Forget the election, American democracy is in stasis
Democracy in the United States is running on empty. Never mind Donald Trump, who liberals feared might have ended up as the American Idi Amin, keeping Hillary Clinton’s head in his White House fridge. Trump has been rumbled. Short of an astonishing last-minute revelation that uncovers grim truths about his rival beyond her misuse of emails, the Republican nominee is about to be summoned to the Dean’s office at Electoral College, where he will be expelled for producing a string of incomprehensible essays and years of deplorable misbehaviour.
No, the truly worrying crisis for America is that lawmakers in Washington have forgotten how to make law. Throughout six out of the eight years of his presidency, Barack Obama has had to contend with a House of Representatives controlled by the “Opposition” Republicans. For the last two years, the Senate has also been in Republican hands. The result, according to Govtrack, an independent website that monitors the workload of Congress, is that there are 11,644 bills and resolutions currently languishing in the Capitol Hill intray of which only 4 per cent are expected to reach the statute books.
Not even the fact that some 33,000 Americans die each year in gun-related incidents and that it is easier in some states to get a gun license than a drivers license has moved Congress to act. A majority of the nation’s elected representatives, Democrats as well as Republicans, are more concerned about losing the endorsement of the gun lobby than they are about life and death on their country’s streets, schools, shopping malls and cinemas.
Practically nothing of substance has emerged from Congress in the Obama era beyond healthcare reform and the bailing out of Wall Street and the car sector, both achieved during the President’s first two years, when the Democrats had majorities in both chambers. Same-sex marriage, the sole landmark advance of recent days, was only delivered after a ruling by the Supreme Court. These days, congressmen and senators spend most of their time fund-raising and demeaning each other’s best, or worst, efforts. Passing a Bill in the 21st century is treated as a concession to the enemy. To reach across the aisle is viewed as if it were crossing the Rubicon.
This time around, with Clinton a near-certainty to emerge victorious in the race to the Oval Office, there is a reasonable chance that the Democrats will have a narrow majority in the Senate, but almost no possibility that they will enjoy power in the House. The current Speaker, Paul Ryan, might choose to be less obstructive than his predecessor John Boehner was to Obama, but his principle focus is expected to be securing the nomination of his party to defeat Clinton in 2020, meaning that he will be in no mood to make her look good in the four years beginning on January 20th.
But even if Ryan were to feel uncharacteristically generous, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican majority leader, can be relied on to sustain the cause of legislative stasis. Given the choice, he would kick-start the 115th Congress by repealing Obamacare, which he regards as a Socialist abomination. A climate change denier, who has declared himself opposed to “any and all tax increases”, he enjoys a 100 per cent approval rating from the National Right to Life Committee, the country’s largest and most influential anti-abortion lobby. In July of this year, as a supporter of the right of citizens to carry concealed weapons, he was presented with the California Rifle and Pistol Association’s Outstanding Legislator Award.
As McCarthy sees it, Hillary Clinton was personally responsible for the assassination by Islamists of the American ambassador and his bodyguards in Libya in 2012. For this reason, he helped put together a committee to investigate the affair which he was determined should show she was unfit for the office of President.
In other words, he is a mainstream Republican, 2016-style. Let’s see how he responds to Clinton when she starts feeding through her proposals for tighter gun control, free college tuition, a higher minimum wage and increased taxes on big business.
You might think that the population at large, not just those who voted for Bernie Sanders, would be disturbed by the failure of their politicians to engage in compromise. And you would be right – up to a point. But though liberals and Sandinistas were outraged last week when Trump hinted he might not accept the validity of a loss to Hillary Clinton on November 8, the chronic breakdown of the legislative system seems to be accepted by most Americans as just one of those things, like gridlock in rush hour.
It wasn’t always like this. In the past, Presidents could normally rely on a House majority for at least half their period in power, with compromise between the two parties generally sufficient the rest of the time to at least allow passage of the budget and the cobbling together of solutions to immediate crises. It didn’t always work, of course. Differences were sometimes too wide and deep to be bridged with fudge. But even then, when things ground to a halt, the volatility of the House was frequently offset by the wiser heads whose counsel prevailed in the Senate.
That ended with the bitterness and recriminations of the Bush years in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Senate today is as crazy as the House. It was the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, from Kentucky, who set the pace (or lack of it) when he announced within days of Obama’s inaugural victory back in 2008 that the number one goal of the GOP should be, at all costs, to prevent the first black President from winning a second term. From that point, it was downhill all the way.
It is possible, even likely, that at some point in the next ten years the President, Senate and House will all be drawn from the same party. But until that day, do not expect anything progressive, or even decisive, to come out of Washington. The Land of the Free will be stuck in a quagmire of its own devising.