By Denny Gulino

WASHINGTON (MNI) – This week’s Gallup Poll update which showed the
approval rating of Congress slipping down to 10% — matching the record
low — has underlined a question increasingly being raised about whether
there are alternatives to some important but faltering mechanisms of the
national legislature.

Gallup’s series of surveys on the performance of Congress is the
gold standard on public opinions about Congress, having consistently
asked the same questions since early 1974 on 230 different occasions.
Congressional approval ratings have at times soared, such as after the
9/11 attack. Yet only since 2007 have the ratings been consistently at
the bottom of the range.

Now, significantly, all political persuasions are in basic
agreement and for more than a year Congress has scored 20% or less.

While at first glance any alternative to Congress seems
preposterous to imagine, like moving planet Earth to a different solar
system, the reality is that years of perceived failure increases
pressure to gravitate toward other ways to get things done.

With still another threat of legislative impasse on the near
horizon, the so-called fiscal cliff looming for yearend, and a
lengthening list of past legislative misfires, proposals for deep reform
or even funding mechanisms that bypass Congress appear to be getting
more traction.

One Washington veteran with strong ties to local government has
been thinking about Congress as he prepares to retire at yearend after
22 years leading the National League of Cities as executive director.

Donald Borut told MNI Congress’ disabilities have grown very slowly
to their present state and so have not been recognized as a national
leadership crisis.

“It simmers and it’s slower and doesn’t have the dramatic impact,”
he said. Instead the coming fiscal cliff has been seen only as a policy
dispute, not a crisis for the institution of Congress.

“Whenever we have some kind of natural disaster, we come together,”
he said. “That’s not the case with these fundamental economic issues
that are impacting the country.”

Viewing the deterioration of congressional functionality over the
years, Borut said he blames one major contributing factor, how
successive political reconfigurations of congressional districts has
gradually narrowed the discretion for those elected to the House.

“Many of the congressional districts frankly have been drawn and
are drawn so that you don’t have real competition and there isn’t a need
to try and come to the center,” he said.

“The whole idea of a democratic system is that you try and find
common ground,” he continued, “and if an individual who is in office
doesn’t have a need to move to a common center because the voters in
his or her district are aligned ideologically, there’s no motivation,
there’s no pressure, no political pressure, to try and find common
ground.”

“That seems to me to be a real problem,” Borut said. As a result,
“Compromise is defined as a weakness.”

Some analysts say the current Congress is the worst ever, judging
by the relatively small number of measures passed this session.

While complaints about Congress naturally are amplified in a
political season, some of the criticism is non-partisan and based more on
technical criteria derived from systems analysis and academic studies.
For those, what may appear to be extreme partisanship is more a symptom
than a cause.

Many members of Congress, according to this view, simply have no
other mode of operation left than to fall back on the playbook of
partisanship as a day-to-day operational routine. Other pathways to
accomplish legislative imperatives, they say, have either atrophied or
become unworkable.

Other than the impending “fiscal cliff,” the inability so far to
fashion long-term fiscal policy, the debt-ceiling stalemate that
triggered an S&P downgrade of the U.S. sovereign rating, the inability
to extend the horizon beyond two years for the new transportation
spending measure or pass a farm bill during the worst drought in a
generation, are among many examples of what some analysts see as the red
flags signaling structural dysfunction.

Many legislators are frustrated with the plight of their
institution and earlier in the year there was one hearing held to review
a “No Budget, No Pay” bill — a reflection of a frequent theme on social
media sites. All that accomplished was to demonstrate again that
while there are dozens, even hundreds of reforms suggested, there is no
broad agreement on what combination would work.

On the one hand, what analysts see as the underpinnings of
congressional functionality, tested and proven as far back as the
Whiskey Rebellion in George Washington’s time, is basically robust. On
the other hand, many see factors that have sabotaged the system, in
their view, multiplying over several decades to the point members of
Congress have become prisoners of dysfunction, not its masters.

In this view, even an election result that somehow resolves
partisan gridlock would still not necessarily solve major defects in the
machinery of Capitol Hill, where individual members and committees
increasingly have to struggle to be productive.

The new element is the way the Internet now allows the
proliferation of Web sites and blogs which give an amplified voice to
critics and provide a way to easily organize across state lines. Among
the partisan sites, the liberal truth-out.org has members of Congress
and former government officials on its masthead. Tea Party sites on the
subject, like teapartypatriots.org, abound.

In contrast, the official Web site of the Library of Congress is
outmoded and little used by the public although it is in the process of
being updated. Non-profit nonpartisan sites supported by foundations,
like opencongress.org, try to fill the gap.

There are some who say part of the problem is, counterintuitively,
that the legislative branch of government has choked on its own
excessive appetite, and in fact it is the executive branch that has not
originated any major legislation for a decade.

For example, they say even legislation as closely identified with
the White House as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was
actually cobbled together in congressional offices where executive
branch personnel were physically absent and their overarching influence
nonexistent.

Quasi-governmental entities that bypass national legislatures are
nothing new, but their span has been at most regional without national
coordination. In the U.S. there are many examples, some with narrow
responsibilities, some much broader. Some are successful, some are
judged to have less usefulness, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In this quasi-governmental space, the tension between regional
authorities, for instance, and their legislatures, is well known to
entities like the Port Authority of New York and the Metropolitan
Washington Airports Authority. Yet regional authorities have been
responsible for some of the most impressive infrastructure developments
and continue, in some cases literally, to keep the trains running on
time.

Some non-congressional revenue conduits like the municipal finance
system are well developed and once established, only rarely intersect
with congressional authority. Bond issuance authority, highway tolls,
airport and other user fees and state and county taxing authority are
revenue conduits typically perpetuated outside the sphere of
congressional authority.

Those who study ways to bypass Congress assume any major effort
would have to assemble broad lower-level support, from governors to the
city and county levels, from statehouses to city councils and county
councils, put together over a period of several years. The longer
Congress fails heal itself, the faster the bypass process will take
place, in this view.

There is also a view that Congress is inevitably hobbled if only
because the total amount of discretionary spending is becoming a smaller
proportion of all spending, as it must in an era of fiscal
consolidation. Fierce fights over what is left that Congress can
accomplish, as well as legislative paralysis, will continue to grow in
an age of austerity, according to this view.

A growing number of critics, nevertheless, appear to be in
agreement that the national legislature has to be able to operate in war
or peace, in austerity as well as times of budget surpluses, and a
Congress that continuously functions poorly is increasingly hazardous to
the nation’s civic health and future.

** MNI Washington Bureau: 202-371-2121 **

[TOPICS: M$U$$$,MFU$$$,MCU$$$]