A Washington Buckeye Wannabe

President Barack Obama helps spell out "Ohio" with the Weithman family, Rachel, 9, Josh, 11, and mom Rhonda, in their home in Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 18, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Reprinted from yesterday's Columbus Dispatch.

Congress back on track? Not yet, says Congressional Scholar Thomas E. Mann

On Tuesday, August 17, the Glenn School's Washington Office hosted a reception at the Phoenix Park Hotel to honor the 15 participants in the Summer 2010 Washington Academic Internship Program. A number of internship supervisors, mentors, and local alumni were in attendance.

The program featured Thomas E. Mann, holder of the W. Averell Harriman Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and co-author, with Norman Ornstein, of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, one of the textbooks in our public policy seminar.

Dr. Mann was educated at the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. He came to Washington forty years ago as a Congressional Fellow in the offices of Senator Philip A. Hart and Representative James G. O’Hara, and apparently he never looked back. He quickly became an expert on Congressional procedures and the history of the institution. He calls himself a “hardcore partisan” of Congress and of the legislative process generally, and he ranks among the wisest and most approachable of Washington's talking heads. Among the many accolades bestowed on Dr. Mann is the Glenn School’s Excellence in Public Service Award, which he won in 2006.

We asked him to share his thoughts about whether, a year and a half into the Obama Administration, Congress is getting “back on track.” Dr. Mann argued that while the branch is still "broken," the 111th Congress accomplished a great deal more than the public is inclined to give it credit for. The Washington Buckeye found that entirely persuasive, though one can imagine a legislature being so broken that a "Do Nothing" Congress might actually be preferable to a productive one.

Rufus Miles and Bob Gates

Rufus Miles (1910-1996) was born in Columbus and is remembered for having been a senior federal administrator for many years. Here is his New York Times obituary.

It was Miles who famously observed that "Where you stand depends upon where you sit," which is usually understood to mean that if you know what's in the best interest of a particular agency or department, you know the opinions of its senior staff. It has come to be known as Miles's Law, and it works almost every time.

As usual, it's the exception that proves the rule. And Exhibit A is Robert Gates, who recently announced that he would be stepping down as Secretary of Defense sometime in 2011. Fareed Zakaria profiled Gates in his August 16 column in the Washington Post. Here's a Secretary of Defense who has the temerity to suggest that there's something terribly wrong when the Pentagon has ten times as many accountants as the United States has foreign service officers. And now, in today's (August 17, 2010) Post, Walter Pincus talks about some of the radical changes Gates is willing to contemplate in his quest to "change the Pentagon culture and to cap spending."

Bob Gates will be sorely missed.

The Empty Chamber

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer makes the same argument, specifically about the Senate,in the current issue of The New Yorker.

Actually, no one has issued this indictment more eloquently than Senator Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--and, as a wag once suggested--never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."

No doubt these issues will be rehearsed at the Phoenix Park next Tuesday evening, when the Glenn Fellows will have a chance to talk to Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

The Billionaires and their Pledge

Last week one of our summer 2010 Glenn Fellows, Sean Fitzpatrick, commented on the recent agreement by 40 or so billionaires to give at least half their money to registered charities. Steven Pearlstein commented in his column in Saturday's Washington Post. Not exactly Sean's point, I don't think, but also worth pondering.

In explaining the high rates of charitable giving in the United States, it's hard to overstate the importance of generous tax deductions that encourage philanthropy. For me the interesting question becomes, is our high rate of charitable giving a reflection of the tax code, or is the code an expression of our distinctive culture? Or does the influence flow both ways?