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1:30 pm - Mon, Apr 23, 2012

Oh, If Only Washington Were More Authoritarian!

Thomas Friedman, who is turning his dictatorship fetish into something approaching a regular beat, is back at it again.

This time he’s leaning on Francis Fukayama, who joins him in bemoaning the fact that rulemaking in Washington is not frictionless:

“There is a crisis of authority, and we’re not prepared to think about it in these terms,” said Fukuyama. “When Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.” That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. “But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”

That is being lost at the federal level. A system with as many checks and balances built into it as ours assumes — indeed requires — a certain minimum level of cooperation on major issues between the two parties, despite ideological differences. Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, which was a hugely powerful force compelling compromise between the parties, several factors are combining to paralyze our whole system.

For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes….

“If we are to get out of our present paralysis, we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules,” argues Fukuyama. These would include eliminating senatorial holds and the filibuster for routine legislation and having budgets drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with “heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,” insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote.

I know what you’re thinking: “That will never happen.” And do you know what I’m thinking? “Then we will never be a great country again, no matter who is elected.” We can’t be great as long as we remain a vetocracy rather than a democracy.

In short, he’s gone from wanting us to be “China for a day” to wanting us to be China until the heat-death of the universe. Heavy technocratic influence, without all that messy democracy — that’s the way you get things done!

What’s especially funny about this? Friedman got started on this kick in late 2009. Oddly — well, not so oddly — he wasn’t beating the drum for less gridlock and more executive power back when the Oval Office was being occupied by a certain George W.

This is pretty typical, and not just of Friedman. Look up debates about the Senate filibuster, and you will find shameless inconsistency on every side:

Senate Republicans, as eternally shameless as their Democratic counterparts, have changed their tune — again — about the virtues of filibustering judicial nominees.

Back when Democrats were filibustering George W. Bush’s nominees, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell railed that the other side had “changed the advise and consent responsibilities to advise and obstruct.” Other Republicans chimed in that it was only fair to give nominees an up-or-down vote.

Yet this month Republicans tried to filibuster David Hamilton’s nomination to a federal appeals court, backing up a threat the GOP  caucus made earlier this year in a letter to the White House — a letter The New York Times deemed “outrageous” for its hypocrisy. Of course it was — if intellectual consistency is the yardstick by which such things ought to be measured.

But if intellectual consistency is the yardstick, then The Times, too, is equally outrageous.

Years ago, when Sen. Phil Gramm threatened to block a Clinton nominee for surgeon general, The Times condemned the move as a “desperate bid.” But three years later, when the GOP tried to stop another nominee with a bill rider, The Times urged Democrats to filibuster the measure.

A decade later, when Republicans griped about Democratic filibusters, The Times said that while the GOP might see the filibuster as “an annoying obstacle” it really was “one of the checks and balances that the Founders, who worried greatly about concentration of power, built into our system of government [and is] one of the oldest traditions in American democracy.”

Now, of course, The Times once again considers the filibuster an egregious, democracy-destroying tool of the devil. And it finally has come up with explanation for its flip-flopping: “Senate Democrats used the filibuster very selectively against Bush nominees who were true extremists … .Republican senators, by contrast, are unreasonably opposing good nominees who are well within the mainstream.”

So I figure Friedman’s authoritarianism fetish won’t last forever. It will probably come to an end either in late 2012, or in late 2016 — depending on which party seizes control of the White House.

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