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May 20, 2005
James Carville, Call Your Office
Josh Marshall makes an odd point about the filibuster battle going on in the Senate right now:
Another point, for anyone who's actually interested in the constitution, its history and its future, is the degree to which this whole operation is quite clearly being engineered from the White House. This isn't just about the internal workings of the senate. It is also about, indeed principally about, the executive clipping the wings of the Congress, part of the parliamentarization of the American government under the President Bush that we discussed back on November 5th.
What makes this such an odd point is that it's hardly new. It's been the case since at least the 1930's that the executive branch has been heavily involved in directing Party strategy (on both sides), that the two-party system was taken to be a given, and that the division in political party was accepted to be the locus of the balance of powers, rather than between the executive and legislative branches. It's been the case since at least the 1960's that the Federal and State divide was no longer going to be part of the balance of powers, and that this too would be subsumed into the Party-balance equation by federalizing most State lawmaking realms. It began to be assumed, with the Bork nomination, that the judiciary, too, would become part of the Party-balance battle. This was made explicit after George Bush's election in 2000, when the current kerfuffle over judicial nominations to circuit courts (and the Supreme Court, when that finally comes up) began.
It's not as if the Clinton administration didn't direct the activities of the Democrat Party in the House, the Senate and pretty much everywhere else: in fact they were (in)famous for how closely they controlled Party politics. So, OK, if you're looking for partisan spin (which Marshall generally is), that is maybe a fine talking point (I begin to see where the blog name comes from...), but it's hardly a point worthy of debate or scandal.
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