Bad on the Street, Worse on Capitol Hill : Political gridlock is paralyzing the legislative system

Gridlock is what people call a traffic jam in which everybody is in somebody’s way and nobody is getting anywhere. Gridlock is also what, lately, everyone has been calling the jam that the federal government is in with its executive and legislative branches controlled by opposed and increasingly embittered parties.

To some extent, this gridlock is designed in. The Founding Fathers wanted a strong executive, but they also wanted clearly limited government. The division of powers in the U.S. Constitution, the system of “checks and balances,” is, to a point, a recipe for gridlock. But the designed system has been overlaid by an undesigned, unplanned-for system--the two-party system, which, in the eyes of some, no longer serves the nation as well as it once did. Vice President Dan Quayle recently said: “If you’re going to vote for Bill Clinton, I’d say vote for your Democratic congressman. It’s a controversial viewpoint and it’s not shared by all the people in my party, but I think we must end the divided government.” Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), revealing his frustration as he announced that he won’t run for reelection, wondered aloud whether this nation would not be well-advised to try parliamentary democracy.

Under the parliamentary system, the chief executive is always chosen by the majority party (or coalition). Government as a whole is unified, its powers not nearly so divided as they are in the cherished U.S. way. The executive, however--even as formidable a prime minister as Margaret Thatcher was in Britain--is weak, subject to recall whenever the party so chooses.

Under such a system, the United States might have Democratic presidents, but the presidency, as such, would no longer exist.

Counsels of desperation? Perhaps. But some of the best minds and spirits in both parties are being driven to despair. The Republicans’ Rudman is matched by the Democrats’ Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.), who also is not running for reelection. These are not men who give up lightly.

But something is clearly wrong when Congress adjourns without authorizing money for the national defense. That’s what happened as a result of a dispute Monday over $1 billion for the “Star Wars” missile defense program. The President had reduced his request by $1 billion already; the Democrats wanted him to cut a billion more, to $3.3 billion in an overall defense budget of $274.5 billion. Bush said he would veto the authorization bill rather than lose that $1 billion. Senate Republicans blocked the Democratic proposal from even coming to a vote. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) then pulled the measure from the floor altogether. And now they have all left on holiday.

That’s a hard-to-top example of gridlock at its worst. Victory for either side would have been better than this stalemate at a time of volatility from Bosnia to Armenia to Iraq and beyond. A Russian aid bill, equally modest in size but as crucial a component of the de facto U.S. defense as any weapons system, has now passed both houses but only after crippling, politically motivated delay, with further delay in store. To a drowning man, a slow rescue is as good as none; and there’s little that could be worse for world stability than for Russian reform to go down for the third time.

Given a little goodwill on both sides, the U.S. system can obviously be made to work well. Without it, people in both parties will continue to talk ever so tentatively about tinkering with the system.