"I was a casualty of the system working in 2006, and while defeat is never easy, I give the voters credit," writes Lincoln Chafee. "They made the connection between electing even popular Republicans at the cost of leaving the Senate in the hands of a leadership they had learned to mistrust." I've been coming to believe that one of the more serious problems in our elections is that voters don't quite comprehend the parliamentarization of Congress. There was a time when the individual standing before you, asking for your vote, actually had some autonomy, some power. If he said he was independent, there was a reasonable chance that he was. That moment is long gone. Now, voters cast ballots for tall, white-haired, charismatic power brokers who promptly return to Washington and show themselves to be meek, cowed, cogs in the larger machine. And that's basically fine, I have no problem with a more parliamentary Congress. The problem is when voters don't realize that it's the party, rather than the person, that they're voting for. As Chafee accurately notes, he was a good guy, and he opposed the administration on some genuinely crucial votes (like the authorization to go to war in Iraq), but at the end of the day, his primary impact was at the start of the session, when he cast a vote for a Republican as Senate Majority Leader. We've hit a moment in our politics when the voters would actually be able to make more informed decisions as to the outcomes of their votes if they were asked to choose between an "unnamed Democrat" and an "unnamed Republican." This whole pretense that the individuals have a role in the process is really just misleading.
