We’ve all heard it before, but let’s hear it again:
At least half of all GOP voters sympathize with this Tea Party upsurge. They are overwhelmingly older, white, conservative-minded men and women who fear that “their country” is about to be lost to mass immigration and new extensions of taxpayer-funded social programs (like the Affordable Care Act) for low- and moderate-income working-aged people, many of whom are black or brown. Fiscal conservatism is often said to be the top grassroots Tea Party priority, but [Vanessa] Williamson and I did not find this to be true. Crackdowns on immigrants, fierce opposition to Democrats, and cuts in spending for the young were the overriding priorities we heard from volunteer Tea Partiers, who are often, themselves, collecting costly Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits to which they feel fully entitled as Americans who have “paid their dues” in lifetimes of hard work.
The young are ascendant by definition, and the browning of America is a demographic certainty, so the aging Tea Party most definitely has a short shelf-life as a viable and overly-influential force in American politics. But that doesn’t mean that they are going away soon, or quietly.
The root of the problem is the way the seats in Congress have been drawn. Earlier today, I kind of stumbled upon something interesting on this subject while I was trying to do some research on Cokie Roberts. I found a set of interviews she did with the Office of the Historian of the House of Representatives in 2007 and 2008. (You can read the interviews here in .pdf form). At one point in the interview, the House historian asked her how Congress has changed since her parents served there. Here is what Ms. Roberts had to say:
ROBERTS: I think that what this business of picking your voters—first of all, is so anti-democratic—it does a few very, very bad things. It creates a far more partisan chamber because you only worry about getting attacked from the true believers of your own party in a primary rather than a general election. Look what just happened to Chris [Christopher B.] Cannon as a perfect example of that.
You do only represent people who are just like you, so that your desire or even ability to compromise is far less that it used to be.
I’ll give you an example. Bob Livingston used to represent a district that was 30- percent black. So he voted for fair housing, he voted for Martin Luther King holiday, he voted for a variety of things that were not the things that people whose representative in the state legislature was David Duke expected him to do. But he could explain to the yahoos in his district that he had to do it because of the black constituency when it was actually stuff that he wanted to do. Then it was redistricted to be lily-white conservative Republicans, and, you know, it’s almost impossible for that person—it was [David] Vitter, I don’t know who it is now—to do that. You just have to be fighting your constituency all the time to do something that would be a sort of national interest thing to do. And that’s true on both sides. It just makes legislating and governing much, much harder.The President [George W. Bush], actually, was talking to me—I don’t often get to say, “The President was talking to me about it,” {laughter}—when I went with him to meet the Pope. We were talking about immigration, and he’s, you know, he’s basically just furious about immigration, about the failure of the bill, and he said, “It’s all about the way districts are drawn.” And it is fundamentally anti-democratic because the whole idea is you get to throw these people out. In 2006, I must say I was heartened, not for partisan reasons, but I thought they had drawn the districts so cleverly that you’d never be able to register that vote of no confidence, which an off-year election is—it’s either a vote of confidence or no confidence—I was afraid that that had been taken away from the voters, which would really be different from what the Founders had in mind. So the fact that even with that, you were able to change parties and register that vote was heartening, but it’s much harder than it should be.
I have to say, she pretty much nailed the problem there, and the problem got considerably worse after the post-2010 census redistricting was completed.
I think the problem is so bad that redistricting reform really ought to leap to the top of the progressive agenda. It’s an issue that should interest more than just progressives. We want it so that we can get stuff done, but moderate Democrats want it so that they can have more room to maneuver, business interests want it so the government will pay its bills on time and so the Republicans will stop losing elections because of lunatic candidates, and elected Republicans want it so they don’t have to worry so much about primary challengers.
It will take a lot of work, though, to make meaningful progress. One thing is always true no matter what. Every elected member of Congress was successful under the rules as they existed during their last election. No congressperson is going to be for changing the rules because they need the rules to change. The unhappy truth is that the reason reform is necessary is because too many members of Congress are in seats that the other party cannot contest, and the solution is to make many members’ seats less safe.
How do you convince a majority of the House to vote against their own narrow political interests?
