Congress: Then and Now

Reading Volume Four of Robert Caro’s masterpiece, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, one passage caught my attention. The volume deals with the years when I served in the federal government in Washington for men prominently featured in this volume. It is remarkable that Caro presents stories of those times and people one couldn’t have known then.

The point I note here, at pages 346 and 347, is the reminder of the dysfunctional and undemocratic Congress at that time, when conservative Democrats ruled the Senate and House. Caro reminds that “the inefficiency of Congress was nothing new … but now, in both houses of Congress, it was escalating to a new level, a level at which some analysts were questioning the efficiency of the governmental framework.” Sound familiar?

Caro quotes historian James MacGregor Burns’s conclusion that we were at “at a critical step of a somber and inexorable cycle that seems to have gripped the public affairs of the nation … mired in governmental deadlock.” Walter Lippmann wrote that “debate and decision” were being replaced by “delay and stultification.” He feared, as some do today, that the congressional system as it operated then was “a grave danger to the Republic.”

At that, Caro states, the inefficiency of Congress then was “nothing new,” that pattern existed since the Civil War, except for the six years of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Senate leadership.

Might it be that the current Congress’s nasty partisanship and undemocratic practices are due less to President Obama’s inefficient leadership but to inherent, historic, institutional political flaws? Not the balance of powers in the judicial, executive, and legislative branches, but, the way Congress operates: the undemocratic modern filibuster rule, the historic decision to give the same two senators to states with hundreds of thousands of voters as states with tens of millions, and the unprecedented influence of money on elections. These and other modern conditions have distorted the legislative process to the disadvantage of the large majority of the American public.

To conclude so is not to concede the current state must continue. It is to suggest that the president’s attempts to foster political harmony fell on legislators’ deaf ears, and it is at them the country’s wrath should be directed.

There is an imminent election!


Goldfarb, a Washington, D.C., based attorney and author, served in the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administrations in the Department of Justice.

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