Steny Hoyer on Our Broken Congress

Steny Hoyer spoke at a recent CAPAF event on how run-amok obstructionism is destroying congress and preventing the country from tackling major problems in the best possible way.

He elaborates a bit in an interview with Ezra Klein on how Newt Gingrich ruined congress:

This all seems much harder because it’s not clear that minority obstructionism is bad politics. Back in the early 1990s, of course, Bill Kristol, among others, urged Republicans to kill the Clinton health-care bill. Not modify it, or improve it, or amend it, but kill it. And then they picked up more than 50 seats.

Newt Gingrich was of course the chief proponent of that policy, and he and Bob Michel, who was leader of the Republicans, disagreed. And Gingrich eventually succeeded in pushing Michel out. Michel’s view was you sit down, offer your input, and move forward. The theory was that the American people elected the legislative body to make policy and so you make policy. Gingrich’s proposition, and maybe accurately, was that as long as you, Bob Michel, and our party cooperate with Democrats and get 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there’s no incentive for the American people to change leadership. You have to confront, delay, and undermine and impose failure in order to move the public. To some degree, he was proven right in 1994.

If you think about how our institutions work, though, I think the key actor here was actually Bob Dole, who agreed to go along with a Senate version of this.

The House can function as a somewhat parliamentary-style body in which the majority party works out something that its members can get behind and passes it. The countermajoritarian senate isn’t like that. To function at all it requires a spirit of cooperation, one that’s currently lacking.