Fermenting Frustration.

• Author: Schousen, Matthew M.
• Position: American Thought - U.S. legislative process under a divided government - Viewpoint essay

"Americans are exasperated by their government's inability to act: gridlock and hostility abound; the process is too slow; and lawmakers continually disappoint their constituents by campaigning on specific issues but compromising on those issues once they reach Capitol Hill."

WHETHER you turn on your television, read a newspaper, go online, or have a conversation with your neighbor, you are likely to encounter expressions of extreme discontent and frustration with our country's government and its politicians. Polls show that fewer than one-third of our citizens think that the U.S. is on the right track; only about 40% of Americans approve of Pres. Donald Trump; fewer than 20% approve of Congress.

Americans are exasperated by their government's inability to act: gridlock and hostility abound; the process is too slow; and lawmakers continually disappoint their constituents by campaigning on specific issues but compromising on those issues once they reach Capitol Hill. Citizens often focus their anger on politicians, the parties, or "the Washington establishment" but, in reality, the problem has its roots in the Founders' decision to design a democracy in which transforming public sentiment into law is--perhaps somewhat counterintuitively--an extremely arduous process.

This decision raises two critical questions. Why did the Founders create a system of government that seems to frustrate a majority of Americans? Does their reasoning still make sense in American democracy today?

James Madison is the primary architect of the Constitution, and his views regarding the way citizens behave in a democratic system can help answer the first question. Madison believed in democracy, but with a caveat: he was concerned that voters were not purely rational actors and that they would not necessarily be capable of uniting for the common good. For Madison, a democracy is limited by its citizens' ability to make sound judgments. His exploration of political histoiy, as well as his personal observations, led to his belief that reason and passion often were intertwined and that individual passions could get in the way of sound decisionmaking. Consequently, Madison envisioned a system of government based on the notion that human beings do not necessarily unity for a greater good--they instead may attempt to influence government to serve their own personal interests.

With these potential conflicts in mind--reason vs. emotion, common good vs. personal interest--Madison and his fellow Founders deliberately created a system of government that was slow and inefficient, one in which it was extremely difficult to translate public sentiment into law. The obstacles to passing legislation are well known. A bill successfully must make its way through two separate and distinct legislative chambers. The House of Representatives, the larger of the two chambers, is made up of members from geographically compact congressional districts who are elected to two-year terms, while the Senate gives equal representation to every state, with members elected to six-year terms.

To make it even more certain that the House and Senate will have different preferences, only one-third of the Senate's seats are available during any election cycle, and the Constitution grants each chamber the right to operate under its own set of rules and procedures. All of these constitutional arrangements ensure that the House and Senate are unique and distinct institutions. Any legislation making it through these two bodies then travels to the president's desk. The president has a different electoral cycle and a different constituency, so there is no guarantee that he or she will be willing to sign the legislation into law. In fact, the president...