"Compared with other political systems in other industrialized democracies, our system is unusually reliant on consensus and resistant to action. In many countries, there’s no such thing as “divided government,” where one party controls the executive branch and the other runs the legislature. Nor is there a filibuster, a debt ceiling or, to go back to one of the primary impediments to action of the civil rights era, a House Rules Committee. It’s simply easier for governments elsewhere to get things done (though it’s not necessarily easier, as the euro region shows, for those governments to get things done in cooperation with one another)."
Financial crisis won’t do us in, but political gridlock might - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post (via rzhale)
Nailed it!
I keep up with a lot of American progressive bloggers, and they increasingly share an overwhelming sense of despair with President Obama. But he’s not the one who voted in the mid-term elections to change control of Congress. Voters decided to cripple their president - he can’t get legislation through the legislature. And even before that self-immolating decision by US voters, when Democrats had a working majority in the House, and, on paper, a good majority in the senate, the out-dated Senate rules on majorities and filibustering meant there was no effective majority there. The Senate rules apply to a different era. Nowadays it effectively gives a senator from the smallest, least populated state an effective veto over a nation of fifty-odd million people, which is obscenely undemocratic. Then add an unregulated media, with big corporations buying a level of partisanship and anti-democratic hatred that we in the UK can scarcely credit.
US voters shouldn’t be surprised that President Obama struggles to get anything done - they’ve invented an almost perfect system to promote stasis. In that context, whilst trying to fix the Bush deficit and the collapse of the financial system, I think the president is doing a stunningly good job; all the time struggling to keep the level of debate civilised and human. I admit I’m only seeing this from the outside…
Seems to me though, if US progressives want to fix this, then the next set of congressional elections are key - get the president a decent majority in both houses; and then bring your constitutional rules in to the 21st century. National renewal. Now *that’s* change worth fighting for.
(via rzhale)
