Matt Yglesias aruges that the risk of constitutional crisis is an inherent weakness in our system of checks and balances. As we've shifted in the 20th century to ideological (from strictly partisan) politics, government has become more dysfunctional and more willing to flirt with extreme behavior: blocking routine appointments, forcing budget showdowns, and using executive actions to rewrite legislation. What are the risks? The last time we had an extended period of ideological conflict, we fought a civil war over it.
In the process, Yglesias reviews the record of other presidential republics like ours, most of which are in Latin America. The results, with the caveat that these are Latin Americans, are not reassuring:
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Linz argues that this goes to the very nature of a system of divided government:
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Most of the rest of the democratic world governs from a parliamentary system, where gridlock results in new elections and where the executive is essentially the leader of the legislature. Parliamentary systems are not perfect, of course--instability may be reflected in repeated dissolutions of parliament and even contested elections--but it can ride out ideological conflict and crises that pose bigger threats to divided government.
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For the polarization to be really damaging, Yglesias argues, it requires an ideological component. Party polarization is not that new, but what is new is its ideological character:
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What he found is that while Gilded Age members of Congress voted in a highly partisan way, their voting didn't reflect any polarization of ideas evident in broader American society. As Charles Calhoun, a leading scholar of Gilded Age politics has written, the main concern of actual members of Congress was not policy, but "patronage power, the privilege of placing one's political friends and supporters in in subordinate offices." In other words, a member of Congress would get to distribute federal jobs and contracts to his supporters and in exchange the beneficiaries of his patronage would support his party's ticket at all levels. For this reason, the obscure-sounding job of customs collector of the Port of New York was important enough in the 1870s that Chester A. Arthur leapt from it to the Vice Presidency. The first real filibuster was held over Whig efforts to assign a printing contract to friendly companies.
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Partisan politics became fused to ideological politics.
Yglesias goes on to describe Honduras' constitutional meltdown, which was precipitated by an attempt to amend its constitution (the legislature and executive could not agree on whether the attempt was legal). After a period of instability and contention, this resulted in a military coup.
American politics are now characterized by what Yglesias calls (after Georgetown University Professor Mark Tushnet) "constitutional hardball". Both sides have been more aggressively interpreting their authority to either get their way or to disrupt their opponent's policies. Predictably, alot of this relies on Talmudic interpretations of the rules. Republicans, for example, have aggressively filibustered presidential appointments, a hardball interpretation of their advise and consent role. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid eventually responded with the hardball move of disallowing filibusters for this purpose.
Similarly, Obama has used executive authority to selectively enforce immigration law, essentially rewriting the law to his liking. A future Republican president may use executive authority to neuter Obamacare. Because gridlock makes it difficult and slow for the legislature to counter executive actions like these, we may be in for a lengthened period of rule by executive authority. Being merely a selective interpretation of the laws, this may lead to uncertain governance--the next president can completely undo previous executive actions without any legislative input.
Immigration isn't even the most egregious case of executive rewriting of law. While it's received less media attention, Obama's actions on No Child Left Behind have gone far further, using the (badly written) Bush-era legislation to effectively compel states to implement whatever educational policies Obama wants.
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Several experts agreed that the waivers alone would have been unremarkable, but that Obama using them to force policy reforms with no basis in the law is something new. "He used what was, in my view, a waiver provision for modest experiments and transformed it into a platform for the redesign of the statute," says Bruce Ackerman, a professor at Yale Law School. Ackerman believes the NCLB waivers were Obama's "most troubling" use of executive power on the domestic front. Howell agrees, saying, "This strikes me as a new frontier."
Yglesias does not include in his calculus the wide ranging demographic change in America, which adds to the likelihood of socipolitical chaos culminating in constitutional breakdown. Up until the 20th century America has seen its constitutional government implemented by a culturally homogenous population--English speaking, European, and forging a distinct world identity. Because liberals do not believe that culture is related to biology or that culture itself really means anything (to them it arises from nowhere and persists for no reason), they do not grasp how much risk demographic change has added to the equation.
Ygelsias concludes:
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The best we can hope for is that when the crisis does come, Americans will have the wisdom to do for ourselves what we did in the past for Germany and Japan and put a better system in place.
I doubt it will take 20-30 years, and I doubt we'll put a better system in place. More likely America will be finished as a single nation.
Sources: http://www.vox.com/2...emocracy-doomed, http://www.vox.com/2...-abuse-of-power