GOVERNINGWorks (GWorks)—[00:00:41:23] For Lawrence Lessig, money perverts politicians’ attention from ‘the People’ to ‘the Funders.’ For you, is it the same dynamic but ideology replaces money?

I...both Norm and I have a problem with Lessig’s argument that money determines everything, that it overwhelms every other factor. Lessig actually downplays ideological differences, partisan differences. He believes that money is at the root, driving all of this. And we think that’s not the case.

It’s problematic. It reinforces some of the worst tendencies in our politics. And in recent years, it has emerged in a way that has allowed the Republican party to really try to gain advantage—if you will, to build a majority in government when such a majority doesn’t really exist in the country.

But, it’s also important to emphasize, as Tom did, that the money system is now careening out of control and is having a series of extraordinarily deleterious impacts on our politics and our culture. The corruption levels are going to be much, much higher.

And it’s not just the money being spent. It’s the threats that are there, much more implicitly and explicitly now.

Every law-maker has to fear at this point that somebody could come in at the last two weeks of a campaign, when you have no ability to raise money to counter it, and spend millions of dollars to destroy you. And that means if there’s a threat of doing that but you can avoid it if you vote for an amendment, support a bill, you’re going to be very tempted to do that and not a dollar will have to be spent. That’s a big problem.

The pressure on the law-makers to raise money not just for themselves and their own campaign against a candidate [but for] their team, because now, it’s ‘pay to play.’ If you want to be a committee chair, you’d better raise money for your team. But now you’ve got to have a protective war chest just in case somebody comes in against you. And, if you’re going out there and raising the money, you’re begging people for money, there’s either an implicit threat or a quid pro quo.

And, at the same time, what we’re seeing in this campaign is this flood of outside money combined with the inside money that’s designed in some ways to obfuscate policy debates and create a very different climate. So, what we’re going to see, for example, on the Medicare front is an attempt to have Americans saying, ‘I can’t figure this out. They’re both probably to blame. And so, I’m just not even going to consider it.’

And what is a very important policy area. And the gamble here is, you pour enough money in, on ads that may be entirely false, and people are going to throw up their hands. That’s not a great way to have a campaign.

I think when the Framers created the system, and it was supposed to be a deliberative system, a campaign, understanding that it’s going to have all kinds of harsh elements to it and often hair-raising attacks, and they had them worse in the 19th Century, even at the end of the 18th Century, in many ways than we do now, personal vilification and the like, the idea was you’d have a back-and-forth in a campaign that would end up with voters being able to make a choice among parties and candidates.

Now, the intervention of this money has changed all of that.

So, we don’t want to be at one end of a scale while Lessig is at the other end of the scale. We view this through a different prism in terms of what the real, important dynamics are. But, we don’t in any way dismiss or downplay the extraordinarily corrosive effect of the post-Citizens United world and also a world in which the Federal Election Commission has become almost literally lawless.

[00:07:29:21] Well, the filibuster is a good example of that.

Nowhere does our Constitution provide for general super-majority vote requirements in the Senate. The Framers anticipated the routine use of majority votes and specified the cases where, like impeaching a President, a super-majority...would be required. But, accident of history, leaving out the Motion to Proceed in the Senate’s rules, to clean them up, created an opportunity for individual Senators to speak at length, to not relinquish the Floor, even though a majority of Senators were ready to act. That was used occasionally in the 19th Century but picked up on some very important matters, including matters pertaining to the US involvement in World War I. And [President] Woodrow Wilson put some pressure on. The Senate adopted a new rule providing for Cloture, that is, a super-majority vote to cut off debate and proceed.

Well, the Senate operated under that system and filibusters occurred, but very occasionally—a couple a year would be significant. But that really began to change initially as the Senate calendar became filled and individual Senators had things they wanted to do or say and so the norm of unanimous consent agreements built up; you got everyone’s agreement on how you would proceed so that there’s predictability. But, then over time all of the constraints on using this began to break down, first by individual Senators but then by the opposition party as a tactic to impose a threat to filibuster. And that’s all that’s required, you know. It is the withholding of consent from unanimous consent agreement. If you do that, then the only way for the majority to proceed is to file a Cloture Motion.

So, we don’t have real filibusters anymore. We haven’t had one in ages, where a group of Senators takes to the Floor. All they need is one to say, ‘I object.’

And this burdensome process of garnering 60 votes, which is hard to do when the parties are deeply polarized and the majority doesn’t have 60 dependable votes. Obama had it for a few months in the middle and end of his first year in office. There were 60 [votes] but not dependable. It made health reform possible. But, it complicates the task of governing.

So, you don’t have to go through that process. It’s such a potent weapon that all you have to do is threaten it to have it be effective.

[00:11:01:02] No. Well, let me just say, you know, the rule is the same as it has been the same since 1975. The difference is in a culture. And it’s a culture where the, in a previous era not only was a filibuster reserved for a few issues of great national moment but the two parties and the leaders had their own agreement that you wouldn’t disrupt governance through the use or the threat of the use of a weapon of this sort.

There would be individual rogue Senators who would do so. Some on the Left; some on the Right. But you had a general understanding that governing the country and solving the problems took over. That’s gone now.

Now, this is not all one-sided. In a process that began when the filibuster was changing in a more modest fashion, under then-[Senate] Majority Leader Trent Lott [R–MS] but expanded under [now-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D–NV], there’s been a counter-tool called “filling the amendment tree.” In effect, pre-empting amendments from the minority so you can expedite matters but also use that as a lever point or threat of your own.

The problem is, doing this on both sides, and I think the bigger issue has been the mis-use of the filibuster per se by the minority, but this is not a good way to govern.

[00:12:50:03] This is a good way to illustrate a fundamental argument of our book, which is the mis-match between the political parties today, both the extent of their polarization but the culture under which they operate, and our Constitutional system of Separation of Powers and Bicameralism and the rest.

Norm was talking about Mitch McConnell playing hardball, you know, with the threats of filibuster and the vehement opposition to everything and demon…It sounds like a parliamentary system. If he were the leader of an opposition in a parliament, you’d say, ‘Well, of course. That’s what oppositions do.’ But, when push comes to shove, the government has a majority and its own party or a coalition of parties to put their program into effect, enact it into law, implement it and then eventually be held accountable.

But, in our system, if the minority party is willing to use that tool on a consistent basis, it can damage what the majority party is trying to put in place and then turn around a blame the majority’s program for being ineffective. That sort of leads to a real problem of democratic accountability. What’s a voter to do? Who do they hold responsible when things aren’t going well?

In some respects, now, they’ve come to say, ‘a pox on both your houses.’ Both parties are rated very low by the electorate—Republicans lower even than Democrats. But the President is the most visible figure and symbol of leadership in the public. So, it’s him and his party that tend to suffer the most, even if they haven’t had a clean shot at putting their program into effect.

[00:15:01:00] I think it’s right for now.

You know, that doesn’t mean it has to always be that way. And it’s not just a switch that got turned on in 2009.

As we point out, some of the roots of this go back to Newt Gingrich and his crusade for 16 years to break the Democratic party’s stranglehold on power in the House, which ended up lasting for 40 years. But, also, a tactic that he employed when Bill Clinton became President which was to get his party united as a parliamentary minority voting against everything and discredit and de-legitimize the Clinton Presidency. And, it worked like a charm in 1994 in the mid-term elections.

And now it was used again with the new tools of communications and social networks and a much greater determination to de-legitimize in 2009 and 2010 and into 2011. And, if you combine that with a growing ideological extremism in Republican ranks, it’s a very different party and we offer a lot of data to suggest this—this isn’t just impressionistic. Those things have changed and they’ve degraded the whole idea of problem solving for the greater good.

It’s the next election. And, it’s putting party ahead of country. And, that’s different than what we have seen in most of our lifetimes.

Some of the newer historiography on the period around the War of 1812 suggests deep partisan divisions. Of course, the lead-up to the Civil War was a period of extraordinary polarization over the issue of slavery. And, the post-Reconstruction period, late 19th, early 20th Century, saw another set of issues divide the parties, produce deep differences and some real problematics and in governing.

The problem is that when we use the pre-Civil War example, people say, ‘Yeah, but look at how that was resolved.’ It was a bloody resolution. And at times, you know, the sort of, you know, the ugliness is...not just incivility but the seemingly sort of genuine feeling of, ‘You’re not a real American,’ a sort of anger that this is socialism, this is someone else, worries one that we’re not doing what the Framers had in mind, which was to peacefully resolve our differences in a set of deliberations involving people representing different interests and having a different set of values.

We’ve encountered it before. It’s back. It’s back severely. And, in many respects, it’s being justified as the new norm—and I don’t mean Ornstein—NO: Yeah.

—End of Part Two—

GWorks Interviews:

Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein

Part One: We Are Not Hegelians

The book, the Republican party as

“insurgent outlier” and the value of

faith in government over conflict

Part Two: Ideology or Bust

The power ideology has over

politicians and the political process

Part Three: End Games

Race, political opportunity & what

Republicans are playing for

Part Four: Inflections

Is this a make-or-break moment

and is there cause for hope

GWorks Interviews:

Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein

(Complete)

The one-hour interview in its entirety

For more interviews,

please visit GWorks Interviews

EDITOR’S NOTES

GWorks Interviews: Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein was filmed Tuesday 28 August 2012 in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC. GWorks would like to thank Mssrs Ornstein and Mann for their generous participation; AEI—in particular, Michael Pratt; and Caitlin Graf of Basic Books. Please note: Basic Books provided a Reviewer Copy of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.

Photo: Thomas Mann. Photo credit: Ralph Alswang. Courtesy Basic Books.

Photo: Norman Ornstein. Photo credit: Peter Holden. Courtesy Basic Books.

Photo: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. Courtesy Basic Books.

1 Noted Congressional scholars and political observers, in Washington, DC for more than 40 years, Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution; Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI. In addition to It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Mssrs  Ornstein and Mann are co-authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How To Get It Back on Track (Oxford University Press, 2006).

GWorks Interviews is a series dedicated to exploring governance issues of interest with persons given to thinking about and having relevant experience. GWorks invites a GWorks Interviewee to respond in depth to questions. GWorks does not edit the substance of what an interviewee says. GWorks edits GWorks Interviews only for editorial and technical considerations including style, length and productions issues. For more, please visit GWorks Interviews.