The Gathering Storm
I think everyone trying to finely parse the latest recess appointment controversy, whether calmly and sagely supportive or calmly and sagely critical, is sort of missing the point. I am supportive (largely on policy grounds) but actually alarmed.
What we see over and over again is a recurrence not over legal minutia but over the basic question: “who governs?” And rhetoric about nullification aside, it’s important to see the deep reasonableness of the House GOP view on this. Every single House member stood for election in November 2010 and every one of them will need to stand for re-election in November 2012. They won a majority fair and square, want to implement their agenda, and are prepared to face the consequences on the next Election Day. This was House Democrats’ perspective in the 111th Congress vis-a-vis the filibuster and it’s House Republicans’ perspective in the 112th Congress vis-a-vis the White House. I have deep sympathies to this “House view” since it reflects, more or less, the way the overwhelming majority of well-functioning democracies operate. The basic conflict here is quite severe. It’s as if the United Kingdom had resolved the King’s conflict with Parliament by turning the Monarchy into an elective position rather than by having the King defer to Parliament’s greater democratic legitimacy—nothing would actually have been resolved in terms of a decision rule.
These escalating rounds of constitutional hardball (into which we ought to fold warrantless wiretapping and assassination of US citizens & the debt ceiling crisis) seem to me bound to result over time in either de facto parliamentary government or de facto plebiscitary dictatorship. The former result would be much better, but the latter is much more likely.
