Hit Ctrl+Z on Congress

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So if it is broke, fix it, right?

Government is broken. Only 8 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing — making it less popular than hemorrhoids.

But we aren’t fixing it.

Americans remain convinced that the dysfunction we’ve seen for the last few decades is a result of incompetent people elected into a great system.

But we could elect a totally new Congress tomorrow and still have these problems.

Gridlock and inefficiency are built into the system. Some of that is intentional. But the problems we face today are unprecedented and unintended.

The problem is that they’re written into the Constitution.

James Madison was worried about “factions,” primarily groups with regional interests, gaining power. His solution was to put as many factions into power as possible, thereby diluting the power of any individual faction.

So we split up power 50 ways. Then we split it again, 435 ways.

We didn’t want Congress to be North vs. South. We wanted Congress to be Indiana vs. Nebraska vs. New York vs. MA-2 vs. CA-43 and so on.

Then, we started to dive into party politics.

It’s easy to see why: if you’re focused on stopping a North vs. South war, why not see if you can’t get a Northerner and a Southerner to both vote for the same group of guys?

University of Virginia historian Michael Holt argues that the breakdown of the party system was responsible for the Civil War. Basically, when Democrats stopped appealing to Northerners and Republicans stopped appealing to Southerners, peaceful political solutions became impossible.

Today, the system works perfectly to ensure regional diversity. Hawaii has two Senators, as does Maine. There is no North vs. South.

The problem is, nobody cares about that anymore.

Congress is designed to stop a war that already happened.

Splitting power geographically means we can’t split power ideologically. So instead of Madison’s 435 factions, we have two factions, a red elephant and a blue donkey.

For a variety of reasons, Democrats cluster in cities and Republicans cluster in the country. Independents and members of third parties, though, are spread relatively evenly around.

The result: even though Gallup finds that 45 percent of Americans identify as Independent, and 22 percent identify as Republican, there are not twice as many Independents as there are Republicans in Congress.

In fact, there are two Independents in Congress, and 278 Republicans.

The problem is geographical representation. The very act of districting entrenches and encourages binary partisanship.

There are a number of solutions, none of which are easy or perfect.

I’m just here to say this: if you want a working government again, don’t blame incumbents or parties or uninformed voters or the Tea Party. Just take a long look at Article 1, because that’s where the problem starts.

­— shlumorg@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Luke Morgan on Twitter @flukemorgan.