29 October 2010
Divided U.S. Government Can Work, Scholars Say
Washington — The prospect of a divided U.S. government — with a president from one political party and at least one chamber of Congress controlled by the other party — has raised questions about what the next two years might be like in Washington.
William A. Galston has studied how the U.S. government works and offers something of a weather forecast for it: an extended period of storms, probably giving way to brighter days as a Democratic White House and a Republican Congress work with one another.
“By and large, in my experience, divided government can indeed produce results. Those results are usually preceded by periods of intense conflict,” said Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington policy research group.
Unlike many countries with parliamentary governments, the United States elects its chief executive and its lawmakers separately, and the three branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial — are designed to be equal and capable of limiting one another’s power. Congress passes laws and appropriates money; the president can veto laws or sign them and put them into practice with regulations; and the courts enforce the laws and decide whether the laws and the actions of the government violate the U.S. Constitution.
A president whose party controls Congress cannot always dictate what bills will be passed, as President Obama has found in his first two years in office. Nor does the government grind to a halt when the president and Congress are from different parties: Of the 17 presidents in the century before Obama took office, only six never had to contend with a divided government.
The party of the winning candidate in a presidential election tends to increase its share of seats in Congress at the same time, but in the election that falls at the midpoint of a president’s four-year term, the party of the president usually loses seats. Polls and pundits have suggested that Obama’s Democratic Party is on the verge of losing its majority in the House of Representatives and possibly in the Senate.
That would please economist William A. Niskanen, a Republican who worked for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, because he says divided governments are historically good for the country.
“With divided government, the rate of growth of federal spending has been lower, and the probability of a war has been much lower,” said Niskanen, who is chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute, a Washington policy research group that advocates for individual liberties and limited government. “A unified government of either party has typically been associated with rapid spending growth and the possibility of a war.”
New programs rarely are enacted in times of divided government, Niskanen said, but those that are tend to last because they must be crafted to meet the concerns of both political parties. He cited a welfare reform bill approved in the 1990s: “The welfare reform of ‘96 was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress twice to be vetoed by President Clinton,” Niskanen said. “The third time around, he signed it, and that, I think, was quite an important change in welfare legislation. It lasted.”
The American public also likes having its government divided, Niskanen said: “I think the public feels safer when there is a check within the political branches here in Washington. The Supreme Court is not an adequate check against unified government; they typically go along with at least the main themes. We have to have some check within the political branches, between the two houses of Congress and the administration, to achieve the benefits of a divided government.”
Galston, who worked in the Clinton White House, said public opinion plays a crucial role when divided government is effective. “Political parties and the White House rarely ignore public sentiment for very long, and in previous periods of interparty conflict that I’ve studied, during eras of divided government, the party that gets evidence that it’s losing ground in the court of public opinion is likely to come to the table, even if it previously has signaled firmness even to the point of intransigence,” he said. When a divided government shut down briefly in the 1990s — Congress could not agree on a spending bill, to the public’s disgust — “the political system shifted from confrontation to actual conversation and then cooperation. And unless the American people have changed completely, I would expect that pattern to repeat itself even in these circumstances of deepening and widening polarization.”
Niskanen worried the bitter partisan polarization might get in the way, but his boss in a Republican White House, Reagan, gained passage of his most important measures because he “was willing to bargain across party lines, and one of the conditions that is necessary to do that is you never impugn motives,” Niskanen said. “Unfortunately, all too much of our political debate during campaigns is impugning the motives of your opposition. But to govern, you’ve got to stop that.”
Galston said lawmakers tend to take a more bipartisan approach to foreign policy issues, but with domestic issues, a certain amount of political theater is inevitable.
“If you do something to keep your [ideological] base happy that alienates the center of the electorate, then you may score some political gains in the short term, but you’ll pay a price in the longer term,” he said. “Let’s begin with the proposition that the American people tend to prefer conciliation to confrontation. They don’t send representatives to Washington to yell at each other for two years. … If people are hurting and they want action to make it better, and what they have is a government divided against itself and tied up in knots, they are likely to become quite disaffected quite quickly.”
All 435 seats of the House of Representatives are up for election every two years, and Republicans will take control if they add 39 seats to their current total. In the Senate, Republicans would need to gain 10 Senate seats to achieve a majority.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
