Change? You Asked for It . . .
By Michael Kinsley
WashPost
Friday, May 15, 2009
Even some loyal Democrats are feeling queasy about what will happen if, as seems likely, Al Franken wins the endless dispute over that Senate seat from Minnesota. With Arlen Specter's recent conversion, that would give the Democrats 60 seats, or three-fifths of the Senate, which is a filibuster-proof majority. With a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic president, suddenly politics seems like a more serious business.
We have endured gridlocked government for so long that the idea of a president and a Congress from the same party enacting the legislation that they promised to enact while they were running for office seems almost unnatural. In the past half-century, one party has controlled both elected branches of government only about a third of the time. Meanwhile, this 60-votes threshold in the Senate has grown on our constitutional arrangements like a third leg coming out of the side of your head. The filibuster used to be a fairly obscure procedural device used mainly by Southerners to block civil rights legislation. And if you wanted to do it, you really had to do it. Actually stopping all other business to talk a piece of legislation to death was a fairly arduous process. Now the whole game is played out in the locker room. Or, as in chess, you look a few moves ahead and claim victory or admit defeat without bothering to go through the motions.
High-church moderates like to claim that a government with the power split between the two parties is desirable. They even claim sometimes that the voters consciously choose divided government, or that they are sending a message that they want sensible compromise and are tired of partisan bickering, etc., etc. Moderistos do not explain how a particular voter would go about doing these things. (How would you even know which way to split your ticket to make sure that you're not just canceling out the votes of a fellow divided-government enthusiast?)
Macaulay, the 19th-century British historian, famously described the American system as "all sail and no anchor." (Hackneyed quote No. 113 in the Columnist's Garden of Pompous Quotations.) I don't get it. Seems to me that most of the time we're almost all anchor and very little sail. But for at least the next two years, we'll be sailing with the wind at our backs and the anchor up our heave-ho me hearties, or something like that. (I think we'll just stay away from nautical metaphors from now on, if that's okay. But you get the point.) What we'll have is something close to a parliamentary system as in Britain or, in fact, most functioning democracies.
(More here.)
WashPost
Friday, May 15, 2009
Even some loyal Democrats are feeling queasy about what will happen if, as seems likely, Al Franken wins the endless dispute over that Senate seat from Minnesota. With Arlen Specter's recent conversion, that would give the Democrats 60 seats, or three-fifths of the Senate, which is a filibuster-proof majority. With a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic president, suddenly politics seems like a more serious business.
We have endured gridlocked government for so long that the idea of a president and a Congress from the same party enacting the legislation that they promised to enact while they were running for office seems almost unnatural. In the past half-century, one party has controlled both elected branches of government only about a third of the time. Meanwhile, this 60-votes threshold in the Senate has grown on our constitutional arrangements like a third leg coming out of the side of your head. The filibuster used to be a fairly obscure procedural device used mainly by Southerners to block civil rights legislation. And if you wanted to do it, you really had to do it. Actually stopping all other business to talk a piece of legislation to death was a fairly arduous process. Now the whole game is played out in the locker room. Or, as in chess, you look a few moves ahead and claim victory or admit defeat without bothering to go through the motions.
High-church moderates like to claim that a government with the power split between the two parties is desirable. They even claim sometimes that the voters consciously choose divided government, or that they are sending a message that they want sensible compromise and are tired of partisan bickering, etc., etc. Moderistos do not explain how a particular voter would go about doing these things. (How would you even know which way to split your ticket to make sure that you're not just canceling out the votes of a fellow divided-government enthusiast?)
Macaulay, the 19th-century British historian, famously described the American system as "all sail and no anchor." (Hackneyed quote No. 113 in the Columnist's Garden of Pompous Quotations.) I don't get it. Seems to me that most of the time we're almost all anchor and very little sail. But for at least the next two years, we'll be sailing with the wind at our backs and the anchor up our heave-ho me hearties, or something like that. (I think we'll just stay away from nautical metaphors from now on, if that's okay. But you get the point.) What we'll have is something close to a parliamentary system as in Britain or, in fact, most functioning democracies.
(More here.)
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