Broken Government

Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards have a great (and long) article in The Washington Monthly, The Big Lobotomy: How Republicans Made Congress Stupid

This widespread, decades-long congressional brain drain could be fixed overnight. Members of Congress, after all, control the national budget. All they need to do is allocate a couple hundred million bucks—chump change in the $4.8 trillion budget—to boost staff levels, increase salaries to retain the best staff, and fill out the institutional capacity of the body. This wouldn’t necessarily mean recreating precisely the infrastructure of the 1970s—hundreds of guys in white short-sleeved shirts sitting in cubicles in some building on South Capitol Street. As New America’s Lorelei Kelly has observed, technology now allows for any number of ways to create distributed networks of expertise. Congress could place policy and oversight staff in district offices, for instance, where they’d be closer to the ground, or create research and advisory partnerships between Congress and universities.

Regardless of how it’s organized or what new technologies can be brought to bear, what’s clear is that members of Congress need the institutional capacity to help them make sense of it all. As the issues facing members of Congress become increasingly intertwined and technological in our complex global economy, what we need is not fewer people in government who understand the implications of, say, the international derivatives market; what we need is more. And we need them, whether they be knowledgeable committee chairs or long-serving professional staff, to be experienced, well paid, and appreciated so they want to stick around for a while.

The problem, however, is that conservatives as a rule don’t see this lack of expertise as a problem. Quite the contrary: they’ve orchestrated the brain drain precisely as a way to advance the conservative agenda. Why, when your aim is less government, would you want to add to government’s intellectual capacity?"

So members of Congress now just spend their time fund-raising and voting based on which monied interest group will help them get reelected. There's little policy knowledge and much of what substitutes for it is wrong. There are a few examples in today's news of the effects of this.

No. 2 House Republican Cantor in shock loss to Tea Party rival. Yup. "House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia lost to a Tea Party challenger on Tuesday in a stunning Republican primary upset that sent shockwaves through Congress and gave the conservative movement a landmark victory...With nearly all precincts reporting, Brat had about 56 percent of the vote to Cantor's 44 percent." The fun thing is just a few days before, Cantor internal poll claims 34-point lead over primary opponent Brat. Hard to make good decisions when your facts are wrong. Also, Brat made the budget deficit a big part of his campaign (second to immigration) pointing to Cantor's votes to increase the debt ceiling, missing the fact that the deficit has shrunk and the debt ceiling isn't about the deficit (the budget is). FiveThiryEight has more on the loss, The Eric Cantor Upset: What Happened?

Vox wrote, A GOP Congressman’s story shows us how money in politics really works.

However garbled the story is, there are a few interesting aspects to it. First of all, McAllister says he's told that he'll get a donation no matter how he votes on the bill — he's merely deciding which team of organized interests to side with. Second, no one promises McAllister a donation in return for a vote (indeed, the groups mentioned have no contact with him at all) — McAllister merely has to hope somebody will pony up eventually. Third, members of Congress are frequently unsure about which of the many votes they cast truly matter most to the various moneyed interests out there — so they often base their political analyses on theories rather than facts, as McAllister does.

In the Senate, where nothing was getting done because of filibusters, 6 months later, Democrats have no regrets about using the nuclear option. "The GOP has filibustered every judge put forward since the rules change — but they've all been confirmed." It turns out something is better than the complete stalemate that existed before.

Then there's just the irony of the complexity of oversight when you have this story, NSA: Our systems are so complex we can’t stop them from deleting data wanted for lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig's Mayday SuperPAC is trying to reach it's second goal to raise $5 million by July 4th. "We’re kickstarting a SuperPAC big enough to make it possible to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform by 2016." Go pledge.