Alternatives 139 Vol. zyxwvutsrqponmlk 13, No. 11 November 1995 CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution Congress Can Win Respect, Legislate Better, By Learning About Consensus from Business By Sol Erdman and Lawrence Susskind Congressional leaders could resolve the most divisive national issues by tak- ing a lesson about consensus from the business world they zyxwvutsrqp so admire. To remain competitive, most busi- nesses find they cannot afford internal strife. Neither can Congress. Public opinion of the institution is zyxwvutsr as low as it was before the 1994 election. If Con- gress doesn’t deal with pressing issues it now faces, legislators of both parties will hurt their reelection prospects. Congress could win public respect and write better laws by adopting con- sensus-buildingtechniques developed by companies and conflict resolution specialists. To do this, Congresswould only have to organize key committees like the cross-functionaldesign teams of many companies. Each committee member would represent a faction. Consider the health-care issue. The major factions are those seeking to reduce the government’s involvement, those seeking to lower national costs, and those seeking to insure more of the public. What if each faction se- lected a representative and told that person to reach consensus on reform with representatives of other factions? This is what a successfulbusiness would do. All sides have something to gain. The United States has the highest health care costs in the world but no- where near the best health. For the process to work, the commit- tee would have to include the major factions. Here’s how this can be done: any legislator wanting a seat on the committee would post a platform de- claring his or her health care priori- ties. Every member of the House would Sol Erdman is president of Democracy 2000, a non-profit promoting conflict resolution in Americanpolitics (E-mail: dem2000@igc. apc. zyxwvutsrqp or&. Lawrence Susskind is director zyxwvutsrqp o f The MlTHaruard Pu blic DisputesProgram (PDP) and a professor at MIT T h q are co-authors of the book, Reinventing Congress for the 21st Century (PDPwithFrontierPress), from which this article is adapted. pick the candidate who best spoke for his or her concerns. To promote Consensus, the commit- tee would need to be a manageable size. To achieve that, the candidate with the smallest following would be dropped and legislators who sup- ported him or her would be asked to make a second choice. Then the next candidate with the smallest following would be dropped and her supporters asked to make another choice. And so on, until a committee of manageable size remained. This process would guarantee that the committee had diverse viewpoints. So that everyone in the House counted equally, the voting power of each com- mittee member would equal the num- ber of his or her supporters. A key incentive for consensus would be a House resolution guaranteeing the committee that if it agreed on a health care bill, the House vote on it would be “up-or-down,’’ no amend- ments allowed. The House would have little to lose. A bill reached by consen- sus would address the major health care priorities of the entire House. Let’s say 20 legislators ran for the committee and a group of five was con- sidered the ideal size.The five winners would likely include one who champi- oned less government involvement, one for universal coverage, one for reducing overall costs, one for the fre- est possible choice and, perhaps, one for strict cost-benefit analysis. Because the committee would have to win an up-or-down vote, each of the five would need to stay in constant contact with his or her House “con- stituents,”seeking their ideas and sup- port as the committee brainstormed for possible solutions. To reach agreement, all five would have to confront their “constituents” in Congress who had unrealistic wish lists for health-care reform. Since ev- ery group represented by a commit- tee member would have agreed on a goal, legislators who pushed for a per- sonal agenda would probably be pres- sured by others in their own group not to jeopardize the pursuit of that goal. Organizing coalitions around priori- ties would nudge Congress’s typical minutiae to the sidelines. What kind of health-care bill might such a committee write? An effective way to improve the nation’s health while cutting costs would be to expand government expenditures for preven- tion and public education-especially for the young and the poor-and sharply curtail government reimburse- ments for treating preventable ail- ments. Medical savingsaccounts would also help. To make the outcome win- win for all, the committee might also allocate most of the bill’s cost savings in the first few years to help groups hurt in the short run. If a committee representing the en- tire House could agree unanimously on such a policy, most Representatives would be likely to defend the bill in their home districts and vote for it. Both the Senate and the President would probably be unwilling to chal- lenge a bill reached by a consensus. The public would at first be non- plused to have its fantasies about health-care reform brought down to earth, but would have to acknowledge that Congress had accomplished a task that once seemed impossible. Far fetched? All politicians have a reason to be concerned about the sta- tus quo. Polls show that the 1994 elec- tion was more a result of anger than ideology. The next election will prob- ably be even dirtier than the last one. Incumbents of both parties will likely find the next campaign painful. If, instead, Congress organizes con- sensus-seeking committees, the major- ity party will still be the majority, still have access to the power it does now, but all incumbentswill gain public stat- ure. Legislation and the process of crafting it would be visibly superior to anything in recent times. Republican and Democratic members would earn public respect that no amount of par- tisanship will ever secure for them. 6