Tracing the Roots of Hyperpartisanship

by Craig Ruff
September 16, 2010

D.C. politicians could not find consensus if a solution stared them in their faces. For a generation, partisans have piled up transgressions by the opposing party and waited their turn to pay back. The atmosphere in the nation’s capital poisons the innocent, polarizes, and denigrates pragmatism throughout the country.

Partisan passions fill chapters of American history. But this generation’s divide between Republicans and Democrats is no slouch. We have had no hand-in-glove politics in 20 years.

Americans overwhelmingly share similar values: love of family and freedom, yearning for physical and financial security, and desire that our children will fare better than us. Yet we witness political leaders in incessant and hyperbolic cat fights. No wonder that confidence in government and leaders has dissipated.

How did American politics slip into divide-and-conquer, winner-take-all gamesmanship? When did we let loose the dogs of war?

The date of October 23, 1987, comes to mind. The U.S. Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. The vote was 42 yes and 58 no, with only eight senators crossing the aisle. Intemperately, the late Ted Kennedy said that Bork’s nomination boiled down to this: “No justice is better than this injustice.” Democrats launched a nuclear strike against the ability by a president to appoint someone with pronounced ideology.

From that point, vitriol took over. Subsequent events enshrined and ingrained in decision and lawmaking utter disregard for bipartisanship and consensus building.

Filibuster
Rarely, most ignobly during the civil rights movement, did U.S. senators play the filibuster card to rob the majority of its right to rule. Today, it is commonplace and has been so ever since the Bork rejection. The filibuster profanely undermines representative democracy and majority rule.

That the U.S. Senate has switched party hands often since Bork has fueled the minority’s use of an arcane (and I would suggest utterly anti-constitutional) rule. The flip-flopping, see-sawing control of the upper chamber has given a minority party ever-growing “rights” to stymie the majority until it regains majority, when the new minority/old majority ups the ante and exercises filibusters even more often. So many bones to pick. So many paybacks.

I blame the U.S. Senate for much of this generation’s ugly hyperpartisanship. The chamber, under Democratic rule, denied Reagan and George H.W. Bush several judicial nominees. In the 1990s, the tide turned, and a Senate Republican majority blocked one after another of Clinton’s picks for federal district courts and courts of appeals. (Republicans today probably would have launched Kennedy-like bombs at Supreme Court justice nominees Breyer and Ginsburg, and had GOP senators held a solid 41 votes and no defections, they may well have rejected Sotomayor and Kagan. I predict that the next nominee, whether by Obama or his successor, will be subjected to filibuster.)

The venerable filibuster is venal. To hell with it and the pretense of a cooling-down dish that the lofty and arrogant Senate professes as its right.

Talk radio and Internet
No doubt that the voices of Limbaugh, Beck, Reagan, Hannity, and Savage have exacerbated partisan (probably more accurately, ideological) chasms. MSNBC tries valiantly to provide counterbalancing, left-wing pabulum. Viewers and listeners get their daily testosterone shots to out hot-head each other.

Whipping people into fervor comes with every new technology, from the pamphlet to the newspaper, electronic media and, surely, the Internet. Without media and attending background noise, the capacity to wilt the respectability (even the legitimacy) of political opponents is marginal. Contemporary media reward the harshest screams and screeches. The masters cannot sustain audiences and advertisers by urging consensus and collegiality.

One-party rule
The vices of the filibuster frequently of late have been visited upon America by an opposing condition, that of one-party rule. For six years, George W. Bush led with GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. Now, for two years, Barack Obama has a similar advantage. They are eight of only 10 years since 1981 that one party controlled the presidency and both congressional chambers.

The master parties simply do not feel obligated to wheel and deal. They rightfully say that the voters put them in charge of change, and change they will deliver. Fair and balanced may or may not be FOX news, but fair and balanced do not go hand in hand with a political party that controls both the executive and legislative branches. Should the GOP sweep the boards this year, it will be a repudiation of one-party rule much more than an affirmation of the love with which voters hold for the Republican Party.

Trivial perks
Members of Congress think big about small things, such as the size or location of their offices and number of sycophantic staff. When a Mr. Chairman becomes a minority vice chairperson, it’s not small stuff to a member of Congress. He has moved from being owner of the penthouse to the super in the basement.

As people in Congress (staff and members alike) gravitate to and from hallowed powers, the stick-it-to-you syndrome poisons. If they covered their hubris when in power with a bit more empathy toward their minority colleagues, the retributions would be held to a minimum. But they don’t. The rubbing of salt in wounds only escalates as perks given the majority — at the minority’s expense — expand. That is a very modern phenomenon. It has taken an enormous toll on amiability on the Hill.

Impeachment
Unquestionably, stuffy moralists in the GOP played a key role in heightening partisan stakes when the U.S. House impeached Bill Clinton. Here, you had a party all haughty and power-consumed in the late 1990s arguing that the commander in chief deserved eviction for some offenses (perjury) borne of an oversized libido.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd deserved a Pulitzer for boiling down the inanity to its ugly core. “These are not grounds for impeachment. They’re grounds for divorce.”

Democrats have not gotten over the impeaching of Clinton. I saw a lot more “Impeach Bush” bumper strips than “Impeach Clinton.” The zealots have so raised the stakes that the trigger-happy seek to deny a president a legitimacy to govern. Trust me, impeachment of Obama or his predecessor is surely to be contemplated unless the vermin stop applying “vengeance is mine.”

The 1994 Election
Bork’s ugly evisceration preceded by seven years a seminal event that cost America its bipartisan, consensus-driven politics.

In 1994, Republicans shockingly won control of the U.S. House and Senate. While the Senate had been controlled by Republicans for six years in the Reagan presidency, the House had not seen a Republican majority since the end of 1954.

Democrats could not believe that their house of Congress would fall into Republican hands. For two generations, it was not just an assumption that the U.S. House would always be held by Democrats, it was by noblesse oblige that Democrats gave Republicans in the House any sense of influence.

Republicans had to prick their hands to believe that they had taken over the House. Fallen Democratic chairs of committees and retirement-aged staffers suffered the indignity of being outnumbered in committees and pushed out of control. Surely, Democrats felt that this was an ephemeral affront to their providential mastery of the U.S. House, but for 12 years the GOP control went on and on.

Younger readers cannot understand the sea change that the 1994 elections delivered to D.C. It was nearly akin to a revolution. Nobody saw it coming. Nobody envisioned it lasting. Nobody read its consequences.

The Courts
The characters who wear “R” and “D” after their names may explain congressional warfare and armed conflict between Congress and the White House. But where and why have judges and justices been demeaned and dumbed down by hyperpartisanship?

Again, we trace back to Bork the demonization of ideological enemies in the judicial branch. Too, the power of the federal courts has grown immeasurably over issues that otherwise would have been seen as the province of federal and state lawmakers. When so many ticklish issues such as gay marriage pop up as constitutional questions, what do we expect?

Ordinary people envision courtrooms where impartial judges guide juries and proceedings. We view judges as objective “stage” directors. We expect them to give equal protection to the defense and prosecutorial arguments and facts that each present.

The Bork nomination stripped away any pretense that the judiciary was impartial. It was now the province of zealots who wanted to keep women from getting back-alley abortions or sought to eavesdrop on bedroom conversations or trumped legislative rights to crime and punishment (i.e., capital punishment) laws. That made jurists pawns of political (honestly, partisan) interests.

Witness the contentious and well-financed campaigns for something like the Michigan Supreme Court. It’s no longer about experience and temperament, but rather who will follow the party line. Campaigns are not about competence, but rather who has a good name that gives a political party a leg up. Elections for the state Supreme Court (like this year) boil down to which political party might oversee redistricting. It’s sick and a process that sucks.

Trickle Down
How to explain the reason the meltdown of D.C.’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches trickled down to we lowly minions at the state level?

At its most basic level, states like Michigan have many people who listen to the media. They look at our state as being a player on the big, national stage. They see and tolerate hyperpartisanship as national, with state implications. They do not separate issues of K-12 education, public safety, and business regulation from what’s being done in Washington, D.C. from that done in Lansing.

Partisan zealots and leaders pile on gallons of gasoline to stoke at the state level that which has enlivened national politics. They want us to impose the tyrannical rules of majority-minority onto our state’s behavior. They implore us to see in stark black-and-white rules the way in which we judge, make law, and implement law. We must bear the horror of D.C. partisanship to seep into the state Capitol.

I resent the intrusion of hyperpartisanship of D.C. into Lansing. I hate it. It repels me to think that the shenanigans of hardcore harlots on the Hill set my state’s ethics and behavior.

I would be content knowing that virtually all state legislators and my governor seek to fix public problems without partisanship at top of mind. I want my judiciary to be men and women of impartiality. That which has crept into and controlled D.C. for a generation is not my cuppa tea. I despise what the national power brokers have wrought upon my state. I am disappointed by the executive, legislative, and judicial leaders who let it guide them.

Conclusion
The values of Michiganians are being subverted by radical hyperpartisans. We must thrust out the decadence and chicanery of D.C. It’s a hell hole. We do not have to stoop to its level of retribution, vial, and self-importance. We should rise above it.

If in several states, like ours, we scream back at the screamers that we are sick and tired of their pettiness and partisan intrigue, perks and prejudices, maybe normal people will prevail.

We may not control the hyperpartisanship of a sick ship of state of D.C. But we ought to be brazen enough to stick an arrow into its eyes and say, “Lay off us.”

How we express this condemnation may be at the ballot box. Maybe, it’s turning off the spigots of dollars to political parties and their friends. Maybe, it’s coming to Lansing and telling its courts and legislators and executive officials that they either tune down or they are toast.

Stuff those who infiltrate our governmental system with exaggerated claims of omniscience. I’m sick and tired of trickle down hyperpartisanship.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.