... then I recommend this piece today in the WaPo by political scientist Jonathan Bernstein. Both parties have a role in the dysfunction/fecklessness swamp that is the modern Senate, Bernstein says. But their roles are not symmetrical -- or "equivalent," we might say:
Mitch McConnell's Republican minority is doing damage by abusing filibuster threats in a way never seen before in American history, Bernstein argues. And the Democrats are doing damage by not resisting strongly enough. To work in a topical reference, this is sort of like George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin both "sharing" the blame for their fight. As Bernstein says:
McConnell, ever since January 2009, has treated filibusters as routine and universal. That's brand new. There have been filibusters of executive branch nominees before, but only in rare cases. Almost all the time, under all previous presidents, the Senate had a simple majority hurdle, not a 60 vote hurdle, for executive branch appointments. Nominees didn't have to get cloture; they only needed to get a simple majority.
Which is how it should be. There are reasonable justifications, agree with them or not, for supermajority requirements on at least some legislation and on at least some lifetime-appointment judges. There are no reasonable justifications for needing 60 for executive branch positions. Really, I'm not aware of any good arguments for needing 60 on any exec branch nominations, let alone having it as the standard for all of those selections.
- Climate changes mount up faster than any evident ability to deal with or even acknowledge them;
- American society is more polarized, stratified, and unequal, economically and socially, than it has been in more than a century, and all visible forces promise to make this worse; and
- At just this time the world's leading power -- that's us -- struggles with governance with one of its major parties acting as if governance doesn't really matter. Cf the default-on-the-debt showdown of 2011, the sequester leech-therapy of 2012-13, now the paralysis on immigration even when it is in the Republican's "rational" self-interest to approve it. This nihilist group is a minority, but a large enough one to block action by everyone else. Disliking "big government" is one thing. Pretending that a big, complicated country doesn't need anyone making decisions would have been a surprise to the Founders and to all the rest of the world.
Yes, these are more downer-than-usual topics late at night, but the real point is that stasis on the last point makes it very difficult to deal with the other two, or lesser challenges. We've had periods of bad government before, and we're still here. But to have one of our major parties acting as if the Senate, the executive branch, the courts -- who needs 'em! ... It actually can be dangerous.
Brighter themes anon.
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