What’s wrong with Washington
Tuesday, July 28 2009
One of the things you hear a lot in the health care debate is folks saying, “I just don’t trust Washington” – as if the people running this country are inherently less trustworthy than everyone else. That’s a cop-out, an easy excuse for avoiding the real problem.
The real problem is structure: our government was designed poorly. Hendrik Hertzberg has an excellent capsule explanation of what’s wrong with Washington:
A President may fancy that he has a mandate (and, morally, he may well have one), but the two separately elected, differently constituted, independent legislatures whose acquiescence he needs are under no compulsion to agree. Within those legislatures, a system of overlapping committees dominated by powerful chairmen creates a plethora of veto points where well-organized special interests can smother or distort a bill meant to benefit a large but amorphous public. In the smaller of the two legislatures—which is even more heavily weighted toward conservative rural interests than is the larger one, and where one member may represent as little as one-seventieth as many people as the member in the next seat—an arcane and patently unconstitutional rule, the filibuster, allows a minority of members to block almost any action. The process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down.
This process is consequence of the compromises by which our Founding Fathers sought to resolve the fundamental tensions of their time: slave vs. free states, king vs. colony, rule of law vs. religion. Though these compromises solved immediate problems, they also guaranteed that our government would be awkward, balky, and inefficient – and create further problems down the road. And, of course, this system went to crap less than a hundred years after its founding; we fought a massive Civil War. After the War, some things changed, but the basic structure and problems remained mostly the same.
The people making our laws are no worse than the rest of us, but they operate under a system of rules that often forces them to make bad decisions. We like to think our government is the best-est ever, so we prefer to blame the people rather than confront the system – but the problem is systemic. The people ‘who don’t trust Washington’ need to come to terms with that, and stop using their mistrust as an excuse for perpetual inaction.
