If Ezra Klein’s ongoing anti-supermajoritarian jihad is purely strategic, then I think I understand it. It is probably the best Democrats can do rhetorically to try pin the blame on Republicans for lousy governance under a Democratic president with solidly Democratic Congressional majorities (filibuster-trumping, even!). But it doesn’t make much substantive sense. Here’s Ezra’s key passage:
Ever since Newt Gingrich partnered with Bob Dole to retake the Congress atop a successful strategy of relentless and effective obstructionism, Congress has been virtually incapable of doing anything difficult because the minority party will either block it or run against it, or both. And make no mistake: Congress will need to do hard things, and soon.
The coherence of Ezra’s whole piece turns on his confusing “anything difficult” with “anything strongly opposed by the minority.” The idea that the present Congress is “virtually” hamstrung is a transparent absurdity to anyone not a professional cheerleader for the legislative agenda of the Democratic Party. As Ross Douthat recently and rightly noted:
In the Obama era, meanwhile, the Senate has already voted to pass the most expensive stimulus package in history, a sweeping reorganization of the American health care system, and a host of more modest legislative initiatives. In this environment, there’s something a little strange about the stridency of liberal complaints about the filibuster, given what they’ve accomplished — and are on the cusp of accomplishing — even with it as an impediment.
I’d say there something more than a little strange about this stridency. It’s downright bizarre. It appears to be based almost entirely on a clearly false claim: that nothing “difficult” can get done with supermajoritarian Senate rules. The next step in the argument is equally outrageous: that the alleged ineffectuality of Congress puts the American people in the way of otherwise avoidable crises. Here’s Ezra again:
There is no doubt that minority parties generally profit in elections when the unemployment rate is high. But given that reality, what incentive do they have to help the majority party lower the unemployment rate? Further out, there is no doubt that the majority party has an incentive to prevent a fiscal crisis on its watch. But what incentive does the minority party have to sign on to the screamingly painful decisions that will avert crisis?
Suddenly Ezra is some kind of rational choice theorist of politics!
What incentive does the minority party have “to help the majority party lower the unemployment rate”? I may be mistaken, but I could swear that Ezra has portrayed Democratic support for health-care reform as grounded in a good-faith desire to secure social justice, reduce suffering, and save lives. Well, whatever that incentive is, that’s the one congressional Republicans have to help Democrats reduce unemployment and avoid fiscal disaster.
But it is not really surprising, is it, that Democrats and Republicans disagree about the policies that would best achieve these aims? Indeed, these differences help explain why the Democratic and Republican parties are different parties. If the Democrats tomorrow announced support for the kind of employment-stimulating and deficit-reduction policies generally favored by Republicans, we’d suddenly see once “difficult” legislation sailing through the Congress. But given the reality that the Democratic Party and its supporters think these are the wrong policies, what incentive does the majority party have to help the minority party lower the unemployment rate and sign on to painful decisions that will avert a fiscal crisis?
Ezra’s analysis reminded me of a passage in Jeremy Waldron’s Law and Disagreement:
The more dangerous temptation is not to pretend an opposing view does not exist, but to treat it as beneath notice in respectable deliberation by assuming it is ignorant or prejudiced or self-interested or based on insufficient contemplation of moral reality. Such an attitude embodies the idea that since truth in matters of justice, right, or policy is singular and consensus is its natural embodiment, some special explanation — some factor of deliberative pathology, such as the lingering taint of self-interest — is required to explain disagreement, which explanation can then be cited as a reason for putting the deviant view to one side.
When Lieberman effectively nixed the public option, Ezra suggested that callous indifference to mass death was at work. If supermajoritarian rules are bringing this kind of monstrous pathology into play, then by all means let’s get rid of them! But, as it is, those rules aren’t even capable of preventing the congressional majority from imposing massive unpopular institutional changes on a reluctant public. That Ezra sees these evidently manageable constraints on the majority party as a positive danger to the public interest suggests that he sees opposing views as unworthy of respect.