Llewellyn King: Time to bring back earmarks?

The remarkably intimate House of Commons chamber.

To know what is wrong with Congress, look to Britain. Look to what is wrong with the venerable British system and the House of Commons.

The fact is rank-and-file members of both institutions have little role in government.

In Britain, it has always been accepted that members of Parliament vote with their parties except when there are rare free votes on issues where there is conscience but no policy – for example the vote to abandon the death penalty in 1969, which was a free vote with members voting their consciences.

The sense of the impotence that the British system engenders in ordinary backbenchers was well explained in the autobiography of Matthew Parris, a former Conservative MP who served in the House of Commons when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. He concluded that he could do much more for Britain out of Parliament and abandoned it to become one of the nation’s most successful political writers and broadcasters. He says of his time in Parliament, “To be an MP is to feed your ego and starve your self-respect.” Political television star and former Republican congressman from Florida, Joe Scarborough, might concur.

Do members of Congress, particularly in the House, feel as frustrated? Many have told me so. 

Richard Arenberg, who worked for Democrats on Capitol Hill for 34 years and now teaches at Brown University, told me, “There is not much point in being a member of the House if you are in minority.” 

Members of that chamber, particularly in opposition, have insignificant effect on the governance for which they came to Washington to carry out. The outcome on most issues is predetermined by the leadership of the majority.

The U.S. system is tolerant of those who defy the party in a way the British system is not, but we have moved, since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, to a practice that is closer to parliamentary than it ever has been. We, the leadership decides, you vote.

Members do not control what comes to the floor and are expected to vote with their parties most of the time. They are the proverbial potted plants, revered socially and stunted professionally. They can shine in committee work, but they do not affect the outcome in legislation.

In this system, with the rigidity that has evolved, Congress is not the place to be if you are member without a leadership role.

Therefore, it is no surprise that bipartisanship is so hard to come by these days and compromise has been largely abandoned as a part of the work on Capitol Hill.

Although the parties seethe internally, Democrats tugged between the center and the left, Republicans torn between their center and their right, there is no common ground between them, little bipartisan agreement.

Craig Shirley, a noted biographer of Ronald Reagan, points out that compromise was possible when there were liberal New England Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. That overlap, he says, is gone and with it, possibility for compromise.

What is to be done? One answer, suggested by President Trump, hinted by House Speaker Paul Ryan and floated around Washington in the think tanks, is to bring back earmarks so that members of Congress can fight for projects for their districts, trade support and have a greater sense of purpose.

Although earmarks, as they became more profligate, got a bad name (the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska) and were denounced by the fledgling Tea Party as congressional sin incarnate, they gave purpose to members -- something to bring home.

At a recent meeting of the American Enterprise Institute, Jason Grumet, founder and president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said, “What do we have to lose? The current congressional process is broken.”

My guess is that it will happen, if the Tea Party Republicans can be mollified, and it will be an enhancement of Congress, not a diminishment.

You see, there is a bridge I would really like to see built close to where I live, so I can get to the beach faster in summer.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Llewellyn King: Taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. and U.K.

On both sides of the Atlantic, political and business retaining walls are being torn down in the belief that they are of no structural importance. Messing with the political and business architecture is likely to have grave, and possibly terrible, effects on democracy and prosperity.

In the United States solid, political orthodoxy, which has served well for so long, is under attack in the Congress and on the hustings.

A more advanced attack is underway in Europe than the United States, but it is a harbinger nonetheless of bad things that can happen here. The commonalities outweigh the differences.

In Europe, Britain has embarked on one of the great, avoidable debacles of history: the decision to leave the European Union. It will destabilize Europe, almost certainly lead to a breakup of the United Kingdom, and leave the British Isles vulnerable and impoverished, clinging to the tatters of its “sovereignty.”

To bring about this state of affairs, the British had to take aim at the very architecture of the English Constitution: the collection of rules and precedents that has flowed since Magna Carta and is enshrined in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

Now the Conservative Party is bowing to the result of a referendum, a decisive result nonetheless, which will involve the withdrawal from Europe without a debate or vote in the House of Commons. A referendum in Britain — there have only ever been three, and all have been on Europe — denies representative government, created over the centuries, as the only system of government: the fundamental political architecture.

In the United States, the political architecture is under threat because we fail to revere it. A book by Richard Arenberg and Robert Dove, titled Defending the Filibuster: The Soul of the Senate, outlines one way that the structure is facing the wrecking ball. For 34 years, Arenberg worked in the Senate for such Democratic political giants as George Mitchell, Carl Levin and Paul Tsongas. Robert Dove served twice as Senate parliamentarian and was on Republican Leader Robert Dole’s staff. They argue that the political architecture in the Senate is under attack from the ceaseless, ugly partisanship and that the filibuster, a minority guarantee to a say, may be swept away.

Arenberg told me that the filibuster, always used sparingly and seldom invoked, has been abused in recent years to such an extent that a change in the Senate rules could sweep away this unique tool of whichever party is in the minority to be heard. If that happens, he said, a situation like the one in the House would prevail, where the majority holds sway without regard to the minority, more like a parliamentary system.

Other threats to the structure of American democracy abound. Many of them have been enunciated by Hedrick Smith, a distinguished documentary filmmaker and former New York Times correspondent, in his book Who Stole the American Dream? He points to gerrymandering and special interests and their money as threatening the retaining walls of the American democracy.

Worse, maybe, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the growing conservative rejection of trade as the basis not only of prosperity, but also of foreign-policy stability.

Brexit is the willing destruction of Britain’s largest trade arrangement and an equivalent reduction in its influence in Europe and, by extrapolation, in the world.

In the United States, Hillary Clinton has pusillanimously turned her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact that she helped write. And Donald Trump has declared his intention to trash almost all our trade treaties, which, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, he claims have been written by idiots to favor our competitors.

Most worrying is the way the U.K.’s Conservative Party and Republicans, silenced by Trump’s candidacy, here have accepted this rejection of traditional conservative bedrock: prosperity through trade. Institutionally, they have been quiet, so quiet.

The threat to good governance in Europe and America, combined with the prevailing economic heresy, poses a serious threat to the West and must have its enemies in Moscow and Beijing doing a happy dance. They know that if you knock down enough retaining walls, the structure will be weakened to the point of collapse. The wrecking balls are already at work.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking2@gmail.com) is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a veteran publisher, columnist and international business consultant.