The Long Shadow of 2010
Laura Blessing | January 9, 2020
The dawning of a new decade brings the expected retrospectives. While algorithms compute our most listened-to songs and pundits connect the latest torrential news cycle to a loose historical pattern, finding the signal amidst the noise can be elusive. Periodization schemes can be difficult to pin down. But arguably, a decade is precisely the right measurement for a major phenomenon: the weakening of parties in Congress. We can pinpoint 2010 not because of a trend in a dataset, but because of the concrete actions of political actors. From the Citizens United ruling, to the earmarks ban and failure of a fiscal grand bargain, to the Tea Party election that created the Freedom Caucus, 2010 has shifted the rules of the political game in a direction that weakens party leadership in Congress, creating problems for governance.
Why this matters:
The weakening of parties in Congress is concerning because of how it interacts with other aspects of the political system. If there were another strong organizing force within Congress, like the committee system of the midcentury “textbook Congress” era (where strong committee chairs and weak party leaders worked together), governance might not be so troubled. But when party leaders are the strongest organizing principle in a Congress that is more polarized than ever before, and they become weaker, congressional legislating becomes more gridlocked and more volatile. Power abhors a vacuum, and when Congress takes a knee the executive and judicial branches are disproportionately strengthened and emboldened.
What others have said:
A chorus of scholars have written on polarization (see Nolan McCarty’s accessible book summarizing this area of inquiry). Julia Azari has specifically written on the combination of “weak parties and strong partisanship.” Her focus is on the lack of coordination between party elites, and also between a party’s voter base and elites. These sort of coalitional management and principal-agent problems are indeed dire. What follows is a different but complementary addition to Azari’s observations.
Citizens United:
The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court case weakened the parties’ ability to both coordinate with their donors and control legislators with funds from the party’s coffers. Journalists such as Tim Alberta (in American Carnage) have noted how these new super PACs (some run by establishment party figures) effectively “cannibalized the donor base.” The combination of the 2003 McCain-Feingold legislation, which limited the soft money a party could dole out to their legislators, followed by Citizens United, which unleashed outside spending, set our political system on a track that resulted in more outside spending than party spending in recent cycles. Sometimes these outside groups echo what party leaders want, and sometimes (particularly with Tea Party groups) they diverge. But there is now competition where there previously was not in a Congress where margins can be close and majority parties change frequently. Party leaders have the potential to be thwarted, and even friendly interests can threaten agenda control.
Budget politics: the earmarks ban and the failure of a grand bargain
If coordinating with donors and doling out campaign money is one way of exercising control as a party leader, helping legislators bring home money to their districts is an even better one. From the perspective of party leaders, such a tool is iterative (it can be used multiple times—campaigns are “only” every two years), invites no zero-sum conflict (just because one member gains a bridge in their district doesn’t mean anyone else loses anything), and often relatively cheap (small projects can mean a lot to voters). Until the “bridge to nowhere” brought public ire down on earmarks, there was no blowback to this tool—unlike, say, removing a member from a committee. There are many effects to banning earmarks (I have ongoing research), but taking them away has both made it harder to pass legislation and taken power from party leadership. The failure of Congress and the Obama Administration to create a “grand bargain” on debt reduction in 2010 – resulting in the 2011 Budget Control Act and the sequestration regime – further deepened the dysfunction of our budget politics; not a single appropriations bill has individually passed since 2010.
The Tea Party election:
The year 2010 was also the year of the Tea Party, with the Republicans picking up 63 House seats in a wave election. Many of these members, backed by an anti-establishment base, funders, and media, went on to form the House Freedom Caucus. Ideological factions are typical in Congress, but the HFC is highly unusual in its ability to assertively bargain with their party leadership; at roughly forty members who would vote as a block, they were able to deny their Speakers a majority on their chosen issues. No other faction since the Civil War had acted against both the opposing party and their own co-partisans. While nothing in the current Democratic majority looks like the HFC, there are also liberal factions troubling Speaker Pelosi. While the electoral viability of these members may have begun as a symptom of the new incentive in the system, and not a cause, these members and their actions now are consequential for governance.
Conclusion:
The events of 2010 have cast a long shadow. They have enervated party leaders’ ability to control their fellow partisans in Congress. It is more difficult to pass legislation and the lawmaking process has become more erratic, departing even further from regular order. Recent efforts to highlight the importance of congressional capacity by outside experts, as well as by Congress itself, are important and highly necessary. The current state of affairs, transformed over the past decade, will take time, effort, and a clear-eyed understanding of the situation to reform.
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