For a handful of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, some deals are too costly

“If all of Congress’s major compromises over the history of the country were tallied up,” Baker said, “I think we might see that most of them actually made things worse.”

Many compromises that are hailed as victories at the time are later seen as “kicking the can down the road, or setting up dangerous precedents,” Baker said.

Regarding the compromise over the debt ceiling this summer, Baker said that only time will tell whether this proves to be another failure. “If the Republicans take this victory and use it as a precedent to demand spending cuts every time a vital piece of legislation comes to the floor, I think Democrats may look back on this [deal] and regret it,” he said.

Conflicting pressures

Steven Smith, a congressional historian at Washington University in St. Louis, said that lawmakers have long been faced with conflicting pressures as to whether to adhere to their principles (or their campaign promises) or to go along with what their leaders and most of their colleagues say is the best deal that can be gotten as a practical matter.

“In some ways, it’s an effect of the way our political institutions are set up,” he said. On the other hand, Smith added, there have been numerous examples in American history of elected officials bucking the party leadership to vote their conscience and reject the compromise that had been tendered.

“Most of the major social movements in American life — from the populist movement to the progressive movement to civil rights activists to the Tea Party movement — have succeeded when a few people in Congress proclaim that they’re not going to compromise on their principles.”

Other democracies do it differently

According to Smith, the current situation in the United States stands in sharp contrast to many parliamentary systems, where the majority party has full control of the both the legislative and executive branches of government. Smith said that compromise is less common in parliamentary systems.

“The majority party is much more free to pursue its values,” he said. A commonly cited example of a parliamentary majority enacting its platform is the Conservative Party that controlled the British Parliament from 1979 to 1997, enacting a series of free-market reforms, especially under the influence of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Thatcher was replaced by her Conservative colleague John Major in 1991). In the 1997 election, the Labor party swept aside the Conservatives in a landslide vote that was largely seen as broad public rejection of those policies.

In the American system, which is more susceptible to having a divided government, there are more opportunities for gridlock, Smith said.

When the attitudes of elected officials are too disparate to be reconciled, “there is more onus on the public to weigh the arguments and choose,” Smith said.

Jennifer Porter Gore of Representative Ellison’s office said that the Congressman agreed with that statement. “He has said repeatedly that elections have consequences,” Gore said. “He was elected to uphold certain principles. His constituents did not send him here to vote for anything, just to go along to get along.”