E.J. Dionne hit a home-run with his latest column. Here’s the part I liked best.
Economists agree that the stimulus worked to create jobs, but Senate moderates made it less effective by shrinking its size and including irrelevancies — notably $70 billion to fix the alternative minimum tax — that did little to create jobs. The moderates got their way because the stimulus needed 60 votes, an absurd standard now that we have an ideologically polarized, parliamentary-style party system. We can waste time mourning that development or we can recognize it and act accordingly.
I haven’t seen the case against the filibuster made in a more succinct manner. It’s actually quite elegant.
The Republican party has evolved into a parliamentary style party, the Democratic party has not. If it had, we wouldn’t be watering down legislation to make it acceptable to the 5 most conservative members of our caucus. They would fall in line, or lose access to party money, seniority and be threatened with primaries if they caused trouble.
I think this is a great article, but it still misses the mark. The biggest cause of our gridlock is not partisan or ideological, its tactical. The Senate minority leadership (essentially McConnel and Gregg) found a way to get their caucus to act in unison and stay united sometime shortly after Obama came into office. Call it parliamentary triumph, call it a desperation act of the weak, but it was an extremely significant development that nobody in washington understood, and that no dems adapted to. Nobody still understands how McConnel managed to do this, but that’s a story some ambitious reporter will crack soon enough.
Instead our leadership and our conservative members of our caucus think its the mid 90’s or the mid 80s and have failed to adapt to the new dynamic.
Here’s probably the clearest example I can give of the two parties: Olympia Snowe a moderate republican from a liberal state, was unable, due to pressure from the GOP leadership, to essentially do what Senators from the minority party have always done: negotiate with the majority to make concessions that benefit her state and accomodate her ideology. IN other words, the GOP leadership essentially told Snowe she couldn’t do her job. ON our side of the aisle, you have 5 conservative members of our caucus taking the unprecedented step of threatening to obstruct the President and leadership’s agenda- denying an up or down vote on legislation that goes to the core of the party’s identity.
This distinction can’t be made enough.
It’s also an additional sign of hope for those of us who want to see the filibuster eliminated or weakened.
Dionne is politically liberal and tempermentally moderate. He’s always willing to try to understand the other side’s point of view, and to be reflective and self-critical about himself and his allies. He’s predisposed to think well of his opponents and their motivations.
This column is Dionne’s version of a call to arms for liberal and moderate Democrats. And if E.J. Dionne has reached that point, then it’s a sign that the old Washington gridlock marked by “comity” and “bipartisanship” may be breaking up.
I guess you disagree with this dude.
I couldn’t get past the second paragraph. Life’s too short to read cr@p like that.
Well…ahhh…yes. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do disagree with Mr. Rosen.
Exactly right.
So basically we’ve created a setup that combines the worst parts of parliamentary and presidential systems into one dead and useless frankenstein. Sort of like recycling Bush into a system of government. Good ol’ American ingenuity strike again.
Dionne and Eugene Robinson are a tiny island of sanity in the toxic sea of bullshit that is the WaPo op-ed page.
For those of us fool enough to subscribe to the print version, for example, Dionne’s column today is trapped in a corner under Broder’s senile mumblings and a centerpiece of George Swill.
All of the oligarchy’s serfs in Washington could die in a calamity. There would be NO change.
One thing almost all bloggers totally ignore is that there is no “news” that is not from a communications channel that is totally owned by the oligarchy.
Propaganda pays. Until the Russians hit East Prussia and the refugees fled for German territory, they actually believed that they were winning the war. The Nazis didn’t even move to a war economy until late 1943 or early 1944, they used the Czechoslovakian and French arms factories to build armaments. The highest production levels acheived by the Nazis were in April,1945 the month before the regime surrendered.
Those carpet bombing worked really well, eh?
While mad generals Hap Arnold and Bomber Harris were murdering innocent people, “intelligence” never got a whiff of where all the tanks and planes came from.