Confrontation Works
A followup thought on today’s signing of the Senate Vacancy bill: a lot of the Republican carping has been about how the Democrats in the legislature are undermining executive power merely because it suits them at this moment: the Republican Governor is popular, both of our Senators are old and ambitious, and the legislature doesn’t want to see a Republican stuffed into that office should a Senator find a job as an ambassador someplace. (H/T to tparty at MLN)
That complaint is, of course, completely accurate, but the hysterical tenor of the criticism obscures the fact that that’s how an awful lot of progress has always been achieved. We don’t have a system of government based on moderation or non-partisan bonhomie: we have a system of adversarial interests, between parties, between branches of government, between regional or ideological factions, and so on.
Legislative Democrats could have stuffed a same-party replacement law (like Wyoming’s, which forced a Democratic Governor to appoint a Republican replacement for Craig Thomas in 2007) through, though maybe not with a 2/3 majority. Since the partisan interests of two branches of State government don’t align — but the status quo was unacceptable to the legislature — the outcome was a bill which put the vacancy into the hands of the public.
None of that is remarkable, except in the way that it contrasts with the behavior of the Congressional Democratic majority during the last two years of the Bush presidency. An adequately confrontational Congress might not have done much to build up their own institutional power during those two years, but when it came to privacy issues, habeus, executive branch secrecy and a range of similar issues, a well-functioning adversarial position would have biased the process towards the interests of the public and away from the opposing views of the two competing branches of government.
It occurs to me that by political placing such a high value on bipartisanship, the default position in national political debates has become gridlock, when confrontation could just as easily devolve power — in the form of valuable information and decision-making authority — to the citizenry instead.