Hey, Democrats, The System Doesn’t Need To Be ‘Fixed’ Every Time You Lose An Election

If you’re under the impression that the system exists merely to facilitate your partisan agenda, it’s not surprising that you also believe it's “broken” every time things don’t go your way. This is why so many Democrats argue that we should “fix” the Electoral College when they lose a presidential election and “fix” the filibuster when they run the Senate and now “fix” the Supreme Court when they don’t run the Senate.

During the Obama presidency, liberal pundits groused about the supposed crisis posed by a “dysfunctional” Congress. In political media parlance, “dysfunction” can be roughly translated into “Democrats aren’t able to do as they like.” Congress, as you know, was only “broken” when President Obama wasn’t getting his agenda passed, not when his party was imposing a wholly partisan, unprecedented health-care regime on all Americans.

In any event, the political establishment spent six years wringing its hands about subsequent GOP electoral success, which was an organic political reaction that strengthened separationof powers and reflected the nation’s ideological divisions. Although you’d never know it listening to political coverage, it meant the system was working just fine.

Yet many of the president’s boosters, including Ezra Klein, then at The Washington Post, began not only arguing that Congress was “broken” (bad) but that it was “fundamentally broken” (really bad!). By 2013, after Republicans had made gains in the Senate, Klein andothers were arguing for increasing majoritarianism to “fix” the problem. It was the GOP’s “unprecedented obstructionism” (a euphemism for disagreeing with Obama on policy) that supposedly left them no other choice.

Now, if the majority of voters had been truly disgusted by “obstructionism,” the GOP would have paid a political price for their actions. The opposite occurred. Perhaps instinctively, voters wanted a more ideologically balanced Washington. So Democrats decided the system was the problem.

What we call “norm-breaking” these days was referred to as “reform” during the Obama administration. "Reformers" like Klein and his allies would convince Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a man who once argued that weakening the Senate filibuster would “destroy the very checks and balances our Founding Fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,” to use the “nuclear option” and blow up Senate rules on judicial filibusters so Obama could stack the courts.

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