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So what would it take to fix the hyper-partisanship?
If we want to discourage "bad behavior" (whatever that means) in government officials, such bad behavior has to have negative consequences. If we're talking about partisan bad behavior, it has to have negative consequences for the party that did it. One could even imagine disincentivizing bad behavior on both sides at once by making sure that it has consequences that both sides dislike. An obvious example is a rule that legislators don't get paid if they don't pass a budget by the deadline. And like most obvious-common-sense rules, it has an unintended consequence: it empowers legislators who happen to be independently wealthy over legislators who actually need their paychecks. Another example, if you assume that balanced budgets are a Good Thing (which isn't entirely obvious), is a rule that if the legislature passes a budget with a deficit, it automatically triggers both spending cuts and tax increases, thus displeasing both the big-spending and the tax-cuts-uber-alles camps. It's tricky finding policies that everybody will like, or everybody will dislike, and it's even trickier in a highly partisan, divided environment because proposed policies are assessed on whether they help or hurt my party and its voters more than the other party and its voters, rather than whether they help or hurt the populace at large; it's an ill wind indeed that blows no-one good, and therefore that no-one has an incentive to see happen. So it is in the public interest to reduce that zero-sum thinking. How can we do that?
The last two Supreme Court nominees were confirmed on essentially party-line votes, and everybody on both sides reasonably assumes they will use their positions in a partisan way, destroying whatever was left of the Court's image as "above politics". The obvious way to avoid that is to return to requiring a super-majority for court confirmations, both Supreme and lower, so nobody gets on the court without bipartisan support (as used to be common a few decades ago). I get why the Democrats dismantled the filibuster for lower-court nominations: the Republicans in the Senate were stonewalling, blocking any nomination with the name "Obama" on the signature line, regardless of qualifications. The Republicans were clearly politicizing the confirmation process, but the immediate effect on the courts was merely understaffing, which (in theory) is bad for everybody but doesn't offer a clear advantage for one party over the other. Getting rid of the super-majority requirement did something worse: it politicized the courts themselves, by allowing a President and Senate of the same party to fill lots of judicial seats with dubiously-qualified partisans, as has in fact happened in the past two years.
The same reasoning goes at the state level: requiring a super-majority in the relevant legislative body to confirm a judge reduces the likelihood of strongly-partisan nominees getting through. I don't know how many states have such a super-majority requirement.
As for the legislative branch, the obvious problem is legislators who are more afraid of primary opponents than general-election opponents, and who therefore are more rewarded for ideological purity than for compromise and legislative effectiveness. As far as possible, every legislator, at every level, should face a realistic general-election opponent. That's really hard to do in deep-red or deep-blue areas of the country. A long-run answer is to get rid of primaries altogether and minimize the role of parties by some combination of ranked balloting, multi-seat districts, and ideas like that. (Proportional representation would help in some ways, but it enshrines parties into an official part of the system, and I want to burn them to the ground.) In the meantime, anything we can do to reduce gerrymandering and voter suppression will help by putting a more diverse mix of voters in the general election.
Gerrymandering is even more of a problem at the state level, where legislators can draw district lines not just for other members of their party but for themselves.
Then there's the executive branch. Most Presidents in history, after running partisan campaigns, have made some effort to become President of the whole country rather than only their partisan base (the current President being an obvious exception). I don't see any systemic changes that would further encourage the former behavior; at some point we have to rely on electing leaders more concerned with their reputations and the judgment of history than with short-term partisan wins.
I guess the same reasoning goes for Governors, although states are more likely to be deep-red or deep-blue, so it's easier to ignore the partisan minority, than the whole country is.
The last two Supreme Court nominees were confirmed on essentially party-line votes, and everybody on both sides reasonably assumes they will use their positions in a partisan way, destroying whatever was left of the Court's image as "above politics". The obvious way to avoid that is to return to requiring a super-majority for court confirmations, both Supreme and lower, so nobody gets on the court without bipartisan support (as used to be common a few decades ago). I get why the Democrats dismantled the filibuster for lower-court nominations: the Republicans in the Senate were stonewalling, blocking any nomination with the name "Obama" on the signature line, regardless of qualifications. The Republicans were clearly politicizing the confirmation process, but the immediate effect on the courts was merely understaffing, which (in theory) is bad for everybody but doesn't offer a clear advantage for one party over the other. Getting rid of the super-majority requirement did something worse: it politicized the courts themselves, by allowing a President and Senate of the same party to fill lots of judicial seats with dubiously-qualified partisans, as has in fact happened in the past two years.
The same reasoning goes at the state level: requiring a super-majority in the relevant legislative body to confirm a judge reduces the likelihood of strongly-partisan nominees getting through. I don't know how many states have such a super-majority requirement.
As for the legislative branch, the obvious problem is legislators who are more afraid of primary opponents than general-election opponents, and who therefore are more rewarded for ideological purity than for compromise and legislative effectiveness. As far as possible, every legislator, at every level, should face a realistic general-election opponent. That's really hard to do in deep-red or deep-blue areas of the country. A long-run answer is to get rid of primaries altogether and minimize the role of parties by some combination of ranked balloting, multi-seat districts, and ideas like that. (Proportional representation would help in some ways, but it enshrines parties into an official part of the system, and I want to burn them to the ground.) In the meantime, anything we can do to reduce gerrymandering and voter suppression will help by putting a more diverse mix of voters in the general election.
Gerrymandering is even more of a problem at the state level, where legislators can draw district lines not just for other members of their party but for themselves.
Then there's the executive branch. Most Presidents in history, after running partisan campaigns, have made some effort to become President of the whole country rather than only their partisan base (the current President being an obvious exception). I don't see any systemic changes that would further encourage the former behavior; at some point we have to rely on electing leaders more concerned with their reputations and the judgment of history than with short-term partisan wins.
I guess the same reasoning goes for Governors, although states are more likely to be deep-red or deep-blue, so it's easier to ignore the partisan minority, than the whole country is.