Discussion for article #223305
Historically and hysterically.
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Why nothing gets done in congress in one key stroke:
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Your headline is wrong. The chart doesn’t say anything on why congress gets nothing done. It just says that Congress is historically ineffective. We already knew that.
I think Austin_Dave above nailed it much better.
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Gridlock is a natural outcome of government as envisioned by our nation’s founders.
edited for clarity
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(Long form)
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They’ll go to Washington to FIGHT for us, though.
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Since 1964 we are going from bad apples to rotten ones in the GOP.
A well kept militia for special interest.
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Eh… I have some methodology problems here. The total number of “Salient Legislative Issues” ranges between 20-40. The definition of these issues is “An issue that has appeared at least 4 times in the NYT editorial pages.” She could have used a demand-driven variable here, like Google searches or trends. Or she could have used from a market basket of editorials.
I will use climate change as an example. Perhaps an omnibus climate change bill gets stuck in the Energy and Commerce committee because opponents spread Austin_Dave’s $$$ to tie it down. But the appropriations process funds a number of active steps across different departments to mitigate climate change. Is climate change then a salient legislative issue? Did it meet Binder’s definition of gridlock? Why or why not?
She admits that “Divergent analytical perspectives are compounded by debates over how best to measure
Congress’s legislative capacity.” We can all agree on that.
When Mitch McConnell smiles, I get frightened shivers down my spine.
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I think the trend line in that graph is incredibly misleading. I recreated the graph to make sure and added some new trend lines.
From 1947 to 1979, even with the huge jump in '79 the trend line is nearly flat. Meaning the amount of gridlock is pretty much constant over that 32 year period. If you look at just the 30 year period between 1947 and 1977, gridlock tended to actually decrease, not increase.
If you take a trend line fit against years 1979 or 1981 to 2012, the trend line is decidedly not flat; gridlock has increased significantly over that period.
The fundamental conclusion of this analysis is flawed. Sure, there’s always some level of gridlock in our government; that’s how it’s designed. The real takeaway from this should be that since 1980, gridlock has increased significantly, and it continues to increase.
So, what happened in 1980 that started this new trend?
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Marxists (Leninists) would see an obvious explanation: taken overall, that is, looking at the overall trend, it reflects the gradually increasing pressure felt domestically from the deteriorating relative position of U.S. capitalism in the world economy. Note the pick up of peaks and means in the late 1970s coincides with the massive deindustrialization in the U.S., i.e., the search for cheaper labor abroad and the concommitant effects that had on the American work force. With that, the divide within the ruling class over how to deal with it - pre-New Deal vs. New Deal-type interventionist approaches - has gradually widened. That has paralleled the long-term stagnation, if not slight decline in inflation-adjusted individual income since the early 1970s.
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Use Google Trends for the years she covers, 1947 to 2012? Right. Remember, the point of the paper is to compare the rate of gridlock over a 65 year period. The climate change “example” you float isn’t on point. You’re not expressing a counter hypothesis about salience, only about what constitutes legislative action. Your second paragraph is unrelated to the first.
That’s not to say her measure is unassailable, and she’d be the first to admit that, but clearly you’ve never had to get your hands dirty and try coding something like this. No measure is perfect and one must always trade off efficiency and accuracy to some degree.
It’s also not clear what a “market basket” would look like and whether it would provide any measurable improvement over the NYT alone, even were one to expend the effort to code the additional newspapers. Does an editorial in the Sacramento Bee characterize the national policy agenda? Would it have done so equally in 1947 and 2012? How does one decide what’s “in” and what’s “out” in a given year? These are not just challenging questions, they are also potential sources of bias.
The NYT is used precisely because it has been read nearly ubiquitously across that full time series by DC policy makers and no other newspaper can make that claim. Perhaps you could add or substitute newspapers for small slices of time, but not all 65 years of it. That would have been a different study.
Why Congress Gets Nothing Done, In One Picture
There, FIFY
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Gridlock is generally going to be higher when different parties control each house of Congress. The pre-1980 period coincided with a long period of un-interrupted Democratic control of the House, combined with control of the Senate for all but 2 2-year interruptions. I realize that the Democrats had a large Southern bloc that differed with the party on civil rights, but many Republicans were willing to support civil rights and the Southern Dems generally voted with the party on economic issues that didn’t directly involve race.
After 1980, split control of the chambers was the norm (gridlock dropped somewhat in the late 90s-early 2000s when the GOP controlled both chambers and in 2006-2010, when the Dems controlled both.
We’ll, we all knows it has absolutely nothing to do with policy. Less than half even understand the Constitution but use it as an excuse for everything.
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Welp, you found a way to break to comments container.
Brilliant.
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Brilliant.
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Actually, the photo above the article gets to the root cause.
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