1)

First, read a news story from the newspaper or the Internet.  Answer the following questions regarding your news story: 1) What is the main issue, who are the main actors being discussed;  

Second, choose one of the assigned articles you read for this week.  Answer the following questions regarding the assigned article: 1) What are the basics of this article (who, what, when, how, why, etc.);  2) What is the overall main point the author is trying to convince you of?  3) Do you agree with the author’s argument?  Why?  Why not?   

Finally, tie together your news story with what you learned from the assigned article, textbook readings, podcasts, videos, etc. for this week.  Type your answers using your own words, no outline or bullets, complete sentences and paragraphs, single-spaced, full-page. 

2)Do you think the political system of federalism was a good or bad idea for the United States?  Tell me why you feel this way.  Write your thoughts here.  You should write about 1 paragraph (75 words).  You should also write replies to other people’s posts on the discussion board.  Please be respectful of other people’s opinions.  This is meant to be an interactive and lively discussion between students.

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Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010

Why Washington Is Tied Up in
Knots
By Peter Beinart

How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina

Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and

received dozens of new canes from appreciative fans. In 1905, Idaho miners bombed the house of a former

governor who had tried to break their union. In 1965, an anti–Vietnam War activist stationed himself

outside the office of the Secretary of Defense and, holding his year-old daughter in his arms, set himself on

fire. (She lived; he did not.) By that measure, a Rush Limbaugh rant isn’t particularly divisive. Americans

may yell at one another about politics, but we mostly leave our guns and bombs at home, which is an

improvement. (See 10 embarrassing things that didn’t stop Americans from getting elected.)

What really defines our political era, as Ronald Brownstein notes in his book The Second Civil War, is not

the polarization of Americans but the polarization of American government. In the country at large, the

disputes are real but manageable. But in Washington, crossing party lines to resolve them has become

excruciatingly rare.

The result, unsurprisingly, is that Americans don’t like Washington very much. According to a CNN poll

conducted in mid-February, 62% of Americans say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election,

up 10 points from 2006. Public skepticism about the Federal Government and its ability to solve problems

is nothing new, but the discontent is greater today than it has been in at least a decade and a half. Witness

the growth of the Tea Party movement, a diffuse conglomeration of forces that have coalesced around

nothing so much as a shared hostility toward Washington. Or the Feb. 15 announcement by Indiana

Senator Evan Bayh — a man who almost made it onto three presidential tickets — that he would not stand

for re-election because “Congress is not operating as it should” and “even in a time of enormous challenge,

the people’s business is not getting done.” (See pictures of Tea Party protests.)

This revulsion toward the nation’s capital is understandable. But it makes the problem worse. From health

care to energy to the deficit, addressing the U.S.’s big challenges requires vigorous government action.

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When government doesn’t take that action, it loses people’s faith. And without public faith, government

action is harder still. Call it Washington’s vicious circle.

Breaking this circle of public mistrust and government failure requires progress on solving big problems,

which requires more cooperation between the parties. But before we can begin to break that circle, we need

to understand how it developed in the first place.

The Death of Moderates
The vicious circle has its roots in the great sorting out of American politics that has occurred over the past

40 years. In the middle of the 20th century, America’s two major parties were Whitmanesque: they

contradicted themselves; they contained multitudes. As late as 1969, the historian Richard Hofstadter

declared that the Democratic and Republican parties were each “a compound, a hodgepodge, of various

and conflicting interests.” (See the top 10 forgettable Presidents.)

But in the 1960s and ’70s, as liberal Northern Democrats rallied behind civil rights, abortion rights,

environmentalism and a more dovish foreign policy, conservative Southern Democrats began drifting into

the GOP. And as the Republican Party shifted rightward, its Northern liberals became Democrats. Whereas

many members of Congress had once been cross-pressured — forced to balance the demands of a more

liberal party and a more conservative region, or vice versa — now party, region and ideology were

increasingly aligned. Washington politics became less a game of Rubik’s Cube and more a game of shirts vs.

skins.

The first shirts-and-skins President was Ronald Reagan, the first truly conservative Republican elected in

50 years. But it was only after Reagan and his GOP successor, George H.W. Bush, left office that

congressional Republicans realized they could use political polarization to stymie government — and use

government failure to win elections. And with that realization, vicious-circle politics started to become an

art form. (See pictures of Republican memorabilia.)

In the 1980s, discrediting government was not the strategy of the congressional GOP, for two reasons.

First, the sorting out hadn’t fully sorted itself out yet: the Senate alone boasted moderate Republicans from

blue states like Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Oregon, where activist

government weren’t dirty words. These moderates — who met every Wednesday for lunch — chaired

powerful committees, served in the party leadership and helped cut big bipartisan deals like the 1986 tax-

reform bill, which simplified the tax code, and the 1990 Clean Air Act, which set new limits on pollution.

Second, because Republicans occupied the White House, making government look foolish and corrupt

risked making the party look foolish and corrupt too.

See the screwups of Campaign ’08.

See America’s worst Vice Presidents.

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All that changed when Bill Clinton took office. With the GOP no longer controlling the White House, a new

breed of aggressive Republicans — men like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott — hit on a strategy

for discrediting Clinton: discredit government. Rhetorically, they derided Washington as ineffective and

conflict-ridden, and through their actions they guaranteed it. Their greatest weapon was the filibuster,

which forced Democrats to muster 60 votes to get legislation through the Senate. Historically, filibustering

had been rare. From the birth of the Republic until the Civil War, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster

per decade. As late as the 1960s, Senators filibustered less than 10% of major legislation. But in the ’70s,

the filibuster rule changed: Senators no longer needed to camp out on the Senate floor all night, reading

from Grandma’s recipe book. Merely declaring their intention to filibuster derailed any bill that lacked 60

votes.

In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. “Whereas the filibusters of

the past were mainly the weapon of last resort,” scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in

1997, “now filibusters are a part of daily life.” For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and

joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in

doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign

finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of “stabbing us in the back.” Their pictures were taken

off the wall at the offices of the Republican Senate campaign committee. “What do these so-called

moderates have in common?” conservative bigwig Grover Norquist would later declare. “They’re 70 years

old. They’re not running again. They’re gonna be dead soon. So while they’re annoying, within the

Republican Party our problems are dying.” (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)

In Clinton’s first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned that the vicious circle works. While

filibusters were occasionally broken, they also brought much of Clinton’s agenda to a halt, and they made

Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old

mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian

company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied

employment laws to members of Congress — a reform they had loudly demanded.

With these acts of legislative sabotage, Republicans tapped into a deep truth about the American people:

they hate political squabbling, and they take out their anger on whoever is in charge. So when the Gingrich

Republicans carried out a virtual sit-down strike during Clinton’s first two years, the public mood turned

nasty. By 1994, trust in government was at an all-time low, which suited the Republicans fine, since their

major line of attack against Clinton’s health care plan was that it would empower government. Clintoncare

collapsed, Democrats lost Congress, and Republicans learned the secrets of vicious-circle politics: When

the parties are polarized, it’s easy to keep anything from getting done. When nothing gets done, people turn

against government. When you’re the party out of power and the party that reviles government, you win.
(See 10 GOP congressional contenders.)

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The Endless Filibuster
All this, it turns out, was a mere warm-up for the Obama years. On the surface, it appeared that Obama

took office in a stronger position than Clinton had, since Democrats boasted more seats in the Senate. But

in their jubilation, Democrats forgot something crucial: vicious-circle politics thrives on polarization. As

the GOP caucus in the Senate shrank, it also hardened. Early on, the White House managed to persuade

three Republicans to break a filibuster of its stimulus plan. But one of those Republicans, Pennsylvania

Senator Arlen Specter — under assault for his vote and facing a right-wing primary challenge — switched

parties. That meant that of the six Senate Republicans with the most moderate voting records in 2007, only

two were still in the Senate, and in the party, by ’09. The Wednesday lunch club had ceased to exist. And

the fewer Republican moderates there were, the more dangerous it was for any of them to cut deals across

the aisle.

See the 10 greatest speeches of all time.

See 10 elections that changed America.

In 2009, Senate Republicans filibustered a stunning 80% of major legislation, even more than during the

Clinton years. GOP leader Mitch McConnell led a filibuster of a deficit-reduction commission that he

himself had demanded. The Obama White House spent months trying to lure the Finance Committee’s

ranking Republican, Chuck Grassley, into supporting a deal on health care reform and gave his staff a

major role in crafting the bill. But GOP officials back home began threatening to run a primary challenger

against the Iowa Senator. By late summer, Grassley wasn’t just inching away from reform; he was implying

that Obamacare would euthanize Grandma.

By October, the process had dragged on for the better part of a year, and the public mood had grown bitter.

According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of Americans who said Obama had done a

“very good” job of “achieving his goals” was less than half the level of January 2009, and significantly fewer

people believed he was successfully “changing business as usual in Washington.” (See the top 10 political
defections.)

The Republicans have used this rising disgust with government not just to cripple health care reform but

also to derail other Obama initiatives. In a memo to clients on how to defeat new regulation of Wall Street,

Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged them to attack “lobbyist loopholes” — items that were put into the

financial-reform bill, as in the health care bill, largely to attract enough Democratic votes to break the GOP

filibuster. Needing 60 votes has made the debate over every bill on Obama’s agenda longer and uglier,

which is exactly how the Republicans want it to be.

Last month, when the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed Americans’ views on health care reform, it found

that most people still back the individual components of Obama’s effort. But enthusiasm for the bill itself —

the contents of which remain hazy in the public mind — has faded, just as in 1993. And according to a new

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poll by CNN/ORC, public approval of Congress stands at its lowest level since — you guessed it — the

Gingrich era. Once again, the Republicans have told Americans that they can’t trust government with their

health care, and once again, their own actions have helped convince Americans that what they say is true.

The circle is complete. (See a special report on Barack Obama’s first year in office.)

Breaking the Circle
In recent years, Republicans have played this style of politics better than Democrats. Winning elections by

making government look foolish is a more natural strategy for the antigovernment party. But there’s no

guarantee Democrats won’t one day try something similar. Were a Republican President and Congress to

make a genuine effort to rein in entitlement spending, Democrats might act in much the same way

McConnell and company are acting now. At its core, vicious-circle politics isn’t an assault on liberal

solutions to hard problems; it’s an assault on any solutions to hard problems. It’s no surprise that

Democrats couldn’t successfully filibuster George W. Bush’s tax cuts and Republicans couldn’t successfully

filibuster Obama’s stimulus spending. When you’re handing out goodies, it’s much harder for opponents to

gum up the process. As Vanderbilt University’s Marc Hetherington has argued, trust in government

matters most when government is asking people to make sacrifices. It’s when the pain is temporary but the

benefits are long-term that people most need to believe that government is something other than stupid

and selfish. Which is exactly what they don’t believe today.

Is there a way out? In theory, if the Democrats won so overwhelmingly that they controlled nearly 70 seats

in the Senate, as they did when Franklin Roosevelt secured passage of Social Security and when Lyndon

Johnson got Medicare through, they could simply steamroll the GOP. But America in 2010, unlike America

in 1935 or ’65, is closely divided between the two parties. Although bipartisanship is not an end in and of

itself, the reality remains that today, and for the foreseeable future, neither party can do big, controversial

things without help from the other.

So, what might encourage the two parties to cooperate?

See the top 10 political gaffes of 2009.

See the top 10 Supreme Court nomination battles.

First, more New Hampshires. Since the 1970s, Iowa and New Hampshire have held the first two

presidential nominating contests. Iowa is a caucus, which means that only a small — and ideologically

extreme — fraction of the state’s voters take part. New Hampshire, by contrast, is an open primary, which

encourages candidates to appeal to voters outside their party. If every state took New Hampshire’s example

to heart — and allowed independents to vote not only in presidential primaries but in congressional ones as

well — the consequences could be profound. Not only would more moderate candidates win, but the same

candidates would stake out more-moderate positions, the result of which might be something of a

bipartisan rebirth.

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Second, more Crossfires. In today’s highly segmented, partisan news environment, it’s hard to create big

new media institutions dedicated to objective news reporting. But it might be possible to create new talk

shows and blogs in which liberals and conservatives interrogate one another’s views — programs like the

early (and more substantive) incarnation of CNN’s Crossfire or William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. There’s no

guarantee that the conversation would be edifying, of course. But it would be a useful antidote to the

current cable and blog ghettos, where you can go years without hearing the other side make its case. The

recent televised meeting between Obama and the House Republican leadership was a reminder that honest

but civil debate can show people that their side isn’t infallible and that not everyone on the other side is evil

and foolish. (See who’s who in Barack Obama’s White House.)

Third, more Ross Perots. Vicious-circle politics thrives because while gridlock sours the public on both

parties, the out-of-government party (particularly if it’s also the antigovernment party) benefits anyway.

That might change were our political system filled with latter-day Perots, cranky independent candidates

determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done. In the early 1990s, the original Perot

combined an assault on the way government did business with a demand that it climb out of debt. Like the

public itself, Perot believed there was a commonsense, nonideological way to cut the deficit, if only the two

parties would stop bickering. His approach was simpleminded and ego-driven, but it forced both parties to

make serious efforts to address the problem, and by the mid-’90s they had come together on behalf of fiscal

discipline.

Imagine if another powerful third-party voice were to emerge today, demanding that both parties take real

steps to solve problems like global warming and health care — as opposed to the Tea Partyers, who insist

that government just get out of the way. Republicans would still disagree profoundly with the Obama

Administration’s favored remedies, but they would feel greater pressure to amend rather than kill them.

Perots would create a countervailing pressure against those partisan zealots who are constantly threatening

to punish Republicans for giving the White House an inch. (See pictures of how Presidents age in office.)

Above all, new Perots would remind Washington that although Americans disagree on lots of things, the

country isn’t as divided as its capital. Every four or eight years, a new President gets elected by pledging to

bring the country together. And every time he fails, the pressure on our two-party system builds. When

government acts to solve problems, even if the solutions aren’t perfect, it breaks the vicious circle of

political failure and mistrust. When it comes to health care, for example, virtually every expansion of

government’s role — Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans’ health care system, the Children’s Health Insurance

Program, even George W. Bush’s prescription-drug plan — has proved popular. But when problems fester

year after year and public trust in government falls lower and lower, strange and convulsive things can

happen. They happened when Perot jolted the political system in 1992, and we may well see them again

soon. Perhaps if the two parties can’t come together to solve difficult problems out of a sense of

responsibility, they’ll eventually respond to something more visceral: fear.

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Click to Print

Beinart is associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a

senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His book The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American

Hubris will be published by Harper in June.

See the best pictures of 2009.

See 25 people who mattered in 2009.

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