Once President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20th, the Democratic Party will be in control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress. What does that mean for legislation?
Dan Cassino of Fairleigh Dickinson University breaks down the pros and cons of unified control as well as divided government.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
[00:00:03] Breaking news from Georgia, where Democrats have picked up at least one Senate seat in the state's highly charged runoff election. CBS News projects the Reverend Raphael Warnock...
Nick Capodice: [00:00:13] You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:15] I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:16] With a special election in Georgia cementing a Senate controlled by the Democratic Party, today, we explore this topic. What happens when one party controls the House, the Senate and the presidency?
Dan Cassino: [00:00:28] So this is what we in political science we call unified control.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:32] This is Dan Cassino, our stalwart civics Virgil and professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:37] Unified Control. I gotta remember that one.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:40] Yes. New vocab to keep in your civics back pocket. And again, unified control is when one party controls both chambers of Congress and the presidency.
Dan Cassino: [00:00:47] And unified control, to some extent, is the best case scenario for democracy because we don't have a division of responsibility.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:55] And when Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20th, we will again be in unified control. We were also in it during the first half of President Trump's term. But after the 2018 midterms, we were not in unified control. We were, and here's our second vocab term of the day, in what is called divided government.
Dan Cassino: [00:01:11] Democrats controlled the House. Republicans controlled the Senate and the presidency. If you don't like what's happening, who are you supposed to vote against? You don't know whose fault it is.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:21] This is something that we see this very moment. I remember during a 2020 debate, both candidates blamed the other party for not passing a covid-19 relief package.
[00:01:31] Why haven't you been able to get them the help? 30 seconds here.
[00:01:35] Because Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to approve it. I do.
[00:01:38] But you're the president.
[00:01:39] I do. But I still have to get unfortunately, that's one of the reasons I think we're going to take over the House.
[00:01:43] Because of the Republican leader in the United States Senate said he can't pass it. He will not be able to pass it. He does not have Republican votes. Why is he talking to his Republican friends?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:55] How common is unified control? I can't remember too many times in my life that the same party [00:02:00] had the White House and both chambers of government.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:03] Yeah, you're right. Divided government has been the norm in modern politics. But prior to the 1960s, with a few notable exceptions, unified control was the norm. President Woodrow Wilson and others criticized divided government for that division of responsibility. Wilson had a rather horrible quote about it. He wrote, How is the schoolmaster the nation to know which boy needs the whipping?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:28] Yikes.
Dan Cassino: [00:02:28] Which tells you something about pedagogy in the 1800s right. If I don't like what's happening in Congress, who am I supposed to vote against? Right. I don't know. So both parties can avoid responsibility because they can just blame on the other guy. If Nancy Pelosi doesn't push the policies you want, that's fine. You can just blame it on the Senate or blame it on the president. If the president's policies won't, you can blame it on Nancy Pelosi. There is divided accountability, and that makes it really hard. First off, for Congress to pass anything because our system is set up with multiple veto points. It's very easy to stop a bill from becoming a law and very hard to push it through. So that means it's hard to get anything done under divided government.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:06] Ok, so those are some of the downsides of divided government. Are there any potential benefits?
Nick Capodice: [00:03:12] Yeah, sure. The benefits of divided government aren't do different from the benefits of grand sweeping ideas like separation of powers and checks and balances. One party doesn't control everything, so there's a necessity for compromise. The branches are checking each other and so too are the parties.
Dan Cassino: [00:03:31] Under unified government is going to be easier to pass things through in general. But that also means that there's going to be greater accountability. After Obamacare was passed. Right. You've got the 2010 midterm election. Obamacare is pretty popular now. When was first passed, it was not at all popular. And so voters didn't have to look around, say, oh, who do I vote against? If I didn't like Obamacare, they knew exactly who to vote against. And they, in fact, did vote out Democrats in the House and in the Senate as punishment for passing bills that were unpopular at the [00:04:00] time.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:00] I am loath to quote Spider-Man and Civics one on one episode, but it sounds like Dan's saying with great power comes great responsibility.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:08] The Peter Parker principle is more than apt, Hannah. That's it for today's episode. Remember to submit your questions at our website, civics101podcast.org.
