Who Stole the American Dream?

by Hedrick Smith

  But LBJ also played to Dirksen’s vanity with an arsenal of flattery, according to Harry McPherson, Johnson’s longtime Senate aide and White House speechwriter. Imitating LBJ’s Texas drawl, McPherson acted out the famous Johnson treatment on Dirksen: “There is no way on earth that I’m going to be able to pass this without you, Everett, and I want to tell you that you’re going to hear yourself referred to in the warmest terms you’ve ever heard. I’ve told Hubert [Senator Humphrey of Minnesota] I don’t want any bad word about Everett Dirksen ever to issue from his mouth…. You know, Everett, I’ve been to Pekin, Illinois [Dirksen’s hometown]. I’ve seen that statue of Lincoln in the town square, and I want to tell you, Everett, if you help with this [civil rights bill], and make it possible for Nigras to live like decent human beings under the law like the rest of us, one day there’s going to be another statue in that town square, and it’s going to be a statue of you—you and Abraham Lincoln in your hometown.”

  McPherson paused, then added with an impish grin: “Now, you know, that’s pretty broad paint, but, Judas Priest, hard to resist.”

  Slowly, Dirksen morphed from adversary to ally, but not before mildly recrafting the civil rights bill to insert some limits on the powers of federal enforcement. Yet when the crucial moment came—the vote on a motion of cloture that is the parliamentary procedure for killing a filibuster—Dirksen produced twenty-seven Republican votes, joining forty-four Democrats. That easily quashed the southern filibuster and paved the way for final passage. True to Johnson’s word, Democrats fell all over themselves praising Dirksen as the savior of the civil rights bill.

  To Johnson, Dirksen’s decision was natural and wise. Not only was it morally right, in Johnson’s view, it was smart politics: Dirksen had moved toward the middle, where Eisenhower had been. As Johnson saw it, the genius of American politics was that the two parties “pull to the center, where the vast majority of the votes traditionally are in this country.”

  A National Political Realignment

  But even as Johnson uttered those words, the precious political center was under assault. Right-wing Republicans, with a power base in the Sun Belt, had taken control of the party, and in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson would face a challenge from the champion of the Republican Right, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Johnson felt Goldwater was too extreme to win in the general election, and he thought Goldwater’s loss would fatally wound right-wing extremism. He was right about his beating Goldwater but wrong about its impact. Goldwater’s loss in 1964 did not quiet the right wing, which fought back against the political center over the next four decades.

  Johnson was prophetic about something else—the way America’s political map was about to be redrawn. He foresaw a political transformation of monumental proportions taking shape. He understood that the foundations of the two major parties were about to be shaken to their core, with the southern reaction to the new civil rights laws fracturing the old New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party and with militant new forces altering the traditional conservatism of the Republican Party.

  Johnson had been euphoric as he signed the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 within hours of its passage in Congress. But that very evening his press secretary, Bill Moyers, found the president in bed, brooding. When Moyers asked what was the trouble, Johnson replied: “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

  Johnson was right. As a Texan, he knew his region and its politics. He understood that by pushing a Democrat-controlled Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he had triggered what would be a prolonged backlash against the Democratic Party among southern whites. The once “Solid South,” the historic bastion of the Democrats, would go Republican.

  The realignment began even faster than Johnson expected. In November 1964, Barry Goldwater carried only six states against Johnson: his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In 1968, Richard Nixon broadened the GOP’s southern beachhead, piling up enough electoral votes in the Old Confederacy to narrowly defeat Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the White House. From 1972 onward, the South and the Sun Belt Southwest became the most reliable voting base of the Republican Party.

  The Center: An Endangered Species

  Moderates in both parties came under pressure, but especially moderate Republicans. As the South went Republican, states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic swung more Democratic. Moderate northern Republicans became an endangered political species—either defeated, purged, or gerrymandered out of their seats by party leaders eager to craft safe seats for more militant party loyalists. Or else moderates were defeated in party primaries engineered to favor extremist candidates. Democrats did much the same, crafting House districts to favor reelection of liberals, especially in big cities. And the conservative wing of the Democratic Party shrank as Republicans took away seats in the Sun Belt from conservative Democrats.

  In the latest Congress, Republican Senate moderates have dwindled from the twenty-two recruited by Dirksen on civil rights to just three—Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine. But now Snowe has decided to resign, like Evan Bayh, out of frustration with the brutal partisanship on Capitol Hill. The seats of northern Republican moderate senators such as Javits in New York, Case in New Jersey, Scott in Pennsylvania, Aiken in Vermont, and Saltonstall in Massachusetts are now held by Democrats. Where Kentucky once elected Republican moderate John Sherman Cooper, it now has Tea Party libertarian Rand Paul. In the House, the sixty-five moderates who voted for Medicare with Johnson have shrunk to fewer than a dozen.

  The swing to the Republican Right has been especially strong in the South. From 1964 to 2010, Republican strength in Congress from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma shot up from just 4 Senate seats to 20, and from 14 House seats to 102. Those gains helped power Republicans to control of the Senate in 1980, the House in 1994, and periodically since then. The impact of the Republican surge shows up not only in the numbers, but in the tenor of politics. Sun Belt Republicans have typically been opposed to the government’s social programs and economic intervention that old-line Republican moderates used to support.

  A Tribal Divide

  The parties used to overlap, with conservative Democrats joining forces with Republicans on some issues and moderate Republicans voting with Democrats. But over time, the political center has been chewed away from both sides, mainly from the right. “Over the past thirty years, the parties have deserted the center of the floor in favor of the wings,” concluded the authors of Polarized America, an academic study of Congress.

  Political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have literally diagrammed the demise of the center. They have constructed inkblot charts that graph the growing gulf between the two political parties by plotting the votes of individual members of Congress on many issues. You can see the widening gulf between the parties. Over time, the R dots marking Republican vote patterns can be seen migrating away from D dots marking Democratic vote patterns. At one time the two clusters overlapped, but today the inkblot charts show clear white space between the parties. No overlapping vote patterns. The parties eye each other warily, like two armies, across a no-man’s-land.

  The few remaining moderates who might be inclined toward bipartisan cooperation are under intense pressure to prove their loyalty to their political tribe, said Tom Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank. In earlier times, Mann recalled, “there wasn’t this sense of the tribe, this sense that no one can venture out of the tribe. Today, there are still some people in both parties who would like to do [bipartisan] deals, but the camps are too far apart. They don’t play that game. They are two teams and they are at war. You don’t fraternize with the enemy.”

  The partisan vitriol during the fight over Obama’s health care reform
in 2009–2010 epitomized the ideological schism that now divorces the parties from each other. “In the forty years that I have been here, this is the sharpest, most rancorous polarization that I have seen,” said Norman Ornstein, a well-known congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “We have had sharp divisions over Vietnam, around the impeachment of Nixon, real issues when Reagan first came in trying to implement a different agenda. But those differences did not play out strictly along party lines. This is more partisan, more ideological.”

  Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, pointed to the senators’ private dining room as a graphic example of the partisan divide, the political chill that keeps senators even from breaking bread together. “Nobody goes there anymore,” said Baucus. “When I was here 10, 15, 30 years ago, that was the place you would go to talk to senators, let your hair down, just kind of compare notes, no spouses allowed, no staff, nobody. It is now empty.”

  Polarized Politics Plus Filibusters Equals Senate Gridlock

  Polarized parties and the missing middle spell policy stalemates. Gridlock has risen almost exponentially since the early 1990s, according to Professor Sarah Binder of George Washington University. “Partisan polarization and ideological diversity both contribute to policy stalemate,” she found. When voters split control of Congress and the White House between the two parties, it’s worse: The odds of gridlock escalate.

  The Senate has become particularly paralyzed by the explosive use of the filibuster. Even the mere threat of filibuster by one or two senators, as Evan Bayh reported, can stop the action. The stepchild of the filibuster, “the personal hold”—a filibuster threat by a single senator—has become the parliamentary weapon of choice for the Senate minority party. There is no easier way for a minority, or even a few senators, to kill a bill than to threaten to shut down the Senate with a filibuster—or even the threat of a filibuster.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, filibusters were used rarely, and then mostly on social issues such as civil rights legislation, but not on economic issues. Today, filibuster tactics are used frequently on economic issues. “Republicans began using filibusters on almost every issue, because it would bollix up the majority,” observed Norman Ornstein. “It was like throwing molasses on the tracks.”

  “The Phantom Filibuster”

  Average Americans frustrated by the eternal gridlock in Congress have no idea of the machine-gun frequency with which the filibuster—or the threat of a filibuster—is exploited. This is mainly because voters do not see live filibusters. The Senate long ago found a way to sidestep the televised drama of marathon filibusters like the one Jimmy Stewart staged in Hollywood’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or the twenty-four-hour, eighteen-minute talkathon by Senator Strom Thurmond, the die-hard segregationist from South Carolina who defied biology and a Senate majority to block a civil rights bill in 1957.

  To avoid tying up the Senate full-time in prolonged filibusters with senators sleeping in their offices, former Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield devised a two-track procedure in the 1960s. On one track, the Senate proceeded with normal business, while on a second track it took a quick test vote to see if it had a sixty-vote majority to invoke cloture. If the majority leader lacked the sixty votes, that bill was deemed dead on arrival. No fuss, no muss, no vote—not even a debate. Voters rarely realized that a bill had been killed by a phantom filibuster.

  What this meant was that a minority of forty-one senators—and often fewer than that—could prevent a majority of fifty-nine from even bringing up a bill for debate. In practical terms, said Senator Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat, “every vote in the Senate now is sixty votes, which is what you need to cut off the debate. The will of the majority can be blocked by a minority. You have tyranny of the minority—and the public doesn’t even realize it.”

  What’s more, because the Senate operates under the rule of unanimous consent to bring up any bill, a single senator can block action by invoking a “personal hold”—long known as “the silent filibuster” because the senator did not have to identify himself or utter a word in public. The senator could set up a legislative blockade by sending a private written notice to the leadership of intention to filibuster a bill or a presidential appointment. A hold stopped the action because it forced the majority leader either to drop the proposal, make a backroom deal, or go through the Sisyphean task of scouring up sixty votes and using many hours of precious floor time to apply cloture. A silent filibuster was, in effect, a one-senator veto.

  Originally, personal holds were granted as a courtesy to a senator who was ill, was out of town, or needed more time to consider a measure. But in the modern era of partisan combat, holds are used routinely to tie the majority in knots or to extract some concession from the White House or Senate leaders on an unrelated measure. As Norman Ornstein explained, “A hold is a hostage-taking weapon for individual senators.”

  The Senate: 70 Percent of All Bills—Death by Filibuster Tactics

  Today, filibuster tactics are used across the board, and particularly on economic issues such as health care and taxes. “The statistics just blow you away,” commented Tom Mann of Brookings. “The use of delaying tactics has just skyrocketed. In the 1960s, about 8 percent of significant legislation was subject to delaying tactics like filibusters and holds. It is now about 70 percent. Obstructionism is now the hallmark of the Senate.”

  With the escalation of filibuster tactics in the early 1990s as Republicans waged partisan warfare against President Clinton, Mann pointed out, the Senate has become the graveyard for legislation passed by solid House majorities. Hundreds of House-passed bills have been “condemned to death-by-filibuster.”

  As reform-minded senators have pointed out, the Senate has become such a bottleneck that the 2009–10 Congress was unable even to pass a normal budget bill or just one of the thirteen appropriations bills needed to fund the normal operations of the government. For years, those bills had routinely passed the Senate. Now, it takes emergency, cliff-hanging, eleventh-hour deals to get minimal routine work done.

  So crippled has the Senate become—and Congress as a whole—that Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein titled their major study on Congress, in 2008, The Broken Branch, and its sequel, out this year, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.

  An Opportunity for Reform

  Many people assume that the Senate filibuster is a constitutional prerogative, but neither the filibuster nor the personal hold is mentioned in the Constitution. These procedures have evolved over time through changes in Senate rules.

  Historians tell us that the filibuster came into being by mistake. In 1805, as the Senate was codifying its rules on the advice of Vice President Aaron Burr, it accidentally omitted a rule for proceeding to its agenda, as the House does, and unknowingly, by default, that omission allowed extended debate. Only in 1917 did the Senate pass a cloture rule to have a formal way for cutting off debate. That backfired. Because of the very high threshold for cloture (then, a two-thirds vote of the Senate), the cloture rule worked perversely. It seemed to sanction filibusters. Senator Mansfield’s two-track strategy backfired in the same way. It no longer took an actual filibuster to stop Senate action. A phantom filibuster did the trick.

  To curb the use of phantom filibusters, reform-minded senators argue that the actual filibuster should be brought out of the closet and exposed to public scrutiny. They reason that the voters, already angry at congressional gridlock, would be even more fed up if forced to watch live filibusters tying up the Senate for weeks on end, and that might be a deterrent. In January 2011, twenty-six senators led by Democrats Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Tom Udall of New Mexico pushed for rule changes to bar some of the procedural delaying tactics. They persuaded the Senate to vote for a ban on the silent filibuster—the anonymous hold. But they failed to win a majority for a more important change—to bar filibusters on the procedural motion to bring a bill to the floor for debate and
to eliminate Mansfield’s old two-track procedure.

  “We want to force a talking filibuster,” explained Udall. “We want to get to the substance and not get stuck on procedure. A talking filibuster means that you would have to come to the floor and actually talk—talk as long as you wanted on the issue, which is the way it always had been, and then we would move to cut off debate and have a majority vote.” That rule change failed to pass in January 2011, but reformers say they will try again.

  The Economic Impact of Gridlock

  Gridlock is not merely Washington’s worry. It has real-life impact on the nation’s economy and on the wealth gap. When Congress is polarized by partisan warfare and crippled by phantom Senate filibusters, budgets fail to pass and programs that are intended to help average Americans and strengthen the social safety net get stranded. Gridlock protects the status quo at a time when most tax laws and other economic legislation favor corporations and the wealthy—as people saw in 2010 and again in 2011 when President Obama tried to raise taxes on the top income bracket.

  Political scientists have documented a link between polarized politics and rising economic inequality. The ever-increasing wealth gap and ever-sharpening partisan divisions go hand in hand. Over the past century, the two trends have moved up and down together, according to the authors of Polarized America, political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.