to thwart legislation. Today, unless the Senate leadership can rally 60 out of the 100 Senate votes to override the recalcitrant minority, a senator merely has to threaten to filibuster to stop the legislative wheels from turning. Is it any wonder it gets used and abused?
The bad behaviour of a few is no reason to badmouth the filibuster. Yet liberal Democrats do nothing else these days, abhorring as they do the prospect that Mr. Obama could be forced to imitate Bill Clinton, who needed to become an unreconstructed centrist to get anything through Congress. For a group that purports to champion so many minorities, it is odd to hear the folks at MSNBC, the U.S. left's foil to Fox News, in essence calling for the tyranny of the current majority in Congress.
Besides, killing the filibuster would be a short-sighted strategy. The procedural tool allowed Democrats to delay, and sometimes block, many of Mr. Bush's most controversial judicial nominations. It prevented the Republican president from proceeding in 2005 with a partial privatization of social security (the U.S. equivalent of the Canada Pension Plan). Sooner or later, Democrats will once more be the minority party and they will get the filibuster faith all over again.
In declaring his support for the Civil Rights Act, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who was the Republican leader in the upper chamber at the time, declared: "Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come." Substitute "filibusters" for "armies" and the same idea applies. The day of reckoning on debts, deficits, health care, social security and climate change may be nearer (or farther off) than anyone can know, but Congress is uniquely adept at acting when it needs to. After all, it saved the global financial system and passed a stimulus package that, with its massive investments in research and green energy, will do much to position the U.S. economy for future growth.
Like a Hollywood movie, Congress often generates unbearable tension as it reaches its climax, but it usually has a happy ending. The American political process may just be the worst form of democracy, were it not for all the others.
Konrad Yakabuski