Bishop Urges Civic Engagement

Former Representative Tim Bishop wasted no time at the East Hampton Library on Saturday in answering the question he had posed in the title of his talk — “The U.S. Congress: Is the Branch Still Broken?”

“Yes,” he said.

Mr. Bishop represented New York’s First Congressional District for six terms until his defeat in November. Now a professor of civic engagement and public service at St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue, Mr. Bishop identified what he called “the three Ms,” maps, money, and media, as the causes of Congressional dysfunction, and he implored his audience to vote and to encourage others to do so.

The 435 congressional districts are mapped in such a way that only 40 to 50 are truly competitive, he said. Because few incumbents represent a “swing” district, they have no incentive to occupy the middle of the political spectrum, fearing a primary challenger. “There’s been a retreat to the extremes on both sides,” he said, “because when your principal motivation is avoiding a primary, you’re going to move in those directions. The middle has essentially been abandoned.”

According to Mr. Bishop, the Republican Party’s center of gravity “has moved decidedly to the right.” Most moderate Republicans have retired and been replaced by those who are more conservative, he said. In addition, the number of Democrats from the South, who are typically less liberal than other members of their party, decreased from 60 when he took office to 18 now.

“The money exacerbates the extremes,” Mr. Bishop said, citing the 2010 Citizens United ruling in which the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on political spending by corporations and unions. Given the ideological chasm between the two parties, “being in the majority is more important,” he said. “The elections have become more vicious than they used to be.”

Omnipresent political talk media, Mr. Bishop said, also contributes to the rancor. “All of us are constantly being bombarded with whatever messages people consider would resonate,” he said, regardless of their accuracy. “You hear the same factually incorrect messages over and over, and pretty soon people are making judgments on issues they don’t understand and have no information on.”

The breakdown of bipartisanship and civility in Congress began with Newt Gingrich, a Republican who became speaker of the House in 1995, Mr. Bishop said. “His approach was that the Democrats had been the majority party for 40-some years, and the only way to dislodge Democrats from what had become for them a very comfortable perch was to basically blow up the Congress and demonstrate to the American people that Congress could not function under its current leadership, and the only remedy was to change that leadership,” Mr. Bishop said. “That was the beginning of the coarseness that permeates politicaldiscourse in Washington and elsewhere.”

The election of President Barack Obama worsened an environment that was already bitter, in Mr. Bishop’s opinion. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, “said his number-one priority was to see that Barack Obama was a one-term president,” Mr. Bishop said. “The way you do that is to shut down the Senate through the use of the 60-threshold,” the so-called filibuster rule. “That was a calculated political strategy, put in place so as to see to it that the Obama presidency had very little to show.” That led to a Republican stance that “the only way forward is new leadership,” and Republican success in the 2010 election.

Another particularly troubling development, Mr. Bishop said, is “the acceptance of legislative hostage-taking as a legitimate means of achieving one’s goals,” citing the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, which led to the downgrading of the federal government’s credit rating and the government shutdown two years later.

In the latter instance, the Affordable Care Act was the hostage, Mr. Bishop said, with Republicans refusing to allow a vote on an appropriations resolution that was not accompanied by a delay or repeal of the act. “What was not available to the Republicans at the ballot box or in the judicial realm, they decided to try to get through other means,” Mr. Bishop said, calling it “a real break from tradition.”

With Republicans enjoying majorities in both the House and Senate, “the motivation is completely different,” Mr. Bishop said, pointing to “somewhat more movement,” particularly in the Senate. However, a schism between “the conservative right and the really, really conservative right,” he said, “is presenting its own contribution to dysfunction.”

Mr. Bishop said that last week’s decision by Florida’s Supreme Court striking down a redistricting map that it said was drawn intentionally to favor Republican incumbents and disadvantage Democrats, was a positive development that could have national implications. He added that gerrymandering should be outlawed and congressional districts drawn by nonpartisan committees.

His overall message on Saturday was clear: “As a country we must become dramatically more civically engaged. . . . Our participatory democracy only works if we participate.”