Having a bicameral legislature in which 40% of one house representing as little as 12% of the population can routinely bring governance to a halt is the kind of institutional quirk that can destabilize a regime in a crisis.
Maybe I'm not seeing what the "crisis" is to which he is referring. Health care, bank bailouts, automotive manufacturer bailouts, Guantanamo closing, farm subsidies for biodiesel, increased funding for renewable energy including "cap-and-trade" are not crises. These issues happen over months, or years, and should be exhaustively talked about before action is taken.
I would never accuse TPI of cloaking agenda (he always puts it right out there in my face), but there is a tendency for people to call controversial issues "a crisis" in order to justify the hurried way they force them through government. Just look at the Republican party, and Bush 43 during 2002-2003, rather than analyzing all the Iraq data, rather than sending people to Iraq to discuss things with Saddam directly, rather than organize a unilateral NATO/U.N. action against Iraq, the GOP cloaked Iraq in a "crisis" and forced a stupid war down our throats. Now, 7 years later, almost everyone agrees that not only was the war a poorly planned waste of American resources and lives, but also it was predicated on a series of bald-faced lies.
What if, instead of kowtowing to the President's "crisis", instead the blue bloods in the Senate had bravely filibustered, and denied the President funding for his little Middle East vendetta? Can anyone honestly tell me that the Dems wouldn't have filibustered (or at least aggressively delayed) the Iraq War if not for the overwhelming support of it from even their constituency base?
Is that not what is going on here? The Republican (and to a certain degree, the Blue Dog) constituency bases are strongly opposed to any form of government health care system, but Obama has not instilled an effective enough false sense of fear in the American people, and as such the GOP isn't afraid to filibuster.
But then again, I'm not a genius like Ezra Klein.
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