This morning Charles Krauthammer slays an utterly disembodied dragon. "The filibuster has grown in use and power over the decades to the point of dysfunction," he writes in a kind of quasi-passive outrage. No one knows how this sloughing, mischievous filibuster thing ever happened in the modern era, no one knows whence it came, no one knows of its abusive creator. It just sort of "grew," you know, "over the decades."
But wouldn't you just know this? Those despicable Democrats are harnessing its "dysfunctional" power. Yes, these Frankenstein brutes are blocking Republican bills and gumming up the populist works, laments the crestfallen Krauthammer, aghast at the ruthlessness of it all. The proper Republican response? "Abolish the filibuster," he says. Then congressional democracy can proceed as God and founders intended: Republicans can, among other things, "immediately pass the House homeland security bill and send it to the president"; indeed filibuster abolition "would give Republicans full control of the Congress and allow swift passage of a GOP agenda." After that, the president can do what he likes. He can "Sign, veto or negotiate a compromise. If he vetoes, then Republicans take that issue to the country in 2016."
Some on the left will chortle that Krauthammer has moved radically in their direction. And he has. His is chiefly a hypocritical careening, but it's a leftward swerve nonetheless. The old-school "participatory democracy" types have advocated filibuster abolitionism for years. Stripped of ideological spectrum-labeling, however, what Krauthammer now advocates is nothing more than political accountability. Republicans may have swindled and slithered their way into majority congressional power, but it's a majority the electorate handed them, and it should be theirs to disgrace as they like.
Such thinking was conservative heresy six months ago; now it's Krauthammerian doctrine. When Democrats regain the Senate, it'll revert to its heretical stage. But that's a secondary point. Hypocritical careening is what modern conservatives do, since they're not conservatives of conviction at all. The essential point is that for now, at least, Krauthammer the Outraged has stumbled into the virtuous corner of political accountability. We should praise, not inter, his sudden enlightenment, however groping, twisted and intellectually corrupt it is.
Krauthammer's freshly hatched, temporary conviction is that accountability will work in Republicans' favor — otherwise, of course, he'd still be agin it. He believes that a trough of GOP bills being vetoed by the president would throw the latter — and by extension all Democrats — on the defensive in the run-up to 2016. What Krauthammer fails to reckon, though, are two considerations: Obama possesses a much, much louder and multidirectional foghorn than do many Republican pols necessarily pandering to a narrow base; and the GOP's trough of lunatic legislation might, in reality, be more of a thimble. Assuming House Democrats hang tough in oppositional solidarity, Speaker Boehner is left with a fractured, infighting caucus that can pass pretty much nothing. And whatever crackpot bills it does pass, purple Republican senators are likely to flee from them, since in 2016 they'll be facing a diverse presidential electorate rather than the midtermish, walking-dead swarms of angry old white dudes.
Charles, I like your thinking here. It's classic, pseudoconservative knee-jerkism born of characteristic outrage, steeped in breathtaking hypocrisy, and shorn of game-theory moves two, three, four, ad infinitum. Welcome to the boomeranging world of political accountability.
Hypocrisy be damned. Tribalism trumps principle. Every. Single. Time.
Posted by: shsavage | February 20, 2015 at 09:04 AM