It's The Constitution, Stupid

A nice counterpoint to Dan Balz's weird Broderish moaning that "the political culture of Washington" didn't bring forth the immigration compromise he desired is provided by John Broder in The New York Times who points out that the institutions of American government are designed to make it hard to pass legislation on controversial topics.

All things considered, I think this is a bad thing, and think it's generally better to operate under more parliamentary methods. But like it or not, you go to war with the institutions you have, and there's no sense heaping personal scorn on individual legislators for institutional factors beyond their control.

Comments

matthew, it's touching that you think that today's journalists might actually care about what makes "sense."

Posted by howard | June 10, 2007 1:06 PM

Too bad it's easier for our troops to go to war for lousy reasons than it is to pass legislation on controversial topics in the U.S. today.

Whatever happened to the idea that only Congress can declare war?

I don't understand why it's considered hopelessly idealistic to bring up this up, when so much tragedy could have been avoided, in Vietnam and Iraq, if we had simply insisted that only Congress can start a war, just as only Congress can pass legislation.

Posted by Kit Stolz | June 10, 2007 1:23 PM

"Whatever happened to the idea that only Congress can declare war?"

What's the difference? Congress explicitly authorized Johnson's escalation in Vietnam (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) and it explicitly authorized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress also retains the authority to cut off funding for wars and thus end them.

Do you think if Johnson and Bush had asked for declarations of war there would be any difference? Hardly. Today, Dems would still be talking about rescinding their declaration of war.

Posted by Fred | June 10, 2007 1:44 PM

However, one must note that politicians have *added* barriers to those already provided in the Consitution. The filibuster, for example. It is hard enough to get a law on a controversial subject that will get majorities in both houses and be signed by the president. To add a three-fifths majority requirement in the Senate makes it almost impossible.

Posted by David T | June 10, 2007 2:33 PM

The Senate is really the problem in all this business, aside from the ridiculous House procedural rules the Republicans love to dream up when they have Congress, of course. In my opinion, the need for cloture once a bill is out of committee (which itself is a signifigant barrier) is an antiquated process that on balance serves to further the interest of those who lard up bills with all manner of earmarks and unrelated omnibus BS to render them politically palatable. The veto and simply the use of a bicameral system itself are more than enough to check 'recklessness', in my view.

Posted by Tim P. | June 10, 2007 3:23 PM

One point on which John broder is dead wrong is this:

The Great Depression . . . shattered partisan divisions and led, at least for a time, to enhanced presidential power and a rush of bipartisan lawmaking . .

The Great Depression led to HUGE Democratic majorites, not enhanced Presidential power and bipartisan lawmaking.

Posted by Armando | June 10, 2007 4:00 PM

C'mon, this is all just inside-the-beltway self-delusion based on polling malpractice. The immigration bill didn't fail because of a lack of "leadership" -- heck, it was closer to an elite putsch attempt of trying to whip it by the public without hearings. Nor, conversely, did it fail because of institutional arrangements preventing passage.

No, it failed because the part of the public that was well-informed was overwhelmingly against it. Frank Newport of the Gallup Poll reported on June 6:

"Those Americans who are following the [immigration] debate closely are highly likely to be opponents of the bill. Among those who know enough to have an opinion, the bill is opposed by almost a three to one margin. Among those who say they are following the news about the bill very closely, opposition outweighs support by almost a four to one margin."

The problem is that the inside-the-beltway types are largely ignorant about immigration, so they come up with bad bills and misread public opinion.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 10, 2007 4:51 PM

John Broder

Any relation?

Posted by lemuel pitkin | June 10, 2007 5:11 PM

There's nothing in the Constitution that requires cloture by a 3/5ths vote in the Senate. If senators who opposed a bill had to conduct a real filibuster - holding the floor by speaking continuously to prevent a vote - do you think they would have done it? The cloture rule is an extra-constitutional means of giving even more power to individual senators than the Constitution does.

Posted by Bloix | June 10, 2007 8:28 PM

What Steve said.

I'd like to propose an informal rule: The term "contraversial" should be reserved for subjects where public opinion is relatively evenly divided. The proper term for the immigration bill is "unpopular", not "contraversial".

Posted by Brett Bellmore | June 10, 2007 8:55 PM

No, it failed because the part of the public that was well-informed was overwhelmingly against it. Frank Newport of the Gallup Poll reported on June 6:

"Those Americans who are following the [immigration] debate closely are highly likely to be opponents of the bill

Those two sentences are not cognates. One can follow something closely -- for instance, by watching Lou Dobbs every night -- and still be very badly informed.

The problem is that the inside-the-beltway types are largely ignorant about immigration, so they come up with bad bills and misread public opinion.

Or, alternatively, the problem is that the people with most influence on public opinion are gobshite myth-peddling nativists. Polling's all over the place on this, but rabble-rousing and dumbfuck xenophobia is good at generating quick knee-jerk reaction.

Plenty of GOPpers who lined up to scupper this bill -- including some of the chamber's dumbest members -- did it to appease their white xenophobe base. Perhaps Sailer can come up with a bullshit crypto-scientific explanation for that.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | June 10, 2007 9:07 PM

I don't know - I mean - Mickey kaus has gone a little nuts about the immigration thing over the last year or so but as he put it the other day what's so good about a deal that gives amnesty (not to mention billions in new benefits) to millions of people who broke the rules while creating a guest worker program liable to continue to degrade the already degraded working class and calling it centrism.

I have no doubt that this is largely about race for some people, and that most of those people are racist. But I've sat back and watched for more than half my life as the wages of working and middle class people have stagnated, and their security has declined. I've seen and am seeing so many decent, hard-working people suffering with incomes that don't improve or go down from year to year, so many people struggling with the high cost of housing, health care, energy, higher education, and increasingly even food, so many people struggling with the threat of offshoring, declining pension security, worries about the future.

In my view you just don't even talk about what you're going to do about immigration until you've made damn sure that the American dream is possible again for every American citizen willing to work for it.

Posted by Linus | June 10, 2007 9:23 PM

It isn't lawyers, doctors, CEOs and other members of the largely white upper classes whose wages are held down by illegal immigration, and if it were the illegal immigration would have been stopped a long time ago.

The democratic party's betrayal of the working class is now almost complete, as the New Deal's lunch pail liberalism has been abandoned for the agenda of the cultural elitists who now run the party.

Posted by kafka | June 10, 2007 11:20 PM

"All things considered, I think this is a bad thing, and think it's generally better to operate under more parliamentary methods."

Then prepare to be whipsawed by the combination of periodic elections and presidential term limits, and the concomitant boost to permanent campaigning and election rigging.

The Great Depression gaffe I.D.'ed by Armando is pretty funny.

Posted by rickhavoc | June 10, 2007 11:43 PM