Alex Pareene (Salon): Blame the Constitution for this mess
The government shut down. It shut down because Republicans wanted it shut down. More importantly, it shut down because Republicans have the power to shut it down. This is the disturbing thing: The Republicans are acting rationally. At least, each individual Republican is acting rationally, with maybe a couple exceptions. (Ok, Bachmann, Gohmert, Broun and Steve King are the exceptions, they are genuinely irrational crazy people.)
In our system of government, an opposition party doesn’t have the ability to pass legislation, but it has the ability to massively screw things up. It would be strange if legislators didn’t exercise that power in order to maximize their chances of either winning legislative concessions or hurting the current ruling party politically. Furthermore, our electoral system means that most House members are insulated from national attitudes about their actions, and, indeed, many Republicans members would be punished by their constituents — especially the ones that vote in primaries, the only elections that matter in many House districts — if they didn’t exercise their power to screw things up.
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza referred recently to a House “suicide caucus,” a group of eighty Republicans driving the House further to the right, in defiance of national popular opinion and the wishes of the more “moderate” elements of their own party:
These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.
These people represent very white, very conservative districts. Partisan primaries and first-past-the-post voting provide even more inventive to be as far to the right as possible. How much can we blame this “minority of a minority” for acting according to the probable wishes of their constituents? Shouldn’t we actually be more upset about a system of government that gives eighty people representing eighteen percent of the population the ability to drag the United States to the edge of national default?
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http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/blame_the_constitution/
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