Being a contrarian, I again buck conventional wisdom, using (again) the Founding Fathers as my source. I had previously written a column defending lobbying as necessary to protecting the fifth (least known) right in the First Amendment, the right to “petition the Government for the redress of grievances.” As I noted, this right went back to the American Revolution when the colonists wrote countless petitions to King George III and Parliament asking for redress of their grievance that Parliament kept taxing them without their consent. Only because the British government ignored these petitions did they rebel.
Of course back then — America comprising just 3 million people on the Eastern Seaboard — it was relatively easy to directly petition the government, but today — in a continental nation of 315 million people — direct petitioning is impossible. So we hire lobbyists to petition the government for us. Our motives are mostly self-interest, but lobbyists are critical to the political process because they allow more groups, large and small, wealthy and modest, near and far, to make their views known to the government.
Washington’s political gridlock, which is causing so much consternation today, has similar roots in our Founding. To the complaint that “nothing gets done” because the political process is so cumbersome, that was by design. The Founding Fathers wanted lawmaking to be a slow, deliberative process in which everyone involved — senators, congressmen, the president (and today, lobbyists!) — first thoroughly familiarized themselves with the issue (including how their constituents felt about the issue), then debated the issue, then compromised and found consensus over the issue, and finally acted on it by making it a law.
Or not. If, because of deeply held political and ideological differences, Congress and the president — or even each branch of Congress — couldn’t reach compromise and consensus, then the law didn’t get passed. C’est la vie.
The goal then (and now) wasn’t to pass laws, but to pass good laws that reflect the political priorities of all parties involved. Take President Obama’s recent State of the Union Address, in which he called for $40 billion in new spending, including “free” tuitions for a community college education. That spending, which reflects the president’s liberal priority of helping the disadvantaged, will be gridlocked to death by a Republican Congress that thinks the truly disadvantaged these days is the American taxpayer, who will be billed for that $40 billion.
So to President Obama’s constant complaint that Republicans won’t pass laws, Republicans reply, we won’t pass laws that reflect only your priorities and not ours. If that is gridlock, so is the fact that if the current Republican-controlled Congress passed a law that only reflected its political priorities, and not his, President Obama would veto it in a heartbeat.
