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Partisanship Set Deficit Panel on Path to Failure
Is there any political price to be paid for failure?
That's the question confronting Washington in the wake of the collapse of the congressional supercommittee that was supposed to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts by this week. Congress now has failed not once but twice this year to perform its most basic task of adequately managing the budget.
There are many reasons for the partisanship that produces this dysfunction, but the most basic one is this: Voters have yet to show that they will punish lawmakers for failing to come together to get something done.
To the contrary, the rewards today tend to go to politicians who remain intransigent, while the pain is meted out to those who attempt to compromise with the other party. Members of Congress are only human, and they respond logically to the incentives and rewards they see before them.
Until that changes, dysfunction is likely to persist. Voters proclaim they hate the hyperpartisanship in Congress—congressional job approval hovers near 10%—yet the same voters regularly reward that hyper-partisanship by re-electing those responsible for it, while occasionally tossing out those who dare to cross party lines to seek compromise. What is the incentive for lawmakers to break the pattern?
The explanation for this seemingly counterintuitive dynamic starts with how Congress is put together in the first place—that is, the process by which congressional districts are drawn up, a ritual now under way anew all around the country. Every 10 years, after the Census, state legislatures redraw their state's allotment of the 435 districts in the House of Representatives, thereby composing the political DNA of Congress.
Thanks to computerized tracking of voters block-by-block, this process of redistricting has become an ever more precise exercise in drawing up partisan districts in which voters are segregated into colonies that are safe for Republicans or safe for Democrats, creating a big incentive for lawmakers to stay on a partisan track. In a sense, political leaders now choose their voters rather than the other way around, says J. Gerald Hebert of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling, left, and Sen. Patty Murray, center, are co-chairs of the congressional supercommittee tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts by this week. Partisanship is one reason the panel is expected to fail.
If you want to know how effectively this system works to create safely partisan districts, look at the state of California. In the last four election cycles, California, with its 53 House districts that are up for re-election every two years, has held 212 elections for House seats. In all those elections, there has been exactly one case in which a seat changed party hands.
That means the Democratic and Republican parties held onto their seats 99.5% of the time. Usually the same representative was simply re-elected, while other times faces changed but party affiliation remained the same. In one case, a California lawmaker was sent to jail for taking bribes, but his party held the seat anyway.
As that suggests, House members increasingly are elected not by appealing to a cross-section of voters, but rather by appealing to a carefully selected group of voters from their own party. Then, the way to stay in office is to cater to partisans at the base of your own party, rather than by angering those partisans by attempting to compromise with the other side.
So while control of the House has changed hands twice in the last six years, that's because a small subset of House seats—perhaps 15% of the 435—are truly competitive swing districts that move between the parties. In the majority of districts, members live on by staying safely in their partisan foxholes, voting the party line and never risking engagement with the other side.
The lawmakers who try to compromise with the other side anger the partisan base on which they depend—and, perhaps more important these days, tempt outside ideological groups of the left or right to swoop and fund a primary challenger. California voters tried to break this chain last year by passing a referendum that sets up a citizen's commission to take the redistricting task away from state lawmakers, and other states are attempting similar moves or pushing the task to the courts, but the fate and effectiveness of those efforts remain uncertain.
But that's only the House, some will say, and doesn't explain a similar hyper-partisanship in the Senate. But increasingly the House is the breeding ground for senators; indeed, four of the six senators who served alongside six House members on the deficit super-committee had served previously in the House.
Senators from both parties will tell you that the partisan ethos of the House now permeates the Senate, where it is only aggravated by filibuster rules that mean 60 votes rather than a simple majority of 51 is required to get anything meaningful done. And the threat of outside groups mounting primary challenges to those who violate party orthodoxy is even more acute in the Senate.
Obviously, some voters want their leaders to stick hard to partisan principles, though a majority claim to want compromise. As long as the system and its voters reward the former and punish the latter, however, nobody should be surprised at the outcome.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com
Why the Super Committee Failed
By JEB HENSARLING
All now know that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction has failed to reach an agreement. While there will still be $1.2 trillion of spending cuts as guaranteed under the Budget Control Act, we regrettably missed a historic opportunity to lift the burden of debt and help spur economic growth and job creation. Americans deserve an explanation.
President Obama summed up our debt crisis best when he told Republican members of the House in January 2010 that "The major driver of our long-term liabilities . . . is Medicare and Medicaid and our health-care spending." A few months later, however, Mr. Obama and his party's leaders in Congress added trillions of dollars in new health-care spending to the government's balance sheet.
Democrats on the committee made it clear that the new spending called for in the president's health law was off the table. Still, committee Republicans offered to negotiate a plan on the other two health-care entitlements—Medicare and Medicaid—based upon the reforms included in the budget the House passed earlier this year.
The Medicare reforms would make no changes for those in or near retirement. Beginning in 2022, beneficiaries would be guaranteed a choice of Medicare-approved private health coverage options and guaranteed a premium-support payment to help pay for the plan they choose.
Democrats rejected this approach but assured us on numerous occasions they would offer a "structural" or "architectural" Medicare reform plan of their own. While I do not question their good faith effort to do so, they never did.
Republicans on the committee also offered to negotiate a plan based on the bipartisan "Protect Medicare Act" authored by Alice Rivlin, one of President Bill Clinton's budget directors, and Pete Domenici, a former Republican senator from New Mexico. Rivlin-Domenici offered financial support to seniors to purchase quality, affordable health coverage in Medicare-approved plans. These seniors would be able to choose from a list of Medicare-guaranteed coverage options, similar to the House budget's approach—except that Rivlin-Domenici would continue to include a traditional Medicare fee-for-service plan among the options.
This approach was also rejected by committee Democrats.
The Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare trustees, and the Government Accountability Office have each repeatedly said that our health-care entitlements are unsustainable. Committee Democrats offered modest adjustments to these programs, but they were far from sufficient to meet the challenge. And even their modest changes were made contingent upon a minimum of $1 trillion in higher taxes—a move sure to stifle job creation during the worst economy in recent memory.
Even if Republicans agreed to every tax increase desired by the president, our national debt would continue to grow uncontrollably. Controlling spending is therefore a crucial challenge. The other is economic growth and job creation, which would produce the necessary revenue to fund our priorities.
In the midst of persistent 9% unemployment, the committee could have enacted fundamental tax reform to simplify the tax code, help create jobs, and bring in over time the higher revenues that come with economic growth. Republicans put such a plan on the table—and even agreed to $250 billion in new revenue by eliminating or limiting most of the deductions, credits, loopholes and tax expenditures mainly enjoyed by higher-income Americans. We offered this to avoid the even larger tax increases already written into current law that will intensify the pain Americans are feeling during these difficult economic times.
Republicans were willing to agree to additional tax revenue, but only in the context of fundamental pro-growth tax reform that would broaden the base, lower rates, and maintain current levels of progressivity. This is the approach to tax reform used by recent bipartisan deficit reduction efforts such as the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission and the Rivlin-Domenici plan.
The Democrats said no. They were unwilling to agree to anything less than $1 trillion in tax hikes—and unwilling to offer any structural reforms to put our health-care entitlements on a permanently sustainable basis.
Congress goes home for the holiday.
Unfortunately, the committee's challenge was made more difficult by President Obama. Since the committee was formed, he has demanded more stimulus spending and issued a veto threat against any proposed committee solution to the spending problem that was not coupled with a massive tax increase.
Despite the president's disappointing lack of leadership, I believe my co-chair, Sen. Patty Murray, and every Democrat acted with honor and integrity and negotiated in good faith to the end. It was, of course, difficult to negotiate with six Democrats who, as Democratic committee member Jim Clyburn said on Nov. 13, "never coalesced around a plan" themselves. But I believe this failure was not due to lack of effort or commitment.
Ultimately, the committee did not succeed because we could not bridge the gap between two dramatically competing visions of the role government should play in a free society, the proper purpose and design of the social safety net, and the fundamentals of job creation and economic growth.
A great opportunity has been missed, but America's fate will not be sealed by the failure of a temporary congressional committee. Spending cuts will begin anyway in 2013, but in a manner many of us, including our secretary of defense, believe could fundamentally harm our national security. I am committed to ensuring that full deficit reduction is realized, but Congress must work to achieve these savings in a more sensible manner that does not make us less safe.
As Winston Churchill said, "Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted." Despite my disappointment with the committee's setback, I remain confident that we will yet again prove Churchill right.
Mr. Hensarling, a Republican congressman from Texas, was co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.