![]() ![]() In 2017, the Daily Beast went so far as to argue that political gridlock is “killing us, literally.” The blog argued that gridlock and lack of political will were allowing politicians to dodge dealing with issues like gun control and the soaring national debt: “our political system is grinding to a halt and producing more demagoguery than governance. ![]() Journalists and politicians periodically complain that gridlock is making it impossible to solve the most serious problems of our day. They accuse us of a lot of other stuff.”įew people seem to share Scalia’s sunny view of gridlock. Congress doesn’t have to do that…That’s the principle reason people don’t accuse us of gridlock. ![]() We can’t just say, ‘We haven’t decided about this case, so go away.’ Sooner or later you gotta vote, so there it is. At the same time, Scalia did point out that the Supreme Court operates more smoothly than the rest of the federal government. “We have to act. “Gridlock is what our system is designed for,” he told the president of the Newseum. The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia argued that gridlock has gotten a bad rap in fact, Scalia said, gridlock is just one more necessary part of the founding fathers’ plan. Alexander Hamilton complained bitterly about the trouble the Continental Congress had in coming to an agreement the debates between the Federalists and the Republicans were as fierce as any debates today. Humming along at nearly 10 petaFLOPS, Stampede is a formidable force.In politics, gridlock is a situation in which the government is unable to pass new legislation, often because the presidency and the Congress are controlled by different political parties.Īs the Brookings Institution has pointed out, gridlock has been around for as long as the United States, if not longer. Fortunately, TACC allocated time on their Stampede supercomputer to help Svensen make short work of those numbers. Seventy years of voting history quickly adds up to more than a typical computer can handle, however. His study looks at US voting since the second World War. "By recovering estimates of legislator preferences on all roll call voting, I create polarization scores to describe the change." ![]() "I want to understand how party polarization in Congress has changed over time due to both increased and divergent spending priorities," says Svensen. Ideology scores range from -1 (extremely liberal) to +1 (extremely conservative), and are derived from roll call votes. To find out why, Svensen compares biennial legislator ideology scores with annual spending. With a completely Republican-controlled Congress and a Democratic president, the tenacity of legislative gridlock is now unprecedented. What changed? Political realities: Mandatory spending for programs like Defense, Social Security, and Medicaid cannot be cut without a great deal of political pain, which means discretionary funding is dwindling. "Even during the Nixon administration, where there was a Republican president and Democratic Congress and a major war, government passed a large number of landmark laws," said Svensen, a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Government. But before the Reagan era, US government shutdowns didn't happen. Employees and soldiers are not paid national parks and monuments are closed government offices are shuttered - everything just stops. With the help of Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) supercomputing, University of Texas-Austin researcher Eric Svensen hopes to determine why this political strategy emerged.įederal functions cease when the government stops. Political infighting has halted the US federal government 12 times in the last 34 years. Eric Svensen, researcher and lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, is using Stampede to track political polarization and ideologically-driven spending priorities. ![]()
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