The Washington Office Update program Saturday morning, “Whither Washington: The 2014 Election and What It Means for Libraries,” got off to a powerful start with the appearance of Richard Durbin, who has represented Illinois as a Democratic senator since 1997. Durbin claimed the ALA Midwinter Meeting audience with his reminiscence of working as a clerk in a bookstore on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., when he was a Georgetown University student in the 1960s and had the challenging task of finding titles for customers by consulting the multivolume Books in Print.
Durbin said that he often hears the question, “Why do we still need libraries?” He always tells them that “libraries have something the internet doesn’t have — librarians.” Durbin added, “Libraries are the classrooms where people go to learn. They are an essential link to government services, and one of the last safeguards of opportunity in the U.S. where everyone has access to the same information.”
Durbin was realistically blunt about prospects for library funding in the new Congress. With 54 Republicans and 46 Democrats in the Senate, “Any controversial issue will require 60 votes to pass and the Democrats will have to pick up six votes” from the other side, he said.
President Obama’s budget funding proposal (including a provision for broadband support to schools and libraries), which he will present to Congress on February 2, will result in a “battle royal,” Durbin said. Republicans have opposed “every federal program that involves spending” except for those that build up commerce and facilitate national defense, he said. The Library Services and Technology Act is also up for reauthorization in 2015.
Durbin reassured librarians, “I am on your side. Libraries are a great bargain, and the library card is still a passport to a better life.” He added, “I was told there would be 11,000 librarians at this conference. A lobbying force of 11,000 cannot be stopped. Get organized. Let Washington know you’re watching.”
The next speaker at the session was University of Chicago political science Professor J. Mark Hansen, who presented statistics from the Brookings Institution on the partisan polarization in Congress, which is “as wide and deep as they’ve ever been,” he said. The percentage of party unity votes in the House and Senate (where legislators vote no bills in alignment with their parties) was less than 50 percent in the 1950s and dropped to less than 33 percent in the 1960s and 1970s. That changed in the 1980s, when party unity rose into the 60- to 70-percent range, a significant indicator of polarization.
Hansen also noted some statistics from American National Election Studies showing that Americans in both parties were more moderate in 1972-1976, but that Republicans moved sharply to the right in 2004-2008. Meanwhile, Democrats, while remaining centrist, moved somewhat to the left. He said that the Democratic percentage could rise in the future, as younger voters and an increasing number of Hispanics (who tend to vote for Democrats) will have an effect.
Last one at the podium was Tom Susman, the chief lobbyist for the American Bar Association and a friend of ALA who has worked with the Washington Office since the 1990s. He confirmed the deep slit between the parties and said that you “have to go back to the 1850s [just before the Civil War] to find the same level of vitriol and lack of cooperation in the U.S. Congress.”
Susman was somewhat more optimistic that the congressional makeup would flip again in two years, but that the parties were unlikely to work together until that happens. He is hopeful that the FOIA Authorization and Implementation Act would pass, probably “by Sunshine Week in March,” and that the parties are finding some consensus in changes in the U.S. copyright law. His final recommendation was to “rally around ALA’s calls to action for the library community.”
