No one really cares about Washington dysfunction

If there's one thing you can get most Americans to agree on, it's that Washington is broken. Beset by gridlock, controlled by lobbyists, in thrall to special interests, hamstrung by bureaucracy, Washington just can't get anything done. "If there is a unifying theme," The Wall Street Journal said of its latest poll taking the pulse of America, "it is anger at the political system."

There's no question that Washington has plenty of problems. The government could clearly work a lot better than it does. Congress in particular has been vacillating between utter inactivity and terrifying crises for the past five years or so. But when people tell you they really care about making Washington work, they're lying. Mostly to themselves, but still lying. Because the real problem people have isn't with the political process, it's with the results.

Right now, the people crying the loudest about how Washington is broken are Republicans. That isn't too surprising, because even though they control Congress, Washington is not giving Republicans what they want. It's not giving them tax cuts or regulatory rollback. Washington is not outlawing abortion or stopping America from becoming a more diverse country. Washington is not getting rid of ObamaCare.

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When we had a Democratic Congress and a Republican president, the same dynamic was at play, simply reversed.

You want to see Washington work? Here's what you do: Elect a president and Congress of the same party. It would be even more helpful if you give that party a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate so it can overcome filibusters. Do that, and Congress will be humming like a finely tuned Italian sports car.

Barack Obama had such a majority for part of his first term (though he had 60 votes in the Senate for less than a year, between the time Sen. Al Franken was seated in 2009 after a disputed election in Minnesota and Sen. Scott Brown was elected in 2010 in a special election in Massachusetts to replace the late Ted Kennedy). And guess what: The Democrats got things done. They passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and a large economic stimulus, and health care reform, and Wall Street reform, and credit card reform, and student loan reform, and a law regulating tobacco, and an expansion of CHIP to give health insurance to poor children, and a bunch of other things you've forgotten by now even if you heard about them at the time. It was the most extraordinary run of consequential legislation since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society nearly a half-century before.

Republicans do not look back fondly on the first half of President Obama's first term. They do not see it as a time when everything was working the way it's supposed to. And why might that be? Why aren't they saying that although they didn't agree with any of those new laws, they sure do admire Obama for making Washington work?

The reason is that they don't actually care about whether Washington is working, they care about what Washington's work produces. Democrats are no different. They want Washington to do the things they want, not just to do things. If a Republican president gets elected next year, Democrats won't say, "Phew, now Washington will finally work!" They'll be appalled and angry about what that president signs into law.

Obviously, the high visibility of the current gridlock in Congress has Americans disgusted, and understandably so. But that gridlock wasn't produced by some enormous entity called "Washington." It was the product of a decision Republicans made in 2009 to oppose Obama on any legislation of any consequence. They could have chosen a different way of doing things, but they didn't. And then when the elections of 2010, 2012, and 2014 made the GOP caucus more and more conservative, its members decided to force a government shutdown and debt ceiling crises in an attempt to blackmail the president. Those were decisions made by human beings, not a "system" that can be cleaned up with enough integrity and common sense on the part of the next president.

Running the federal government is, without question, a real and complex organizational task, one that might be performed in a better or worse fashion. Sometimes Congress runs more efficiently than at other times. The system works in many ways that are positively pathological. But most of the time, Americans have little or no sense of all that, and don't much care.

They care about their own financial situation and that of those around them, and about whether they like the policies the current government is producing. It's about the results, not the process. So we should stop clothing our substantive complaints in a critique of the process, and be honest about what actually matters to us.