Two strange things happened last week. The first was that an otherwise obscure state senator won Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts with a campaign that largely concerned his pickup truck. The second strange thing was that this one special election whose outcome, in the words of Ezra Klein, reduced the Democrats’ Senate majority from the largest since the 1970s to the second-largest since the 1970s has now seriously imperiled the fate of health care legislation which had, in slightly different forms, already passed both the House and the Senate.
Strange, isn’t it? But in this topsy-turvy world where a Massachusetts politician doesn’t know who Curt Schilling is and where a former Cosmo centerfold is soon going to be the most junior member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, a reduction of a Senate majority from 60 to 59 is incredibly important.
So, what does a 59-41 majority mean for the Democrats and the country? Well, it probably means that just about nothing of consequence or significance will be passed — at least until the 2010 elections where Democrats will probably see their majority dwindle even further.
More generally, that a single special election has now put the party that holds substantial majorities in both houses in such a stark defensive posture only shows how bizarre the Senate’s de facto supermajority requirements are and how they could well damn our country to endless and expanding deficits, no resolution to the ongoing crisis of illegal immigration and a continually warming planet.
The kicker is that allowing these problems to fester makes sense for an opposition party. Sometimes, and I would argue that now is one of those times, the blind obstruction of the opposition party is forestalling any chance at the large, overarching reforms that are direly necessary and more importantly, should be dictated by the election results of 2006 and 2008.
But why are 60 votes so important? After all, the major legislation that has been passed –- namely the stimulus -– occurred when the Democrats didn’t even have 60 votes. For the brief period when the Democrats did have 60 votes, no major legislation was signed by the president, although a health care bill did get through the Senate.
Looking forward, it seems like the Republican Party has coalesced around a policy of blind, total and complete opposition to any and all of the Democratic Party and president’s initiatives. And they are able to do this because their minority is just large enough to continually prevent votes in the Senate. Now, if you’re a conservative or a Republican, the de facto 60 vote requirement is no problem at all. Since the GOP sees just about all the president’s policies as bad ones, a world in which none of them can get past is a good one. But if they care about democratic accountability and the possibility for large scale reforms to address pressing issues, the success and apparent future of a strategy that rests on unrelenting opposition should worry you.
Since the 1980s, the two political parties have evolved into ideologically coherent wholes. While there used to be conservative Democrats from the South and liberal Republicans from the Northeast with a fair amount of ideological overlap that allowed for bipartisan coalitions to be built around specific pieces of legislation, this is no longer case. Instead, the Democratic Party is mostly liberal and centrist and the Republican Party is especially conservative. This means that the hypothetical space for bipartisan, major legislation has greatly narrowed.
Furthermore, Republicans in the 1990s realized that the best strategy for a minority party was simply to frustrate the majority party’s ambitions. After Republicans took back the House in 1994 following the failure of President Clinton’s health care plan, the efficacy of this strategy was proven. So now, the very conservative Republican party is going to be able to make it so the Democrats can’t do anything and see Congress’ and the President’s approval ratings fall.
While it may seem well and good for the opposition party to oppose to the majority, the problem comes when voters are not given any useful information about what either party can be doing. Ideally, voters would elect a majority party and president, that party could then pass legislation and, based on their record and the objective economic conditions at election time, voters would chose to keep that party or elect a new one. But with a supermajority requirement that either forestalls any action or gives exorbitant power to centrist Democrats to extract oddlyspecific concessions from the majority, the ability of a majority party to be evaluated based on their record is curtailed.
So immigration reform, cap-and-trade legislation and health care reform are all potential Democratic victories that Republicans want to obstruct. The problems with this approach to legislating, where a party that is a clear minority in both legislatures can prevent any legislation if they have enough discipline, can also prevent, well, any legislating. And if you think that the large number of uninsured is a problem or that we should put some sort of price on carbon emissions, then a policy of pure opposition is obviously disastrous for the country as a whole.