Last week as Congress headed into recess over the President’s Day holiday, Senate Republicans handed President Obama another black eye in their never-ending quest to stymie, block or otherwise derail his administration at every turn. They did so by voting to filibuster former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination to head the Defense Department.
While Republicans pooh-poohed the idea that they would actually veto Hagel’s bid to run the Pentagon, even temporarily blocking the conservative Nebraskan for the prospect of “further debate” on issues relating to his nomination is unprecedented in many respects. Presidential nominations to high office have at times been contentious, but delaying a swift handover of leadership in America’s most important and powerful government department during a time of war marks a new low in modern partisan relations.
Partisan obstructionism is nothing new, of course, but the extension of the writ of the minority filibuster over more and more administrative territory, let alone legislative activity, is beginning to make the world’s “greatest deliberative body” look a lot like the infamous Sejm of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania – a parliamentary body so jealous of its aristocratic privileges that it made governing Poland all but impossible and contributed mightily to the decline and eventual dismemberment of this once great Eastern European kingdom.
The Sejm’s dysfunction, like ours, stemmed from an archaic constitution that gave overweening power to deeply conservative legislative minorities. Under the rules of the Commonwealth’s constitution, any single member of the body – which was filled with aristocrats – possessed the power to stop all parliamentary proceedings in a given session. Since unanimity was often difficult to achieve, Poland-Lithuania’s elected monarchs found themselves effectively unable to govern or able to enact desperately needed modernizing reforms.
Without a vigorous government of the type found in surrounding nations, the Commonwealth slowly but surely declined in power and vigor relative to its neighbors. Poland-Lithuania eventually became so enfeebled that the country was unable to defend either its borders or sovereignty by the middle of the 18th century – a particularly violent period in European dynastic politics. Sensing weakness, the absolutist monarchs of Prussia, Russia and Austria – who were not encumbered with the silly prerogatives of a dysfunctional legislature – conspired to divide up Poland amongst themselves, and between 1772 and 1795 a series of territorial seizures and annexations carried out by these predatory states eliminated an independent Poland from the map of Europe for over a century.
Not even the looming threat of external conquest and partition could galvanize Poland’s petty parliamentarians to change their ways for the good of the country, and forever after the Sejm became a watchword for parliamentary dysfunction and a warning against the enervating weakness caused by out-of-control factionalism. Indeed, Poland’s fate – along with the subjugation of Europe’s many small Republics by larger powers – had long been an argument against democratic republicanism. History, argued critics, was replete with the chronicles of fallen republics whose internal squabbling opened the door to indigenous despotism or foreign conquest.
Faction had, as our Founding Fathers well knew, destroyed the great Roman Republic and led to the downfall of democratic Athens. Poland’s grim fate, contemporaneous with the birth of the American republic, was only the latest example of an inherent flaw of popular government that was high on the minds of the United States’ early leaders. Indeed, once the Revolution against Britain had been won, the problem of faction became the constitutional issue of the day – and has remained so ever since. America’s motto may be E Pluribus Unum, but more often than naught this has been more an ideal than a practical description of the day-to-day governing reality in our nation’s capital.
James Madison, our fourth president and widely considered the father of the Constitution, conceded that faction of the type that destroyed Poland was a distinct danger. However, in his famous Federalist No. 10, Madison argued that a large federal republic such as ours, which included many competing interests, would ensure that no one faction could become large or powerful enough to threaten the body politic as a whole. Much as having many competitors in a market prevents the emergence of a monopoly, so too would the inclusion of many competing political factions preclude the formation of a bloc of political interests that could stymie all action inimical to their ambitions.
Unfortunately, the idea that a large political “market” of the type envisioned by Madison could prevent the emergence of powerful factionalism failed almost immediately once real politics, as opposed to theoretical philosophizing, got underway. Within a few years of the ratification of our current Constitution the United States developed a two-party system that has remained more or less intact to this day. Worse still, regional differences between North and South could not be peacefully contained within the system Madison created, and just 71 years after the Constitution’s ratification the United States was nearly ripped asunder by Civil War. Not exactly the fate of Poland-Lithuania, but close to it nonetheless.
The common thread in all these instances of faction-induced republican failure all revolved around irresolvable conflicts between polarized parties that justified their actions via ideological extremism, were funded by greedy vested interests and were led by hubris-filled political egoists. The Roman Republic fell because neither Caesar nor Pompey could both be the first citizen of Rome. Poland-Lithuania collapsed because the jealous nobles in the Sejm would not cede power to a central authority. The Constitution of Madison collapsed in 1860 because, as Lincoln said, the country could not indefinitely remain half slave and half free.
Today, nearly 150 years after the end of the war which concluded the first instance of constitutional failure in the United States, there are disturbing signs that, once again, we may be approaching the outer boundaries of constitutional dysfunction of the type that eventually brought down Rome, Poland and our first attempt at Madisonian democracy.
The U.S. Senate, for example, has been captured by a powerful blocking minority that refuses to compromise or admit they are, in fact, a minority. As a result, activity in that body has all but ground to a halt due to the unprecedented use of the filibuster to block not only top-ranking nominations like Chuck Hagel’s, but administrative and judicial appointments throughout the entire federal government. At a stroke, guerilla legislators in the Senate have overturned the very idea of majoritarian democracy and have thumbed their nose at the will of the electorate. It is, put simply, a procedural coup that subverts the very meaning and legitimacy of our elections.
Meanwhile, in that body, meaningful legislative action, like financial and health care reform, has either been blocked entirely or so eviscerated of content in order to ensure Senate approval that no real change seems likely to come from these new laws despite the immense effort put into enacting them. When one considers that the Senate is rigged by the Constitution to ensure the overrepresentation of rural backwaters reeking of reactionary conservatism, one despairs of the possibility of meaningful reform ever getting through America’s upper house.
Then there is the U.S. House of Representatives, a body whose members now come from districts so gerrymandered that only a handful of truly competitive seats remain. This means that the House, which was supposed to be more reflective of popular will than the Senate, will now only really change partisan composition every 10 years – when states are required by the Constitution to redraw Congressional districts in light of demographic changes revealed by the Census.
Indeed, gerrymandering of this sort is a big reason Republicans retained the U.S. House despite the Democrats’ thumping victory in the 2008 elections. Even though the GOP received fewer overall votes in the House elections than the Democrats as a whole, the GOP retains a considerable majority – something that would not occur in any other country calling itself a democracy. As a result, the legislative chamber that was to exhibit the most flexibility and responsiveness over time has now become even more rigid than the hidebound upper-body it was supposed to balance. If citizens are left to conclude from all this that voting for Congress is of little use, they might very well be right.
What all this means is that a Congress already totally corrupted by big money is even less capable of governing effectively than ever before. Our system, which is premised on compromise, has been made increasingly rigid as the two Americas, red and blue, find living alongside one another more uncomfortable at time goes on. Little wonder, then, that even mundane and routine aspects of governing – like debt ceiling authorizations – have become an arena for high-stakes partisan brinksmanship. Lincoln famously said that a house divided against itself, as Poland’s Sejm painfully discovered, cannot stand. The United States is certainly no Poland, but Washington is increasingly looking like Warsaw on the Potomac.