To begin with, I want to congratulate Juliet Eilperin on an insightful, well-reported, very well written and engaging book on a topic of enormous importance. While issues such as partisanship and civility within a single political institution may seem purely procedural and abstract, relevant only to those involved, they are in fact deeply relevant to all the matters of substance - taxes, health care, foreign policy - we care about.

I’ll make some modestly critical points about the book, but first, I want to identify two points in Eilperin’s argument that were generally persuasive to me, or at least lifted some of my skepticism.

First, I had been deeply skeptical of the scheduling theory of congressional partisanship, the idea that with only two days a week in Washington, members don’t form personal ties that cut across party lines. Eilperin’s reporting begins to bring me around on this theory. It is astonishing, from her account, how little members seem to know one another. It’s almost enough to make me nostalgic for the old slap-on-the-back boy’s club atmosphere of Washington that seemed disturbing and corrupt to me when I was first here in the early 90s.

Second, Eilperin’s reporting on redistricting added a lot to my understanding of that issue and persuaded me that it is more relevant to hyper-partisanship than I had thought. Still, I think she overstates the case. States that have independent redistricting commissions, such as Arizona and Iowa, didn’t have competitive congressional or legislative elections in 2004. The only way to guarantee even a modest number of competitive races within the assumptions of a winner-take-all system would be through a program like that rejected by Ohio voters last year, in which districts would be constructed with the sole goal of competitiveness, linking Republican and Democratic areas into sprawling and illogical conglomerations of their own. That shouldn’t be surprising. Most “natural” districts are likely to have a general preference for one party or the other, and/or to be happy with their incumbent. More competitive races occur only when that preference is in transition, as in the South through the 80s and 90s and more recently in Northeastern districts currently represented by the last Republicans who will ever hold those seats. One thing that happened in 1994 was a massive alignment of partisan preference with districts, caused by nationalizing the election around the backlash against Clinton. Going into the 1994 election, 53 House Democrats represented districts that had voted for George H. W. Bush in 1992, even as Bush 41 carried only 37 percent of the national vote, whereas today, only 18 Republicans represent Kerry districts. 1994 was simply the last gasp of the arrangement that had prevailed through most of the postwar era, in which conservative Democrats (very conservative Democrats, incidentally, and not “centrists” as Eilperin suggest) dominated Congress, creating a structure that James McGregor Burns described in the 50s as four separate parties, which intersected and aligned in different ways on different issues. Those situations are anomalous.

As some commentors have pointed out, the only way to really introduce competition and unpredictability into House elections is to get rid of winner-take-all elections and introduce multi-member districts chosen through some form of proportional representation. I don’t think that’s a politically viable solution or worth much effort, but it is a fact that should be acknowledged in any discussion of redistricting.

I also wish that Eilperin had acknowledged the role of money in reinforcing the partisanship of districts. One of the notable facts about the recent congressional scandals is that, while most of the members identified in either the Abramoff or Wade/Wilkes affairs held demographically safe seats, they also consistently faced opponents who had no more than a few thousand dollars to spend. As a result, not only were they assured of victory, they were assured that their conduct in office would receive no close scrutiny whatsoever in the election year. Here some fault lies with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which targets resources on only the handful of districts deemed winnable, leaving hundreds of Republicans untouched and further narrowing the number of potentially competitive seats.

Now on to my real issues with the book. The biggest complaint I had was the number and the audacity of the moral equivalencies created, those misleading “both-parties-share-responsibility” sentences that seem wired to hot keys on many computers at the Washington Post. This is not the predictable moral equivalence between the supposedly horrible way the Democrats ran the House before 1994 and Republican conduct today, which Eilperin handles well. Rather, it is an equivalence between the powerful majority party and the powerless minority in today’s Congress. Three notable examples:

• Eilperin resurrects an episode from 1999 in which the appointment of a new House chaplain descended into partisan squabbling. It is very useful to be reminded that little things like this, vaguely remembered and entirely irrelevant, can nonetheless have longstanding consequences, much as the 1980s battle over the “Bloody Eighth” district of Indiana did. But Eilperin ruins the effect by equating Republican resentment over Democrats’ misbehavior in the chaplain fight (misbehavior of which she gives no evidence except for one quote from a backbencher criticizing the Republicans for rejecting a Catholic candidate) with Democratic resentment over the impeachment of President Clinton. These are simply not parallel situations.

• Former Representative Billy Tauzin’s acceptance of a job as the top lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry months after writing the Medicare prescription drug bill based on the wish list of that same industry was a disgraceful episode and a prime example of Michael Kinsley’s famous aphorism that the scandal in Washington is not the crimes but what’s legal. Yet somehow, in Eilperin’s account, this becomes another example of Democratic excess. The fault, it seems, lies with Nancy Pelosi for, Tauzin says, telling him that she believed his claim that he began negotiating for the job only after the Medicaid bill was passed, but failing to silence Democrats who suggested otherwise. (Tauzin had already announced his retirement, had been passed over for his first choice lobbying job, and was widely mentioned as a candidate to run PhRMA. When he began the formal negotiations is irrelevant, and what Pelosi said or didn’t say to him is doubly or triply irrelevant.)
• According to Eilperin, Rep. Bob Filner became aware of a constituent, a dentist, who had a problem with an absurd application of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule. Democrats warned him against making an effort to change the rule, she says, on the grounds that it would open the door to undermining OSHA, and Republicans told him that if he introduced such a bill, they would use the opportunity to undermine OSHA. Thus, Eilperin says, “both parties” were responsible for blocking this reasonable fix. What? One party, the party with all the power, is determined to gut OSHA, and has never been ashamed to say that it will take any opportunity to do so. Democrats point this out to Filner, and Republicans admit it. How are “both parties” responsible?

Although I appreciate Eilperin’s disciplined focus on the House, our understanding of partisanship would benefit if she discussed the Senate a little bit. Her only mention of the Senate comes in saying that increased partisanship in the Senate can be explained as a secondary effect of partisanship in the House, because more Senators are former House members and thus are more partisan. She cites Senators Boxer, Schumer, Coburn and Vitter. But Schumer (who I don’t consider very partisan) and Boxer did not serve in the House in the hyper-partisan era she describes, and there’s no evidence presented that House members are inherently more partisan than others within the very different climate of the Senate. For example, there’s little doubt that Bill Frist is the most aggressively partisan Senate leader in history, but he never served a day in the House (and didn’t even vote), whereas the less partisan Tom Daschle, Trent Lott and Bob Dole all did serve there. Paul Wellstone and Jon Corzine were both pretty partisan Democrats and never served in the House, while that great icon of bipartisanship, John McCain, did.

I worked in the Senate, so my perspective on the House is always from that angle (although hopefully without the usual contempt). My favorite example of the pre-Gingrich Democratic House involves an argument I had with a staffer to Dick Gephardt a month or two before the 1994 election. Senator Bradley and a handful of Senators from both parties had succeeded in putting a provision into that year’s crime bill allocating $1 billion for after-school programs in the name of crime prevention. Gephardt wanted to change the provision in some way, and I warned that if he got his way, we risked losing our hard-won Republican allies. “Since when do we give a shit what Republicans think?” Gephardt’s staffer asked, which said it all about an office that was about to become the Minority Leader’s. But at the same time, there was a tension. She backed off. In normal politics, the Senate presses back on the House, as in this case, forcing some acknowledgement of the necessity for bipartisanship. But when bipartisanship becomes unnecessary in the Senate, there is no such pressure on the House.

That’s what’s happened as a consequence of the increasing abuse of the budget reconciliation process for major legislation, which overrides the Senate rules that allow unlimited debate and makes the Senate a strictly majoritarian institution, along with the abuse of the conference committee process, such as on the Energy Bill, to produce legislation that bears little resemblance to that passed by the Senate, but forces an up-or-down vote in the Senate. These tactics essentially cut the minority out in the Senate, and as a result, there is even less pressure than before on the House to respect its own minority. It is not that the House infects the Senate, but that when the Senate turns into the House, the House gets even worse.

And this goes, I think, to my overwhelming reaction to Eilperin’s book. It treats the post-1994 House both in isolation and as if it were a single era of gradually increasing partisanship. But partisanship, which is neither an inherently good or bad thing, means very different things and has very different consequences depending on other circumstances. The circumstances from the 2002 election until at least the resignation of Tom DeLay, in which one party has held control of the Presidency and also both houses of Congress, and has been able to exercise that control in top-down fashion, has been unique in modern history. Democrats theoretically had such control in 1992 and 1993, but could barely exercise it and conservatives such as Tauzin still held great power in the party. Jimmy Carter offended the congressional barons and was never able to exercise such control. Even LBJ, because of the power of the conservative Southerners, needed help from Everett Dirksen’s Republicans to form majorities. In these particular, unique, circumstances, it is the party that holds all the power that bears responsibility for the tone and practice of politics, while the party that holds no power at all can only do its best to get its act together.

Over the weekend, before reading Eilperin’s book, I read a fascinating law review article by Daryl Levinson and Rick Pildes, “Separation of Parties, Not Powers.” They draw on a comment in Justice Jackson’s Youngstown Steel decision in which Jackson notes that “The rise of the pary system has made a significant extraconstitutional supplement to real executive power….Party loyalities….extend his effective control into branches of government other than his own.” In other words, the doctrine of separation of powers assumes that Congress and the presidency have separate institutional interests and will naturally struggle; what Pildes and Levinson point out is that there are no institutional interests and if all the branches operate through one political party, there is actually no struggle at all. The Founders’ vision of separation of powers works only if the branches are separated by party. This is easily illustrated in the recent subservience of congressional leaders to massive claims of power by a president of their own party. Levinson and Pildes suggest some measures to institutionalize split-ticket voting or through other means ensure that the parties, rather than the branches of government, exercise some checks on one another. These, too, are far-fetched solutions, but the Levinson-Pildes article is a strong reminder that “partisanship” that takes the form of giving one party and its leader total control over the U.S. government is a very different matter than partisanship that results in power being divided and checked. That’s a perspective that I found missing from Eilperin’s book.

My greatest fear coming out of this singularly partisan era is that the Democrats, especially those who became interested or involved in politics only in the last few galvanizing years, will think this is the way it is, that an era of one-party absolute control will be or should be followed by another. It will not be. Even if by 2009, Democrats win back the House, Senate and presidency, they will not be able to govern as the current Republican majority governs but will need to find ways to work together, especially given the need for unpopular actions such as postponed tax increases and difficult choices as on Iraq and health care. Eilperin’s book shows how much the common practices within Congress that might make these decisions possible have been eroded, and that is indeed a great tragedy.