American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld: The Way of the Hammer

[Strawman]

This is from the October issue, but something to keep in mind in the context of the current leadership struggle. We need a unified leadership, not some struggle between Pelosi and Hoyer. And not some factious majority dominated by committee chairmen with their little individual fiefdoms. Ironically, the centralization of power into the majority party leadership under the Republicans gives us a historically unique opportunity for liberal governance. Shame on us if we piss this opportunity away.


"If one merely accepts two claims -- that a streamlined legislative process helps whichever party holds power, and that simply hoping for Republicans to reform their behavior and revive traditions of bipartisan compromise is daft -- the case for Democrats approaching their return to power in 2007 or 2009 or 2011 with a mind toward DeLay-style parliamentary ruthlessness is clear. But given basic truths about social policy, one can make an even stronger positive claim: Liberalism will benefit more from such arrangements than conservatism.

An enormous amount of political science literature has shed light on an empirical fact of modern welfare states: Expansions of broad-based social insurance and welfare-state programs, once enacted, prove virtually impossible to roll back. Middle-class entitlements and social policies produce constituencies that, in turn, provide those programs with immense political durability. This explains the famous invulnerability of Social Security and Medicare to political assault (reconfirmed by the GOP’s disastrous privatization campaign last year).

The trick is to get them enacted in the first place. And the American legislative process, by the Founders’ deliberate design, makes it more difficult to pass new laws than virtually any other advanced democracy in the world. It is not a coincidence that the United States has always also had a comparatively weaker welfare state than other advanced democracies. Public majorities in the United States have expressed support for a national health-care system for decades, for example, yet every single effort to enact such a system has crashed on the shoals of Congress. Why? Because the extensive array of veto points and cumbersome requirements placed along the American legislative obstacle course -- the committee process, required passage in two legislative chambers, the counter-majoritarian features of both chambers, the presidential veto -- have enabled vested interests opposing such a reform to kill legislation time and again. As political scientists Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts put it in 1994, reflecting on the wreckage of Hillarycare, the United States lacks universal health care because “American political institutions are structurally biased against this kind of comprehensive reform.”

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