×
This may be because I'm a rash reformist type, but I found Josh Patashnik's post exalting the responsiveness of American democracy a bit puzzling:
[In 2006], there was a huge wave of discontent with the ruling party. The body designed to be most in tune with popular opinion (the House of Representatives) flipped to the opposition by a wide margin. The body designed to be slightly more insulated from momentary shifts in public sentiment (the Senate) flipped just barely, and perhaps thanks only to one ill-chosen word from George Allen. As dissatisfaction with the GOP has persisted, the party's prospects have become even bleaker, and now it stands a pretty good chance of losing the presidency too. (And if it doesn't, it will be because the two parties responded to the situation rationally in the manner Matt describes.)All in all, it's a fairly elegant, and yet not impetuous, means of transferring power as public opinion changes. It makes you appreciate the wisdom of the system the Framers devised--something to keep in mind next time someone tells you the U.S. would be better off with parliamentary-style government.It was elegant, but also incredibly ineffective. Though true that there was discontent with the ruling party, it's actually not true that the discontentment was about the ruling party. In other words, the point of the 2006 elections was not a shift in control, but a shift in public policy. Namely, voters were pretty clear that they wanted withdrawal from Iraq, strengthened ethics rules, and a variety of populist measures meant to ease what was then a weakening, though not yet in crisis, economy.Exactly none of these things happened. Power changed hands, true, but without the presidency or a Senate supermajority, even a seismic political shift caused little discernible impact. When people say they want a Parliamentary-style of government, they're arguing that the system we've set up is too insulated from public opinion, and does too much to allow regional and ideological minorities to impede change. They're saying, in other words, that you can flip the Senate, flip the House, and the minority party can still keep you in Iraq and block health reform. Now, you can support the wisdom of that system or you can oppose it, but what 2006 demonstrated was its extraordinary resilience and relevance, not that criticisms of it were misguided. The system worked as it was supposed to, and as we expected it to: It created a non-violent civic outlet for feelings of discontent without actually enabling much in the way of rapid change.
