‘A Couple of Things That Puzzle Me in the Debt Ceiling Negotiations’
26th July 2011
Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy has a fundamental insight.
I call Washington all f**ked up and mean, because no rational person would seriously entertain default. You call Washington all f**ked up and mean, because no rational person would agree to these kinds of deficits. We think — in the current twitter-talk of a pox on both their DC houses — Washington is a mess because we can’t find a compromise. The truth is, however, we don’t actually think there is much room to compromise and, given that our principles on this represent a fairly sizable difference in world view, that’s probably right. The structural problem of Washington is that everyone has a hold-up; “let’s vote and majority policy wins” doesn’t work because we’ve allowed a consensus system informally to take hold, rather than a majoritarian one (albeit one revisable at least in part by a future majority).
And that’s the fundamental problem — searching for a consensus that doesn’t exist, and an unwillingness to let the side with more votes win. Granted that the latter isn’t a panacea — Democrats had two years where they complete control of the government, and they still didn’t do anything — nevertheless it’s better than what we have now. Politicians just aren’t willing to put their names on a policy and push it through, because if it fails they own it; they’d rather dither and moan and let things fall apart, because then they can keep pointing the finger at the other side in hopes of improving their chances of re-election.