Comments on Congress: Democracy needs some disagreement

My first year in Congress, 1965, was a watershed year. Among many noteworthy pieces of legislation, that was the year we passed the law creating Medicare and Medicaid. And I remember something crucial about it: When the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills, brought the legislation to the floor of the U.S. House, he said we needed to build bipartisan support.

This wasn’t an obvious thing to ask. Many of us had been swept into office in the 1964 Democratic wave that accompanied Lyndon Johnson’s election, and we had an overwhelming majority in Congress. We didn’t need Republicans on board.

But Mills disagreed. What truly counted, he argued, wasn’t passing the bill, but implementing it. Bipartisan support would make the law more effective, easier to roll out, and more widely embraced. The result was legislation that, six decades later, has stood the test of time — because, at its very beginning, it had the support of a broad cross-section of the American people.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what it takes for our representative democracy not just to survive, but to thrive. Two recent articles help to crystallize what’s at stake and how we might think about it.

The first is by two Bloomberg writers, Mary Ellen Klas and Carolyn Silverman. It’s a tough look at how single-party control in the majority of US states “is suppressing competition in elections, discouraging voter engagement and ... enabling the party in power to ignore perspectives outside of their base.”

In “This is Why You Don’t Recognize Your State Government,” Klas and Silverman argue that in the country’s 40 “trifecta” states—where both the legislature and the governor’s office are controlled by a single party—untrammeled control of state government has led to a divergence between public opinion and actual policy. This leads to a growing sense of apathy and disillusionment among voters whose views are mostly ignored no matter who’s in charge.

Even worse, they argue, government itself suffers because the policies it carries out reflect just a single worldview. “Well-formed, enduring policy ideas rarely spring from a single party,” they write. “After many years of covering government and legislatures, we’ve learned that the friction of dissent and dialogue refines policies, just as steel sharpens steel.”

Which brings me to the second article. Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote this: “In a healthy democracy, division must ultimately be framed by unity. Democrats, Republicans and independents must be able to recognize one another as fellow patriots. The party in power should not abuse its temporary majority to change the rules of the game — something both parties have been guilty of. When consensus reached through compromise is possible, we should prefer it to divisive, and reversible, partisan victories. That’s how progress isn’t just achieved but also secured.”

In other words, disagreement is healthy—but only within the confines of mutual respect for the norms and procedures we’ve developed over 250 years of practicing representative government, and only if the parties are willing to find common ground.

Columnist Lee Hamilton was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years. He is a Senior Advisor for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government and a professor at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs.