Jonathan Kniss: Broken Legislature

Jonathan Kniss

Blog Post 1 Broken Legislature.

In a seemingly extremely polarized time period in our nations political history, one opinion seems to be held unanimously by Americans, and that is that congress is doing a bad job.

This recently completed Gallup poll conducted this year shows the consistent disapproval of congressional representatives. After hitting its peak of 84% in 2002, the congress has experience a steep and steady decline in support of their work. even dropping to a low of 9% during President Obama’s second term in 2014.  But what exactly is contributing to this negative view of our legislature, especially in the last few years?

A major part of this issue is addressed in the article “Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites’ by Brookman and Skovron. The constitution states that the job of the congress is to represent the individual constituents that they represent. However, the system suffers a major hit when the legislature fails to enact policies and conduct business in a way that is not conducive to the will of their constituents. In there article Brookman and Skovron provide many statistics and proving this to be the unfortunate predicament we are finding ourselves in. The major issue they address is the legislatures inability to accurately gage the standing of their constituents. One study they used stated that “American politicians from both parties in 2012 and 2014 believed that support for conservative positions on these issues in their constituencies was much higher than it actually was” (Brookman and Skovron). It is easy to see how a politician’s incorrect view of their constituents can lead to misinformed policy initiatives. The same study goes on to find that on the issue of gun control “Politicians’ right-skewed misperceptions exceed 20 percentage points” (Brookman and Skovron).

This table from their article shows the extent of such misperceptions of widely held American viewpoints.  All 5 of the first issues listed are considered to be liberal in their considerations.  In every case the elite perception assumed more of a conservative bias that was actually the case (Brookman and Skovron). And with respect to the prospect of more in-depth background checks for potential gun owners the estimate given by political elites was more than 35 points wrong in their estimates, unrealistically favoring the conservative viewpoint.

Jeffery Toobin in his article “Our Broken Constitution” addresses another flaw that many are worried about in our current system and that is a fundamental fracturing in the application of our constitution to a functioning legislature in 2019.  Although it is often stated with a sense of pride, the fact that the United States is utilizing the world’s oldest constitution is a statement that would have driven fear into the hearts of our founding father, including Thomas Jefferson  (Toobin). In the article  Sanford Levinson, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that the constitution “no longer works”. Taking this notion back to the foundation of the document he states that the constitution has “almost insurmountable barriers in the way of any acceptable notion of democracy.” (Toobin).  With political polarization and misrepresentation on the rise Levinson’s assumptions of the constitutions dysfunction in the legislature may be unfolding before our eyes.

References

BROOCKMAN, DAVID E., and CHRISTOPHER SKOVRON. “Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites.” American Political Science Review, vol. 112, no. 3, 2018, pp. 542–563., doi:10.1017/S0003055418000011.

Gallup, Inc. “Congress and the Public.”Gallup.com, Gallup, 12 Sept. 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx.

Toobin, Jeffery. “Our Broken Constitution”. The New Yorker. New York, NY. December 1, 2013. Accessed on September 16, 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/our-broken-constitution