What Isn’t Going So Well at the Capitol

There will soon no longer be a Kennedy in the United States Congress for the first time in sixty-four years. The explanation: two weeks ago, Patrick Kennedy, a Democratic Representative from Rhode Island, announced that he would not run again in the upcoming November elections. He will leave the House of Representatives, where he has held a seat for the past sixteen years. Patrick is the son of Senator Ted Kennedy, who passed away on Aug 25th, 2009, and the nephew of former President John Kennedy, who was elected to the House in 1946 before becoming Senator and going on to conquer the White House in 1960.

According to the press, Washington without a Kennedy on Capitol Hill “is the end of an era.” We can say without any ill intent that this commentary was mainly referring to Ted. For this is not only a sentimental matter. Ted Kennedy was the embodiment of a certain way of conducting politics for which Americans are nostalgic.

Anchored in the left wing of the Democratic Party, willingly populist, he was also a man of compromise. The Catholic patrician of New England, who did not dislike bourbon, formed with his Republican colleague from Utah, Orrin Hatch, a Mormon and tea drinker, a legislative pairing to which we owe a number of social advancements.

Today, Washington is lamenting: the period of bipartisan politics seems to be over. Some “heavy” bills are blocked, for a lack of a qualified majority: energy and climate issues, employment, financial regulation and the budget deficit. Republicans are blaming the Democrats’ drift toward the left; the latter in turn pointing their finger towards the “nihilistic” obstructionism of their adversaries. The press and political scientists are competing with somber diagnoses: American democracy is ill, Congress has the flu and Washington is broken.

Barack Obama was elected by promising to change the way Washington works. For his health insurance plan, he claims to want a bipartisan majority. Truth be told, such a majority has been absent for quite a while from Congress, whose paralysis is due to other factors, and in particular the financing of election campaigns.

Why do a large number of Democrats show no immediate inclination to vote for a reform of financial market operations? asks Robert Reich, former secretary under Bill Clinton. He wrote the answer in the Financial Times on January 12th: “Wall Street firms and executives […are] emerging as one of the largest benefactors of the Democrats.”* In 2009, Wall Street distributed $42 million to electoral campaigns of various politicians, Reich explains, but particularly to members of the banking commissions of the Senate and House. This doesn’t include $344 million spent on direct lobbying with Congress. If the great American democracy needs bipartisan reform in the Kennedy-Hatch style, the object of the reform is right here: the financing of electoral campaigns.

*Robert Reich original quote, from Financial Times’ 12 January article: “Why Obama must take on Wall Street”: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0666adfe-ffb6-11de-921f-00144feabdc0.html