Do We Have a Dysfunctional Congress – Or a Dysfunctional President?

As the presidential campaign heads into the fall, I assume President Obama will be out campaigning for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.  And I assume he will spend a lot of time complaining about the “dysfunctional Congress” that he has had to deal with and that has frustrated his efforts.  Except, I am not sure it is only Congress that is dysfunctional.  It might be the President, too.

President Obama likes to say he was elected twice by the American people to deal with our problems.  It is certainly true he was elected twice.  And the first time he was elected, a Democratic Congress was elected, too.  The problem for him was it didn’t last long.

Within a year after he was inaugurated, voters of Massachusetts (not the most Republican of states) elected a Republican, Scott Brown, to the Senate because of his promise to stop Obamacare.  President Obama was able to get Obamacare passed anyway by having the House pass the bill that had already cleared the Senate without any changes.  But it was a sloppy bill, with lots of drafting errors and other problems.  I am sure if you asked President Obama why he couldn’t get a better bill passed, he would say it was the fault of a dysfunctional Congress.  Except the Senate wasn’t being dysfunctional by not approving a better bill.  The Senate was doing exactly what the people of Massachusetts, and other states, wanted them to do in trying to stop Obamacare.

Then, in November of 2010, the voters elected a Republican majority to the House of Representatives.  After that, President Obama complained that the House Republicans created a dysfunctional Congress by not doing what he wanted.  On the other hand, a good case can be made that it was more the opposite:  It was the President who was being dysfunctional by not trying to cooperate with the newly-elected representatives.  President Obama may have been elected in 2008, but these representatives were elected in 2010.

In 2012, both President Obama and the House Republicans won.  Why did that mean, as the President seemed to think, that the House Republicans were supposed to give in to what he wanted to do?  It makes as much sense to say that President Obama should have given in to what the House Republicans wanted – and that, when he didn’t, the dysfunctionality was as much on his side as on Congress’s. 

And then, when the Republicans not only retained control of the House in 2014 but also won the Senate, the dysfunction indicator may have moved more to the President’s side.  At that point, didn’t the Republicans’ more recent victories mean more than President Obama’s win of almost four years ago now?  But President Obama’s view of working with people who disagree with him still seems to be to be, in effect: “Do it my way, and if you won’t, I’ll just have the bureaucracy do what I want anyway.”

So where is the dysfunction in Washington now?