ABOUT THIS BLOG

I shall post videos, graphs, news stories, and other material there. We shall use some of this material in class, and you may review the rest at your convenience. You will all receive invitations to post to the blog. (Please let me know if you do not get such an invitation.) I encourage you to use the blog in these ways:
To post questions or comments about the readings before we discuss them in class;
To follow up on class discussions with additional comments or questions.
To post relevant news items or videos.

There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges.


Search This Blog

Friday, September 16, 2016

Lobotomy on the Hill

Frank Baumgartner and Lee Drutman write at Vox that Congress is working fine ... for some.
So who are these select few? They are indeed a small group, but not an inconsequential one. They include party leaders who benefit from centralized control of policy and personnel resources, lobbying groups withpolicy capacity to lend, and anybody who doesn't want Congress to be able to produce new legislation or know much about it if it does. That's about it.
Congress has given itself a lobotomy over the past three decades. It has eliminated thousands of staff positionseviscerated its ability to carry out policy analysis, and generally has such low pay and difficult work environments that it relies on inexperienced and overstretched 20-somethings for the vast bulk of its work.

Before puzzling why any institution would do something so self-destructive and attributing the cause to irrationality or worse, we should consider perhaps that the system is now working just as many people would prefer.
Congress would significantly improve its problem-solving capacity under a reempowered committee system, with more and more professional staff to conduct policy analysis. Under such a system, committees have both the resources and the breathing space to tackle public problems. Congress would get more discovery on a range of problems, more information about potential policy solutions, and more capacity to solve problems.
By contrast, centralization of resources in party leadership means that information sourcesare tightly controlled, limited, and drawn into the zero-sum nature of partisan conflict. It's no wonder Congress is frequently incapacitated.

But change is hard.

No comments:

Blog Archive