An Old Pro on Why Things Are So Bad
Norman Ornstein, a longtime follower of Congress, is not-repeat, not-surprised that lobbying reform has stalled. A resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Ornstein has coauthored a new book with Thomas Mann called The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track. U.S. News spoke with Ornstein. Congress, he says, is more dysfunctional now than at any time in recent history.
Will Congress ever pass strong ethics rules?
What has happened so far is pathetic. It is a meaningless package of minor changes. Very few members want to change the very comfortable arrangements they have fallen into with lobbyists. But if there is a string of indictments, then I think we are going to see a different outcome.
You say one of the main problems is that Congress no longer deliberates. How's that?
The framers set the legislative process up as something that would take a lot of time, knowing that you would have people from all across the country representing very different regions. You wanted to have them talk and discuss and debate and amend until you could get a better product that reflected everybody. Well, we hardly have that. Now, you get a small number of omnibus bills that are put together in the dead of night often without any hearings.
You also criticize the virtual disappearance of congressional oversight, pointing in particular to the resulting failures of FEMA. Why so little oversight these days?
It's mostly because Republicans, instead of seeing themselves as a legislative branch see themselves as field soldiers in the president's army, players in a team where he's the captain. Their attitude has been we don't want to do anything where we embarrass the president because that will mean embarrassing the party. During the Second World War, Harry Truman as a senator, made his reputation by having a committee that looked into war profiteering and misuse of resources. Here was a Democratic senator taking on his own party and his own president in a way. But there is no Harry Truman now.
Is one party more to blame than the other?
They both deserve a lot of the blame. But the fact is that the Republicans, who have been in charge for the last almost 12 years, deserve a greater kick in the pants right now.
This story appears in the September 11, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.