Congress began its summer recess last week and won’t reconvene until after Labor Day. You’d be forgiven for not noticing a difference. With just 15 bills signed into law so far this year, the 113th Congress is on pace to be the most unproductive since at least the 1940s.
But just because the legislature has ceased to function doesn’t mean our government has. Political decision making has moved to peripheral public entities, where power is exercised less transparently and accountability to voters is less direct. What we’re losing in the process isn’t government — it’s democracy.
Take the Federal Reserve. Absent any Congressional legislation to speak of … the nation’s central bank has been forced to do all the heavy lifting with the economy… Congress’s paralysis has also encouraged the Supreme Court to enter the political fray. Normally the judicial activism of recent years could be checked by Congressional action. But not now… Or consider climate change. It’s a public debate the nation briefly embarked on in the 2008 presidential race, when John McCain and Barack Obama presented different plans for cap-and-trade systems… The issue ultimately lost the spotlight to a debate over Mr. Obama’s choice for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy… The E.P.A. will handle the issue through regulatory rule making, mostly unchecked by Congress and the public…
[T]hese institutions aren’t even understood by the public to be making political decisions with national implications. Media coverage tends to be narrowly drawn for insiders — macroeconomists, constitutional scholars, E.P.A. watchers, the residents of a particular state — or trivialized for outsiders: Should the next Fed chief be female? Are Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas too openly partisan? Is Ms. McCarthy too much of a firebrand? Are “red” states diverging from “blue” states?
The Republican right — mostly new House members who are supported by the Tea Party and who are in open rebellion against the rest of the right — are probably pleased with the gridlock in Congress. They would like nothing better than to stop the federal government from functioning. But they may not fully grasp that their efforts have only shifted power elsewhere in the system…
In any event, it’s bizarre that a self-styled populist insurrection would end up making our government less accountable to the people. But that’s exactly what it’s done. What’s really gridlocked now is democracy.
Robust Analysis
Readings and occasional commentary
