Steve Huefner, my colleague at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and its Election Law program, and I had a conversation about the stresses and challenges facing democracy in the United States. A recording is available. I found the discussion productive, and I hope others do as well.
One main theme of the discussion—the nation’s electoral and political institutions that worked reasonably well in the aftermath of World War II no longer function adequately because of changes in cultural conditions affecting American elections and politics—is echoed in an essay that Bruce Cain contributed to the “100 ideas in 100 days” series at NYU Law School’s Democracy Project. (Rick Pildes blogged about Bruce’s essay earlier today.) Bruce, whose previous work has greatly influenced my own thinking on America’s “Madisonian” system, writes in this essay: “We need to ask ourselves whether the Congressional rules that worked so well in the post-WWII period are the right ones for the current polarized era.”
Bruce ends his essay with the intriguing suggestion that the United States would benefit from a “28th Amendment” that would require members of Congress to “go without pay if they could not pass the budget on time.” I’m not sure that would be a sufficient fix for the current problems caused by partisan polarization. I would add the necessity for the kind of electoral reform that former Senator Joe Manchin embraced this weekend, which I wrote about in my recent Common Ground Democracy post. But I wholeheartedly agree with Bruce that all of us should be brainstorming about what institutional innovations would restore our Madisonian system to the kind of well-functioning equilibrium that existed in the post-WWII period.
