WASHINGTON – If there's one area where pundits and politicians seem to agree, it's that the gridlock resulting from the nation's first perpetual election is a terribly unfortunate development.
The Washington Post fretted about the "legitimacy of the election." Caroll Doherty of the Pew Research Center darkly confided to another reporter that "if it goes on into January, it will be a national crisis." The New York Daily News, meanwhile, went so far as to warn that the Florida uncertainty "could throw the whole U.S. election system – and American democracy itself – into a constitutional crisis of unpredictable and nightmarish proportions."
Whew.
Not to mention the hardly energizing effect the perpetual election has had on the stock market. Monday's plunge in the Nasdaq index was the kind of bone-chilling drop not seen since U.S. District Judge Thomas Jackson sided with the Feds in their antitrust campaign against Microsoft.
Still, in the cold economics of politics, one person's setbacks are another's welcome boon. Might the costs of this perpetual election be outweighed by the benefits?
In other words, might gridlock be good?
"Gridlock is good if there will be less regulation and fewer pieces of legislation passed," says James Gattuso, vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former FCC official under President Bush. "I don't see the situation as leading to policy gridlock, though. It's more uncertainty than gridlock."
Instead, Gattuso says he's worried about something far more subtle: Not what happens in the next Congress, but what goes on in the waning days of the Clinton administration as exiting bureaucrats enact a welter of last-minute regulations before the Republicans take over.
"A lot of people have been concerned about midnight regulations: Democratic officials getting regulations through during the transition period," Gattuso says. "By shortening the period, there may be less room for mischief."
President Carter's administration did precisely that, rushing to enact new rules just before he vacated the White House. The U.S. Department of Labor's history says that as soon as President Reagan took office, he signed "a memorandum in January 1981 from the president to all federal agencies freezing for two months the issuance of most of the 'midnight' regulations that had been published by the departing Carter Administration."
And during the last days of President Johnson's administration, the president had his Justice Department file a massive antitrust lawsuit against IBM. The computer maker only disposed of the case 13 years later, when the Reagan administration abandoned it in 1982.
Few Washington insiders predict unexpected moves of that kind. What's seen as a far more likely outcome of the Florida lawsuits is a weakened president who takes office after a disputed election and then attempts to work with a Congress in which neither major party has a commanding advantage.
In that kind of a hostile environment, it's easy for legislators to be obstructionist.
The 106th Congress, which will end when the new members take office in January, has frequently been labeled, with some justification, a "do-nothing" Congress. It did not, for instance, approve anti-spam legislation, regulations of Internet data collection or restrictions on gambling, even though plenty of hearings were devoted to those topics.
"(Gridlock is) a good argument when it comes to technology because there hasn't been an aggressive, hands-on approach," says Bob Levy, a lawyer at the Cato Institute. "But in so many other areas the status quo is hands on. One hopes a Republican president will start to roll back of some of the regulation."
True, even free-market types want Congress to pass some laws – namely, repealing federal regulations and providing more economic freedom. But since Congress is more likely to approve than repeal regulations, Levy and some other analysts don't particularly mind gridlock over technology bills.
A Democratic analyst says he'd prefer that legislators do the right things for the right reasons.
"It's good for Congress to take their time when writing laws for the Internet, but it would be better for the delays to come from thoughtful deliberation of the issues rather than partisan headbutting," says Shane Ham, a policy analyst with the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist group with ties to President Clinton and vice president nominee Joseph Lieberman.
Much of the work in any administration is, of course, done by some of the roughly 3,000 political appointees who are gradually hired by the incoming president's transition team.
Depending on who becomes president, this means either a more- or less-regulatory approach. Republican George W. Bush, for instance, has signaled that he would end encryption export regulations, which Vice President Gore seems more inclined to keep. A president could repeal the rules without an act of Congress.
"The impact of appointees in regulatory agencies is one of the great invisible certainties of an administration," Mark Gearan, the former deputy transition director for the Clinton administration, said at a Brookings Institution event on Wednesday.
The think tank has published a Survivor's Guide for Presidential Nominees.
"They make a big difference in accelerating or stopping regulation," Gearan said. "And we saw that early in the Reagan administration with the appointment of a number of heads of regulatory agencies, who really did slow down, or stop cold, a number of regulatory activities. There's some wonderful literature in political science on this, and it's very clear."
But what about the Congress? At least one veteran Republican thinks the Texas governor could avoid gridlock.
"If Bush were elected, he's going to be the first president, since the first two years of Eisenhower, to have a Republican Senate and Republican House," C. Boyden Gray, former transition counsel to President Bush, said at the Brookings event.
"And that's not – that's not a vote of unconfidence, or a vote of lack of confidence. That's not a mandate either, but it certainly is a governing platform."
