“I don’t believe the American people want us to focus on our job security, they want us to focus on their job security,” President Obama said at his face-off with Republican members of the House yesterday. In fact, one of the keys to getting Washington focus on our job security, and any and all other issues we’re concerned about, is to focus on the security of our legislators.
Everyone knows that Congress is a bit like a university: once people gets tenure, it’s hard to get rid of them. Incumbents in both houses of Congress have enormous advantages–higher name recognition, the ability to raise money, the ability to do things (or to at least appear to.) But the single greatest advantage incumbents enjoy is having a safe seat–a seat where the incumbent’s party enjoys a huge advantage in registration. Thanks to state of the art district-drawing processes, most districts are drawn to give one party or another that huge head start. (Take a look at the map in the illustration, which can be viewed more clearly here; it aims to show the tornado-twisty 15th district, but just looking at the bizarrely-drawn shapes of on this map shows that a clever hand was at work here.) And that means that voters lose out, and not just the voters from the other party. The incumbent doesn’t have to work as hard for any of his constituents.
It’s not a hard concept to understand. You may be a committed Coke drinker, but you benefit enormously from having Pepsi in the world. The presence of Pepsi makes Coke compete harder, to get in more outlets so as to be more available, to add new products and premiums and promotions, to keep prices down. Wherever Coke or any brand has a monopoly, it just doesn’t have to do as much to please its customers.
Ideally, legislative seats should be competitive. Ideally, candidates from both parties, including incumbents, would be working hard to try to attract voters from the other side, through service, through initiative, by getting things done. Yes, we want our elected officials to take strong stands and offer firm leadership. But seldom does it benefit the majority when they are hard-core partisans.
But that’s what we’ve got. In most districts, the incumbents have to please the party activists, who are usually more partisan and more extreme than the ordinary voter. And so the incumbents have no incentive to compromise. As long as they keep delivering to their base, their jobs are secure. And that’s why changing parties seldom gets us what we want. We get new faces and new positions, but we get the same old way of doing business.
What we need is a voter movement–a bipartisan, cross-party movement to insist that next year, after the census results are in, the state legislators who are drawing the new Congressional districts stop serving the political incumbents and the political parties. They need to draw fewer safe seats, and to start drawing more competitive seats. President Obama speaks for millions when he says that he’d like to end the partisan obstructionism epidemic in our politics. Persuasion, however, is not the way to do that. Competition–good old market forces–is the best way to put the good of the people back in politics.