Bring On Less Democracy. (full article)
“Is anybody else as depressed as I am about the next four years?
No matter who wins, we face the prospect of bitterly divided government, savage partisanship in Congress, and increasing executive desperation. Even if Republicans win the Senate and retain the House, they will not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate; even if Obama holds on to the White House, he will face filibusters in the Senate and outright defiance in the House. A Congress that cannot deal with the tiny student-debt problem in orderly fashion is unlikely to be able to tackle big problems at all.
The response to legislative paralysis is, of course, executive aggrandizement. Charlie Savage of The New York Times laid out recently the turn by the Obama administration to executive authority as its means of governing the country. It’s entirely predictable; legislative fecklessness has led to Presidential power-grabbing for more than a century. And if Mitt Romney becomes President, he is already poised to follow the trend—witness his announcement that he will simply suspend the Affordable Care Act by executive order, a claim of prerogative that would, I suspect, make even John Yoo wince.”
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