In WaPo Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) lays out how Congress has become a hollow shell since the years that Rep. Gingrich (R-GA) held the Speaker’s gavel:
Our decay as an institution began in 1995, when conservatives, led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), carried out a full-scale war on government. Gingrich began by slashing the congressional workforce by one-third. He aimed particular ire at Congress’s brain, firing 1 of every 3 staffers at the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office. He defunded the Office of Technology Assessment, a tech-focused think tank. Social scientists have called those moves Congress’s self-lobotomy, and the cuts remain largely unreversed.
Gingrich’s actions didn’t stop with Congress’s mind: He went for its arms and legs, too, as he dismantled the committee system, taking power from chairmen and shifting it to leadership. His successors as speaker have entrenched this practice. While there was a 35 percent decline in committee staffing from 1994 to 2014, funding over that period for leadership staff rose 89 percent.
This imbalance has defanged many of our committees, as bills originating in leadership offices and K Street suites are forced through without analysis or alteration. Very often, lawmakers never even see important legislation until right before we vote on it. During the debate over the Republicans’ 2017 tax package, hours before the floor vote, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) tweeted a lobbying firm’s summary of GOP amendments to the bill before she and her colleagues had had a chance to read the legislation. A similar process played out during the Republicans’ other signature effort of the last Congress, the failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Their bill would have remade one-sixth of the U.S. economy, but it was not subject to hearings and was introduced just a few hours before being voted on in the dead of night. This is what happens when legislation is no longer grown organically through hearings and debate.
Of course, it’s important to remember that Pascrell is a Democrat criticizing his opponents. Nevertheless, he is one of the best situated Americans to describe how Congress has changed, particularly in its acquisition and evaluations of information, and his is an important contribution to the conversation. Republicans may assert their favorite argument, that it’s Big Government and Way Too Much Spending, but I think that’s become an argument with some holes in it, given the vast incompetence exhibited by the Republican leadership of the 115th Congress (that’d be the one just concluded a few days ago, when Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) assumed the Speaker’s gavel from retiring Rep. Ryan (R-WI)). Their inability to follow an appropriate process for creating legislation concerning the most important issues facing the nation was, speaking as an independent, simply appalling and inexcusable.
But it can be explained by deliberate actions to cripple our government. No doubt Gingrich would claim – and believe – that he was just rooting out liberals with a distorted view of reality, but in the following decades, it’s become clear that, instead, he and his adherents crippled our government. If lobbyists are indeed often writing legislation via their captured Congresspeople, and then forcing it down the throats of Congress before it can be properly read, much less debated and modified, then Congress has been failing in its duties.
Later in the article, Pascrell claims Pelosi, as the new Speaker, will be trying to repair at least some of the damage. Whether this works out or not, we shall see. I suspect, given the propensity of new generations to lean towards data analysis, the ideology and power fixation of Gingrich and his buddies may be rejected as foolish failure as the youngsters continue to move into government.
But they do have to wake up and start taking an interest in governance.
