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With Republicans gaining control of the House of Representatives, the federal government again will be “gridlocked,” as critics call it.
Democrats still will control the White House under President Biden and the Senate under Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. The House speaker to be elected in January likely will be Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, replacing another from our state, Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
“Congress will experience continued partisan polarization, gridlock and dysfunction with divided party government,” said James Thurber, professor emeritus of government at American University.
Let’s hope so.
Although there are no guarantees, previous gridlocks kept government at least a little more in check. After losing Congress to the Republicans in 1994, Democrat President Bill Clinton exclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” Not exactly. But he and new GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich crafted budgets that restrained spending and cut taxes for capital gains, estates and families with children. That magnified the dot-com boom. And it eventually produced budget surpluses for the first time in three decades — and not seen since.
By contrast, when Republicans took over everything in January 2003 under President Bush, the party that campaigned on frugality spent money faster than any time since Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society programs. The deficit soared to $1.4 trillion in President Obama’s first year in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, but dropped to $440 billion in 2015 when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. President Trump and the Republican Congress then pushed it up again, to $780 billion in 2018. The COVID-19 years then followed, but the $3 trillion deficit of 2020 under divided government should be considered an anomaly.
Divided government also generally gives more power to moderates. Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona should continue to be forces for stabilization, such as maintaining the filibuster. Both limited the size of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021 and the misnamed $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Going back a little further, it was divided government that produced the amnesty of the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act under President Reagan, as well as a good tax cut. Those would be excellent templates for 2023. There’s already talk of Republicans getting concessions on greater border enforcement in exchange for the Democrats getting a path to citizenship for the 700,000 immigrants in the DACA program.
The main benefit of gridlock is both sides are so busy fighting each other they tend more often to leave the rest of us alone. Each side also launches investigations into what the other is doing, giving citizens a glimpse into what really goes on in their government. For Americans long fatigued by the expensive shenanigans, the best result for the next two years would be continued wrangling in the Capitol, leading to less getting done.
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