The Other Side of Gridlock: Policy Stability and Supermajoritarianism in U.S. Lawmaking

Chapter 1 Introduction

On November 4, 2004, two days after the GOP triumph both in the presidential and Congressional elections, the reelected president George W. Bush held a press conference and emphasized what he considered to be a mandate emanating from the electoral results. Bush, who had won barely 51 percent of the popular vote, aggressively proclaimed that “the people have spoken and embraced your [his] point of view, and that’s what I [he] intend to tell the Congress.” Bush continued and stated that he would use political capital he had allegedly earned in order to pursue his policy agendas. Ironically, Bush’s optimistic and simplistic view of the political landscape in his relationship with Congress reminded several pundits of the uneasy relationship between the former president Clinton and his first Congress. Clinton’s election in 1992 ended the twelve-year-long divided government, and there was an enormous expectation that the first unified government since 1980 would turn out decisive action and adopt innovative programs. In embracing the public’s expectation, Clinton announced that he anticipated his first hundred days to be the most productive period since Franklin Roosevelt (Fiorina 1996, 159). However, by 1994, the optimism surrounding the unified government was found to be wrong in everyone’s eyes. In the 103rd Congress, Clinton’s health care plan never made it to the floor, and he abandoned his proposal of the energy tax in the 1993 budget reconciliation bill. In addition, Republican filibusters successfully killed many of Clinton’s legislative initiatives, including the economic stimulus package and campaign finance reform bill. Chapter 1 Introduction I’ve earned capital in this election—and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is. . . . Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror. —President George W. Bush, November 4, 2004 The campaign is over. Democrats are ready to lead, prepared to govern and absolutely willing to work in a bipartisan way. —Nancy Pelosi, November 8, 2006 1 The Other Side of Gridlock 2 As for the 109th Congress after the 2004 election, parallel to the 103rd Congress, President Bush suffered the Clintonite legislative quandary in the Republican unified government. Although Bush, in his second term, advocated swift policy changes including the partial privatization of Social Security, the guest worker program, antiterrorism surveillance, and extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, only the latter two were enacted in a modified version. The indication is that a factor other than divided government leads to legislative stalemate. David Mayhew’s Divided We Govern (1991) examined the amount of significant laws enacted, and remarkably challenged the myth of an adversarial effect of divided government on governmental effectiveness. By extending his analysis of the amount of important laws to the year 2002, Mayhew (2005) has recently reasserted his claim that party control of government has no impact on legislative productivity. Further, scholars of the preference-based school have contended that preferences of individual legislators, rather than party control of the government, influence legislative productivity (Krehbiel 1996, 1998; Brady and Volden 1998, 2006). Specifically, the researchers observe that a passage of legislation needs the support of the supermajority of legislators, otherwise a minority of legislators would block the bill by mounting a filibuster or extracting and supporting the presidential veto. This book extends and tests the assumption of nonpartisan, supermajoritarian lawmaking in the U.S. Congress. Presented herein is the theory that a sizable change from one Congress to the next in the preferences of the minority legislators who are ideologically more extreme decreases the potential of gridlock . Nonetheless, this book does not focus on the amount of enacted laws as a measure of legislative stalemate. If several significant policies are packed in a few omnibus bills, the modest quantity of the omnibus measures underestimates the significance of their policy output. Thus, the ratio or number of enacted bills does not suggest the significance of policy output by Congress. Accordingly, this book embraces a definition of gridlock as an inability to change policy, and attempts to explain policy change, or inversely policy stability, in legislative output. 109th Congress In his State of the Union speech in January 2005, President Bush revealed the agendas for his second term, including the creation of individual accounts in the Social Security program, the guest worker program, the extension of the tax cuts of...