Has Congress Always Been So Divided?

mAY 29, 2008

CBNNews.com - CBN News Reporter John Jessup recently spoke with Donald Ritchie, an historian with the U.S. Senate. He talked about whether Washington D.C. has always been as partisan as it today.

Watch for more, or read the transcript below.

John Jessup: Are things really as acrimonious as they seem?

Donald Ritchie: They're certainly more polarized than they've been. I came to work for the Senate in 1970s and very rarely was there ever a partyline vote any the issue. Almost every issue was a bipartisan. And, today most votes in the Senate tend to be a party line votes.

I think what's changed over time, in many ways, are the parties themselves. In the 1970s both the Democrats and the Republicans were internally divided. Both had very strong conservative wings and very strong liberal wings. And what happened was, on every vote, people tended to vote their ideology rather than their party. So conservative Democrats voted with conservative Republicans. Liberal Republicans voted with liberal Democrats.

Now both parties are very internally cohesive. They're fairly united And neither party has a large group of middle of the roaders who can form those kinds of compromises the way it was possible in the past. And so it tends to pit the parties against each other and makes it harder for the leadership to find that sort of common ground that you really need to accomplish in the United States Senate.

JJ: What's changed? Has it always been this way?

DR: The voters have changed in who they elect. For instance in the 1970s all of the southern states were represented by Democrats and there were southern conservative Democrats. It was a tradition that went back to the Civil War. Beginning with Richard Mixon and his southern strategy. The Republican party started to make inroads in the South, and now most of the southern senators are Republican rather than Democrat. That's a completely different situation than you had in the 1970s.

So that root of southern conservative Democrats pretty much doesn't exist anymore. By contrast, the Republican party had an Eisenhower wing and a Goldwater wing - the Eisenhower wing, middle of the road, more moderate to liberal Republicans. Over time, that sort of moderate Republican wing has diminished. But essentially the Democratic party is the liberal to moderate part of the process and Republican party is the moderate to conservative part of the process.

They sorted themselves out in a way that didn't exist years ago. And that has to do with elections. That's one thing the Congress doesn't have control over in the end. So you get this sort of built in extra separation of powers that, in itself, creates some polarization. You pit one branch against the other. Especially if the two parties control the different branches, they'll be more contentiousness.

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