News Journal: Gridlocked Congress is nobody’s fault but ours

Everybody hates gridlock in Washington. If only those partisan politicians would start working together, right?
Nonsense. Shakespeare summed the problem up perfectly: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Ourselves. You and me. We elected them.
More from this writer: What would the Good Samaritan have done on immigration?
If my forty years in Washington taught me one thing, it is that the primary concern of just about every senator and representative is to fulfill campaign promises, to do what the majority of their constituents voted for.
A step further: with rare exceptions, voters send someone to Congress who not only reflects and shares their views, but is also “like” them in important cultural ways. That’s why Chuck Schumer is a senator from New York and Ted Cruz is a senator from Texas.
Is it their fault they don’t agree on much of anything? Not when the majority of voters in Texas and the majority of voters in New York don’t agree on much of anything.
I’m always amused when proponents of term limits make their case. The reality is, the people of New York would certainly like to impose term limits on Senator Cruz, but they also want to be able to continue sending Chuck Schumer back to the Senate.
There is gridlock on Washington for one simple, but profoundly disturbing reason: Congress exactly reflects how divided a country we are.
If you want to understand how deep those divisions are, read the results of a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. The Center summarizes them by saying; ”the gap between the political values of Democrats and Republicans is now larger than at any point in Pew Research Center surveys dating back to 1994, a continuation of a steep increase in the ideological divisions between the two parties over more than a decade.”
Take a look at just a few of the poll’s findings:
The government cannot do much more to help the needy. Republicans agree 69%. Democrats agree 24%
Government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest. Republicans agree 31%. Democrats agree 66%.
Stricter environmental laws and regulations cost too many jobs and hurt the economy. Republicans agree 58%. Democrats agree 20%
Pew concludes that the total partisan gap in political values has grown from 15% in 1994 to 36% now. Over half of the growth has occurred in the last seven years.
Why? And what can we do about it?
I have thought for some time that one of the major causes of this increase in the partisan divide was the Great Recession that started in 2007. Millions of people who lost their jobs, their savings, and/or their homes had good reason to lose faith in the system.
A lot of them got even angrier when some of their political leaders quoted economists as saying the recession ended sometime in 2009. It certainly hadn’t ended for them.
The result was a political backlash against leadership, even if some of that leadership had been successful in making things a lot better than they could have been. With the anger directed at just about anybody who represented the political culture they thought had failed them, Donald Trump and his politics of blame and divisiveness attracted enough votes to bring us to where we are today.
If you have read any of the columns I started writing more than six years ago, you know I am an optimist by nature. I think an improving economy will help temper some of the anger.
I think more and more people are beginning to realize that government by cruel and often false tweets is destructive and antithetical to values most of us still share as Americans. I think more and more of us want desperately to find a way to compromise with people who disagree with us, to find some way forward.
If and when we do, the people we send to Washington will hear us, and much of the political gridlock will disappear.
Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.