Deirdre Shesgreen

USATODAY

WASHINGTON – On May 20, the House was about to clear a bill by voice vote to award a gold medal to Ohio native and golf star Jack Nicklaus – a gesture by Congress to recognize his “service to the nation” for promoting good sportsmanship and philanthropy.

Rep. Thomas Massie, who represents Northern Kentucky, was incensed. The Garrison Republican raced to the House floor and demanded a roll call vote, trying to persuade his GOP colleagues to oppose the measure. Despite Massie’s efforts, it passed easily – 371-to-10.

To the Kentucky Republican, that vote stands as a small symbol of what’s wrong with Congress – lawmakers rushing to approve feel-good bills without truly evaluating their costs or their merit.

“Giving a gold medal to a golf figure ... is not a good use of our resources,” Massie said. “(Nicklaus) didn’t die on the golf course, and he’s got plenty of medals.”

Massie has voted “no” at least 324 times so far in the 113th Congress – opposing about one of every three measures that have come to the House floor since January 2013. Politico dubbed him “Mr. No”; even some local Republicans worried about Massie’s contrarian nature, and the longtime president of the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Steve Stevens, briefly explored – but then dropped – a potential primary challenge.

Massie has voted against Republican bills, Democratic bills and bipartisan bills. He has opposed sweeping policy proposals, such as a GOP-crafted bill to map out national defense policy for 2014. And he’s opposed minor, almost meaningless bills, like a proposal to name an interstate bridge after baseball legend Stan Musial.

Some might look at his voting record and see a reason for the gridlock that has essentially paralyzed this Congress – an explanation for why Congress can’t tackle big issues or small ones. There’s no question that Massie is part of a band of arch-conservatives who have tugged the Republican Party strongly to the right – making any form of compromise with the Democrats extremely difficult for House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester.

Massie: It’s not always bad when bills die

Two congressional scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, have analyzed the rightward shift of the Republican Party and concluded that it has contributed significantly to the current congressional dysfunction.

The GOP has become dominated by “an insurgent outlier” who abhors compromise and has declared “war on the government,” they write in their 2012 book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.” The Democratic Party is “no paragon of civic virtue,” Ornstein and Mann write, but its members are “more ideologically centered and diverse.”

The asymmetrical paths of the two parties “constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance,” they conclude. Ornstein is a congressional expert with the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, and Mann is with the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

Massie agrees that Congress isn’t working. But he says the tea party faction in the House is not contributing to the sorry state of affairs in Washington.

He says he votes against more bills than many of his colleagues because he’s giving them more scrutiny – and appropriately so. If there were more lawmakers like him – super conservative with an obsession for the details – Congress would work much better, he said. He said most bills cost money and are unaffordable given the debt.

While Massie says he’s no fan of gridlock, he does see some problems with consensus. That’s because when Republicans and Democrats agree on something, he says, it’s almost always to spend more money.

He jokes that the buttons lawmakers push to register their votes on the House floor – which are labeled “yea” and “nay” – should be relabeled “spend” and “don’t spend.” And more of his colleagues should hit the “don’t spend” button as often as possible, as he does.

Massie also says that legislative stalemate isn’t always bad. Take, for example, a patent reform bill that the House passed in April. Supporters said the measure was needed to stop “patent trolls” who buy up patents and then sue companies for infringement in an effort to win big legal settlements.

Massie argued that it would help big companies at the expense of small inventors who are trying to protect their innovations. He said the bill would have reduced the value of their intellectual property. He tried to kill the bill. It sailed through the House on a vote of 325-to-91, but it has since stalled in the Senate – thanks in part, Massie says, to his efforts to bring more scrutiny to the bill and highlight its negative potential.

“When things die because of dysfunction, I think that’s bad. Now when things die because the process worked, I think that’s good,” Massie said.

‘Half-measures’ are the new norm

Whatever the explanation for gridlock, there’s no doubt that this Congress is immobilized by it.

Lawmakers are deadlocked over immigration reform. They can’t agree on a bill to modernize the U.S. Postal Service. They’re fighting over how to renew an expiring transportation bill. While lawmakers in both parties say they support overhauling the tax code, no one expects them to do it.

Sarah Binder, an expert on Congress and governance at Brookings, said that, even when the two parties do manage to reach an agreement, it’s often a last-minute, narrow deal. A short-term extension of the highway bill, for example, or a stop-gap spending bill to keep the government open for a few months.

“Half measures, second bests, and just-in-time legislating are the new norm,” Binder wrote last month in a paper on gridlock.

Her analysis concluded that the last Congress, the 112th, was the most gridlocked in the post-war era – tied with the 106th Congress, which convened in 1999-2000. Almost three-quarters of the nation’s most pressing issues remained unresolved at the end of both sessions, according to Binder’s analysis.

The 113th appears to be on track to achieve the same dismal results, she said.

She and others say that the polarization between the two parties has become so acute, it’s almost impossible for lawmakers to find any common ground.

“You just have very different approaches to issues of the day,” she said, whether it’s on immigration policy or energy issues.

With the “problem-solving capacity” of Congress at a low point, she said, long-term problems are left to fester at a steep cost to the American public.

Massie doesn’t dispute there’s a cost to dysfunction, but he says it won’t be solved by electing more moderates to Congress or closing the ideological chasm between the two parties.

He said congressional leaders need to come up with a way to make the process work more smoothly – something to replace earmarks, which Democrats and Republicans alike used to use to grease the legislative skids. Earmarks are the special projects that funneled federal dollars to lawmakers’ home districts. And Massie said he understands, watching lawmakers dither on the House floor about their votes, why they helped congressional leaders rack up support for various bills.

Instead of earmarks, Massie said, “the new process seems to be to create a crisis right before Christmas break (or) create one right before the election” as a way to get lawmakers to fall into line. That, he said, has led to “chaos” – and a lot of bad bills being whisked through Congress without enough examination.

In the meantime, Massie said he takes solace in small steps forward. He noted that in the last Congress, the Jack Nicklaus gold medal bill only got 4 votes before dying in the Senate. This time, the opposition in the House has swelled to 10, and the Senate still hasn’t acted on it.

“Things are improving,” he said. “We need more of me here.” ⬛

Why Massie voted ‘no’

Of 823 votes cast so far this year, Massie voted yes 499 times and he voted no 324 times, according to a Gannett Washington Bureau analysis. The analysis relied on a vote database maintained by the Washington Post.

• The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2014 authorized about $552 billion for national defense programs and another $85.8 billion for Afghanistan and other overseas contingency operations. It passed the House on June 14, 2013 by a vote of 315-108.

Why Massie voted no: Among other things, he objected to a provision that preserves the ability of the government to detain indefinitely American citizens suspected of terrorist activity.

• The Stolen Valor Act, which passed the House 390-to-3 on May 20, 2013, and is now law, made it a crime to lie for profit about being the recipient of military medals or decorations.

Why Massie voted no: He felt it duplicated another federal law and was overly broad because it failed to define “fraudulently.”

• The United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 would bolster cooperation between the U.S. and Israel on a number of fronts, including defense, cyber-security, energy and trade. The measure cleared the House by a vote of 410-to-1 on March 5, 2014. The Senate has not taken up the measure yet.

Why Massie voted no: Massie said this bill would have subsidized green energy companies in Israel. He said he wouldn’t support subsidies for American green energy companies, let alone foreign ones.

• A $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government for fiscal year 2014. The measure softened across-the-board budget cuts and came after a bitter fiscal fight that sparked a government shutdown. The measure passed the House 359-to-67 on Jan. 15, 2014, and the Senate approved it the next day.

Why Massie voted no: Massie said the bill exceeded agreed-to budget cuts – trading “spending increases in 2014 and 2015 for spending reductions in 2022 and 2023.”

About this series

Forget big stuff like immigration reform and a tax overhaul. Lawmakers in Washington are unable or unwilling to approve even modest, bipartisan bills. Congress is often paralyzed even when it comes to must-pass legislation, such as spending measures and transportation proposals.

What is the real cause of this legislative dysfunction and its impact on Greater Cincinnati residents? This is the second in an occasional series of articles aimed at pulling back the curtain on congressional gridlock and documenting how it affects average Tristate residents.

EARLIER:

Sen. Rob Portman and House Speaker John Boehner are both influential Republican members of Congress from Greater Cincinnati. But even they couldn't agree on a plan to extend unemployment benefits.

The result: The long-term unemployed in Ohio – where many are still struggling to rebound after the recession – are left in limbo. What went wrong?

Talk to us

How has Washington gridlock affected you – for better or worse? Email the Enquirer's Washington correspondent Deirdre Shesgreen at

dshesgreen@enquirer.com.