Salem: No Parties, No Progress

By Scott R. Cooper, Crook County Judge
published in the Central Oregonian, March 2003

Few Oregonians would disagree: the situation in Salem is a mess.

To date, the legislature has managed to balance the 2001-2003 budget by spending all its savings accounts and mortgaging future revenues. The leadership pink-slipped one-third of the state cops—and then put them back to work again. In two months, the Legislature has managed to identify $12 million in cuts to balance the budget, but faced with too much voter outcry, it added $15 million in restored services. Work on the 2003-05 budget hasn’t yet begun.

The culprit, say some, is an excess of partisanship.

In November, voters came close to eliminating partisanship in the statehouse with as an equitable a distribution of powers between the parties as possible. We put a Democratic Governor in one of the most closely divided gubernatorial elections in state history, gave the Republicans control of the House with the barest of majorities and equally divided the Senate between the two parties. Checks and balances, some called it. Disaster waiting to happen, said others.

Increasingly, the events seem to favor the latter conclusion. Salem seems to be more gridlocked than ever by indecision and unable to move without taking poll. Key party leaders seem more concerned about whether each and every vote will translate into a majority down the road than they are about solving our pressing political problems.

Given this scenario, perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves if we prefer this “balanced” scenario to one where somebody’s in charge. Partisanship isn’t always pretty, but it is an historic and effective way to keep an agenda moving, which is why its been with us since our nation’s earliest days.

Remember your U.S. history? Before the Constitution was ever ratified, factions formed known as Federalists and Anti-Federalists. With great leaders such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the Federalists made their case for a strong central government. Meanwhile, the anti-federalists, led by equally strong leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, pushed just as hard for a decentralized system. Their arguments were incredibly complex and take up volumes of political theory. Most federalists and anti-federalists of the time neither read nor understood them, but few in that day and age failed to identify themselves with one school of thought or the other.

Likewise, in the years before the Civil War, leaders such as Lincoln and Douglas represented opposite sides of the slavery question. Underlying issues such as tariff schedules and constitutional nullification were never well understood, but a voter could tell you pretty quickly if he were a Republican or a Democrat, simply based on his views on the slavery question.

These were enormous issues in their day, the outcomes of which presented real challenges to a nation ill equipped, either politically or socially, to confront them. The two-party system gave each side the discipline to it needed to distill the many points of view about these issues into a single and competing set of coherent philosophies, which eventually came to represent significant policy choices. Americans then, like Americans now, didn’t understand the complexity of the issues involved with these choices. But they did have a vague sense that the positions of one side or the other simply felt better, and they affiliated themselves accordingly with the political parties whose views were the best fit with their own.

Partisanship along these lines is a good thing. It helps transform a muddle of information into sharp, focused choices for policymakers and voters. Once a choice was made, action followed.

Today, it’s fashionable to bash partisanship. “Republican” and “Democrat” are just labels. A good chunk of us choose not to affiliate with either of the major parties and register as “non-affiliated” or “independent” voters. We like to say we “vote for the person, not the party.” Candidates like to promise that they’ll work in a “bipartisan” fashion with “both sides of the aisle.”

That’s fine rhetoric, but the fact is partisanship offers a form of political discipline that has served our country and other established democracies well. Without partisanship to act as a filter, there is no clear set of competing choices. There is only a daunting array of options, which have no philosophical continuity and an undisciplined political system where no one’s in charge, no philosophy prevails and nothing is ever finished.

Sounds a lot like Salem these days. Perhaps we ought to be careful what we ask for in the future. We just might be getting it.