Is Everything Reagan's Fault?

An event the American Enterprise Institute gives us insight into the problems with Congress

Welcome to The Right Struggle. Here, I will discuss arguments within the right, take a side, and, of course, attack the left. The title of the newsletter is multi-entendre. The right refers to both the side of the political spectrum I am on and to truthfulness. It is also similar to a book written by a failed German painter, My Struggle, because too many on the right nowadays seem inspired by that kind of struggle, and I am here to belittle them when the issue at hand permits humor and take them seriously when I must. But my work depends on readers’ support. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber and/or sharing my articles with your friends and on your social media.

During an event at the American Enterprise Institute, featuring bipartisan members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the panelists discussed the challenges why the government is no longer able to accomplish big things.

You might be familiar with the talking points: New technology has turned members into performers, who go on television to appeal to small-dollar donors, thus making the parties incapable of enforcing discipline; months into the new fiscal year, the federal government is still running on a continuing resolution because Congress cannot pass a budget on time; Congress’s a approval rating is dangerously low because all the members do is attacking each other and the courts; everyone agrees on the need to reform the entitlements, but nobody has the guts to do it; and America finally got done with fighting an unwise and lengthy war, and it should absolutely avoid a getting itself into a new one.

The panelists included Congressmen Dick Cheney (R-WY), Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Dick Gephardt (D-MO), and Wyche Fowler (D-GA). This event took place in 1981, during the first year of the Reagan administration, when Cheney and Gingrich famously debated whether the power should rest with the executive or the legislative branch.

Gephardt said:

We have had very wide parties. In the Democratic party today in the House, one could probably find a range of ideas that, in another country, would represent five, and maybe more, political parties. … We can restore the kind of discipline we need in the Congress to make tough decisions through consensus building and coalition building within the parties and between the parties.

Fowler responded:

Television has killed the parties more than anything else. No party can hold the line on any sort of discipline, or probably any coherent ideology, without curbs on campaign financing and spending. With the present system, no matter what the party stands for, an individual candidate can attract enough money so that he can go around the party, through television, directly to the voters. That opens up the whole system.

On the budget, Cheney said:

The budget process has become a joke. A few years ago we put in place a process to guarantee that Congress would take a broad overview of how much money it was to spend, what kinds of taxes it was to raise, and what the overall deficit would be. Now we find ourselves well into fiscal year 1981, and most of the appropriation bills have not yet been enacted into law. Government is limping along on a continuing resolution months after the beginning of the fiscal year.

During the Q&A session, an attendee stated:

I call to your attention, also, repeated public opinion polls, expressing approval of the performance of Congress that rarely exceeds 30 percent. One poll taken about 1974 rated congressmen above trash collectors and below barbers in terms of professional respect.

Cheney responded:

We send out newsletters; we make speeches; we visit with our constituents. To the extent that the American people have a perspective on government, we are responsible for having created it. We create it by castigating the courts, by condemning the bureaucracy, by worrying about alleged abuses of presidential power.

On the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Gingrich remarked:

We have no interest in Afghanistan, at the present time. We have never had any interest in Afghanistan. We must look very carefully at what we want to accomplish with our policy. … [We] have stumbled into various and sundry secondary wars, Vietnam being the least admirable example, in efficiency and perhaps in wisdom. … The major problems of American foreign policy in the 1970s were problems of political willpower, not of military power. We have enough military force now to raise the cost incredibly for the Russians to stay in Afghanistan. We need not use a single American soldier, if we are willing simply to arm the Afghans. That is a political issue; it is not a military issue.

On defense spending, Gingrich said:

I am not certain, despite all the rhetoric, that we need to spend dramatically more on defense, although I am a hawk in most ways. I am certain that we need to spend our money differently on defense. One of the places that the president ought to be looking at to change the budget, rather than to cut it, is inside the Pentagon. There is an incredible amount of waste and ineffective management in the military. We have a set of strategic assumptions that are nonsense, in the present age; we could completely rethink the way we are doing things.

If you replace television with social media, Afghanistan with Ukraine, and Vietnam with Afghanistan and Iraq, this event could have happened in 2025.

There are two different ways to interpret these similarities. The optimist would argue that there is nothing new under the sun. American history is marked by its ups and downs. Just as in the 1960s and 1970s, America is one good president away from a new era of good feelings.

The pessimistic response is, what if that president does not come along? Rather, Ronald Reagan gave Americans a lucky break from facing the challenges that they would necessarily have to address at some point.

Adam White observes that Congress’s role, including its members’ self-perception, has transformed from policymaking to oversight since the middle of the 20th Century, when Congress delegated its powers to the executive branch. The Supreme Court’s removal of the legislative veto in INS v. Chadha in 1983 further weakened Congress, rendering its oversight toothless.

The emergence of the powerful executive branch coincided with a good executive. Ronald Reagan’s presidency was successful domestically and internationally. A weak Congress did not appear to be a problem when the economy was booming and the Soviet Union was losing the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War again mitigated America’s problems. During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, approximately 400 million people living in former communist states joined the global market. More than a billion Chinese were also integrating with the global economy. The Clinton administration’s process to enlarge NATO further secured new investments in some of these countries. Both administrations worked on what would become the North American Free Trade Agreement. Between 1990 and 2000, U.S. exports increased from $552 billion to $1.096, and U.S. imports increased from $630 billion to $1,477 billion. Trade’s share of the U.S. GDP increased from 20 percent to 25 percent in that period. The 1990s’ economic boom, therefore, had more to do with foreign affairs and less with domestic politics and policies.

The Reagan presidency and the expansion of hemispheric trade secured two happy decades for America, despite the underlying problems with political arrangements. The 2008 Financial Crisis was, in part, the result of a Congress no longer capable of legislating and a White House that could not persuade the other branch to reduce the size of government-sponsored enterprises, which were the cause of the crisis. The administrations succeeding it have been successful in securing legislative victories only on partisan bases.

The one exception was the Biden administration, which succeeded in enacting a few new laws with broad bipartisan support, most notably reforming the Electoral Count Act, Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, investing in domestic chip production, and increasing infrastructure spending. These bills had two things in common: First, there was a bipartisan consensus on passing them; second, White House did not lead the negotiations, therefore, giving Congress greater say in what those bills would look like so it could broaden their appeals within the legislative branch.

Yet, Congress’s most important job is the power of the purse, which has been a failure for decades, including during the Biden administration, evidently, going back to the 1970s. As the conversation from 44 years ago illustrates, today’s problems are not new in kind but in degree, and they are the outcomes of new technologies, laws, and changes in Congressional rules and its members’ self-perception.

The half-century delay in restoring Congress’s role resulted in these problems returning with a vengeance and decay in political culture. Whereas there was an institutional memory in 1981, no such memory exists today. The longest-serving member of Congress, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), arrived in Congress the same year. There is no single member who remembers the era of Congressional supremacy, making its restoration much more difficult. Reagan’s extraordinary achievements postponed the recovery of our Constitutional order, and they might have come at a significant cost.