{"id":5139,"date":"2022-05-15T14:28:51","date_gmt":"2022-05-15T14:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/15\/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret-congress\/"},"modified":"2022-05-15T14:28:51","modified_gmt":"2022-05-15T14:28:51","slug":"the-rise-and-importance-of-secret-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/15\/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise and importance of Secret Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The core of the Secret Congress theory is that on highly salient issues, lawmaking is dominated by the question of which party controls which chambers and by how slim their majorities are. Under these circumstances, polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock, and when solutions pass, they pass on a near party line. <br><br>Highly salient successes tend to be the most famous legislative achievements of a president\u2019s term (the ACA for Obama, the TCJA for Trump, the ARP for Biden). <br><br>Highly salient failures tend to be what people point to when they call Congress gridlocked: the 2013 Manchin-Toomey background checks bill, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the American Health Care Act, the Dream Act, etc.<br><br>But while these highly salient issues are the subject of heated debate in Regular Congress, Secret Congress keeps plugging away in obscurity. <br><br>The key is that public attention creates incredibly perverse incentives. Members of the minority (rightly) think that any popular, well-known bill that passes on a bipartisan basis is going to help the standing of the president. David Mayhew\u2019s book \u201cDivided We Govern\u201d studies the 1946-2002 period and finds that periods in which the president and Congress are on opposite sides generate just as much legislation as periods of unified government. Another classic Mayhew book, \u201cCongress: The Electoral Connection,\u201d is about how members of Congress like to win elections. Getting bills passed helps members win re-election by giving them things to take credit for. But in an era where congressional voting is so highly correlated with presidential approval, and primary electorates say they\u2019d rather have members that fight the other party than help their own state, it\u2019s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.slowboring.com\/p\/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret\">https:\/\/www.slowboring.com\/p\/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The core of the Secret Congress theory is that on highly salient issues, lawmaking is dominated by the question of which party controls which chambers and by how slim their majorities are. Under these circumstances, polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock, and when solutions pass, they pass on a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1kT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}