Top 9 reasons Congress is broken

Congress's approval rating is barely at 10 percent, and the venerable institution is filled with such rancor that moderates such as Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) of Maine are fleeing the place. From people who've previously served on the Hill comes this assessment of the top nine problems Congress faces today.

8. Interest groups rule, political parties drool

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/File
Protesters against the Keystone XL pipeline dressed as referees throw red penalty flags during a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, in January 2012.

Special-interest groups are wielding too much influence on Capitol Hill, to the detriment of political parties and lawmakers' ability to focus on broad goals, say some Congress-watchers. 

“Parties have flaws. But parties really have an interest in coalescing a majority, because they want to win," says Weber, the former US House member. "A lot of the problems we have in politics we have today ... are because, yes, interest groups have supplanted a lot of the functions that political parties used to play.”

In particular, Weber says, these groups box in politicians by applying lots of pressure and money, starting with the earliest stages of a prospective member's campaign.

“If you’re a Republican running for office, your goal is to get endorsed by your party, but you probably care more what the single-issue groups think,” he says. “What do the taxpayer groups think? What do the pro-life groups think?”

On the Democratic side, one could easily sub in public employee unions, environmentalists, or feminists, he adds.  

And that leads to members whose concerns are more narrowly focused.

“Interest groups have a different set of motivations: They want to get more donors and more activists, and they get there by distilling their message down, not by broadening it out. And I think that explains a lot of our politics in this town,” Weber says.

And while corporate America isn’t seeking more donors or activists, it has a new outlet to pressure Congress: unlimited donations to political organizations, courtesy of the US Supreme Court's ruling in 2010 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 

It only makes things worse that campaign-finance laws put limits on people's donations to political parties but allow unlimited funds to flow to interest groups, he says.

“We have the worst system of all,” Weber says, “and both sides need to give a little bit to reform it and get a system that is both more palatable and [that] strengthens those institutions that have an interest in achieving a majority as opposed to [a] narrow partisan interest.”

8 of 9

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.