How Big Government Destroys Democracy
But the real-life version is not entertaining. It’s a threat to the survival of our republic. Representative government depends on a return to limited government and the open legislative order we used to have in Washington.
Consider the past few months. As Congress finished its business for 2013 in December, a ten-year, multi-trillion-dollar budget deal emerged from secret negotiations. There was no public debate. No committee hearings. No way for members of Congress or the people of the United States to find out what was in the legislation until the deal was completed. Positive talking points were delivered to “friends” in the media before any details were divulged to the public. The obeisant “journalists” dutifully spun the final product as a bipartisan achievement for both parties.
These secret processes have become the norm for major legislation in Congress. Only a month later, another massive, 1,582-page omnibus bill spending more than $1 trillion was released from closed-door negotiations and passed within forty-eight hours. No committee hearings or debate. No amendments. No time for voters or even members of Congress to weigh in with their opinions. Few, if any, members of Congress even read it. Yet it passed both Houses easily with bipartisan support.
A few weeks later, the same process was repeated with a near trillion-dollar food stamp and farm bill. That was followed by the debt-ceiling vote, when journalists who should know better described a vote on cloture that guaranteed passage as a charade. The virtually meaningless final vote on the bill (the real charade) was written up as “the real thing.”
Frank Underwood, the fictional legislator and later Vice President in House of Cards, would have been proud. The inept and/or conniving journalists in the series would also feel right at home.
There was a time when the U.S. Senate was actually called “the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,” and people who used the term were not being sarcastic. Most deliberations were conducted in public. The Senate—and the House—would conduct separate proceedings on similar bills. They’d hold hearings, debate the merits of legislation and amend it in committees in full public view.
One of the results of this level of debate is that it would sometimes take weeks, months or even years to get major pieces of new legislation to the floor of both Houses for debate and vote. Then, if similar bills passed both Houses, a bicameral (House/Senate) and bipartisan committee would work in “conference” to reconcile the differences in the bills. Finally, identical bills would go back to the full membership of both the House and Senate for final passage and on to the president to approve or veto.
This open and deliberative process of creating new laws and determining how much and where to spend taxpayer money, was never perfect. But it was the hallmark of our representative government.
On the all-important issue of spending, twelve separate appropriation bills would move through twelve different committees in both the House and the Senate every year. The media and the public would know how Congress planned to spend taxpayer money even before the bills were brought up for debate, amendment and final passage. But as the government grew, appropriation bills became much bigger, more complex and harder to pass in public view. Parochial earmarks were added by the thousands to assuage public concerns about deficit spending and to buy votes from members of Congress who no longer even read or understood the whole bill.
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