Divided Government: You know you want it
As much as we Republicans would like to believe otherwise, the difficulties facing President Obama and the Democrats are not so much an endorsement of Republican governance as a repudiation of the Democrats'. The GOP remains about as stubbornly unpopular today as it was a year ago when Obama took power.
Voter discontent, which Obama sought to soothe in last night's State of the Union address, is of course partly ideological. Obama and congressional Democrats are moving too far left, far too fast. But it is also about a growing distaste for how the process of government has been working. In short, Americans believe that government is broken.
In the best of times the American system of government is slow and inefficient. But in the words of computer programmers, that is a feature, not a bug. The layers of checks and balances the founders created were designed precisely to slow down the pace of change and to preserve our liberty by weighting the system toward government inaction over "getting things done."
And these are not the best of times. Voters, believing that George W. Bush's presidency was foundering, sent congressional Republicans packing in 2006 and 2008 after 12 years of controlling Congress. With Obama's election, Democrats regained control of all of the levers of power in Washington -- something they had not had since 1994, when America voted overwhelmingly for dividing government power between Republicans and Democrats.
This fact alone is enough to explain why Americans believe that things are going so terribly wrong in Washington. No, not that Democrats are stupid or venal (although as a conservative I vehemently oppose much of what they promote). Rather, recent history shows us that one-party rule almost inevitably leads to political disaster.
Read the rest at the Star Tribune
Share this post
