Gridlocked government badly in need of evolution - how Democratic legislators have prevented the streamlining of the legislative process - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 20, 1993 | by Richard Grenier

Lord Beloff, one of Britain's greatest living historians, thinks of the United States as a nation that has "repudiated history." By this he means we have little historical sense, knowing there where we came from, where we're going, nor even, in some cases, where we are today.

The Democratic Party is a stunning example of this. Democratic leaders -- whose thinking is fashionably elitist -- have seemingly quite forgotten the party's populist roots. The gulf of deceit now separating the party's leadership from ordinary Democratic voters is a source of perennial astonishment to me. And I'll never have clearer proof of this than the list of members of Congress who tried desperately to keep their names secret while deliberately preventing a key bill by GOP Rep. James F. Inhofe of Oklahoma from coming before the House of Representatives for a vote. With a single exception, all 222 of these secretive lawmakers are Democrats.

Inhofe's bill was designed to prevent the practice of "bottling up in committee" legislation popular with the American people but unpopular with the congressional elite. He proposed breaking up this double shuffle reminiscent of a crooked blackjack dealer by making public what has been the most mysterious secret in Washington: the names of representatives who refuse to sign a "discharge petition," thereby preventing a bill from getting to the floor of the House.

Apply simple common sense. What possible reason could a representative have for wanting to keep it a secret that he opposed putting a bill to a vote? There's a rather disgusting reason -- he has been grandstanding and harrumphing around the country claiming to support a bill, when in fact he doesn't want the bill passed at all. There are even cases of House members who sponsor bills they don't want passed. This, you will admit, is hypocrisy on a truly impressive scale.

In keeping Inhofe's bill bottled up but their names secret, all the big Democratic players were there: Tom Foley, Dick Gephardt, David Bonior, Dan Rostenkowski, Lee Hamilton, David Obey, Pat Schroeder. From idealistic Massachusetts: Barney Frank, Ed Markey, Joe Kennedy From economically depressed California: Tom Lantos, Robert Matsui, Nancy Pelosi, Vic Fazio, Don Edwards. From the Black Caucus: Kweisi Mfume, Charlie Rangel, Ron Dellums and that tribune of the people, Maxine Waters. Plus Robert Torricelli, Charles Schumer and 200 other Democrats less known but naturally including, both last and least, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky.

Most Americans don't have the faintest idea what a discharge petition is. They've heard of bills being bottled up in committee, but don't realize that forcing a bill onto the floor for a vote requires a petition signed by an absolute majority of House members. Above all, almost no one knows that a petition of this sort is guarded like the code for the "black box." It's kept in a locked drawer in the House clerk's desk. Only signatories are allowed to see it -- but they're not all notes or even to carry a pencil when reading it. Violators face disciplinary action up to and including expulsion.

Inhofe has just blown the whole racket. Before the summer recess, he introduced a bill requiring signers and nonsigners of discharge petitions to be made public. And when his bill was predictably assigned to the Rules Committee to be deep-sixed, he defied the House and has now published the names of those refusing to sign his discharge petition.

Americans often think that because their country is in many ways the envy of the world, their government is also. It is not. Congress's cumbersome, unwieldly committee system" that has evolved over the past half-century or so is imitated by no one. And our political institutions (the elite controlling the Democratic Party is a prime example) are often far from reflecting the popular will.

Lord Beloff contrasts the United States with France, a much more consciously political country whose political institutions, he observes, "mutate" far more rapidly. Political parties rise and fall, change their names, and often disappear. The Radical Socialist Party of Georges Clemenceau is no more. The current Socialist Party was formed about 20 years ago and zoomed to unchallenged power in the early 1980s, only to be cut to pieces in this spring's elections. France's environmental movement, which the New York Times predicted on the eve of the elections would become the country's second most powerful force, won not a single seat. When the French change their minds on a political issue, change can be swift. In Britain also, David Lloyd George's once-powerful Liberal Party barely survives.

Since the Civil War, the United States has been slogging along with the same two parties. Democrats and Republicans change now and then, of course, but compared with European parties they are somewhat amorphous groupings. And there's often a substantial ideological discrepancy between a party's leaders and many of its voters -- as the clandestine behavior of Democratic representatives concerning discharge petitions clearly suggests.