As a proud member of the “don’t just do something, sit there” school of politics, I don’t fret much about partisanship and gridlock. Partisanship and gridlock aren’t bugs of our constitutional system, they’re features. And while everyone likes to see their preferred policies sail through Congress, on the whole I think we’ve been well served by those features for two centuries.
That said, in the spirit of compromise so lacking in Washington, I would like to offer a suggestion for how to fix the alleged dysfunction in Washington: Let’s have more partisanship about ideas and less about process.
I will raise a cheer for process-related partisanship – I find merit in the Republican party’s history, even when it was not unabashedly conservative* – but Jonah raised some interesting points. Read, as they say, the whole thing.
Moe Lane
*The GOP has always fallen back to embracing liberty. From the Civil War to civil rights to killing the Soviet Empire, once and for bloody all. And if that meant using the government to do it, well… there is still music in the sound of a shackle broken, and clattering to the ground.
I really liked Jonah’s point (matching up with your post two down) that the way Reid kept Democrat Senators from having to face any challenging votes is what made it so they’re all high 90s “with the President”.
He saved Obama from having to issue vetoes, at the cost of losing a large number of Red Democrat Senate seats.