It's a question that has been asked a lot here recently. Why has Obama not got health care through yet, with a robust public option? Why hasn't he passed much more sweeping reform of banking? Why hasn't he repealed DADT? Why are Dems incapable of getting anything through the Senate?
In the Guardian newspaper in the UK today, Michael Tomasky has a go at answering that question. He has some interesting thoughts, which also throws up some illuminating differences between the US and UK Parliaments. It could be summarised as saying that your minority parties have too much power, while ours have too little.
Tomasky's jumping-off point is the announcement from the UK Government that they are going to tax the bankers. It's been announced by the Treasury, and it has the support of the majority party in Parliament. Therefore there is no question at all that it will be passed. He contrasts that with the position in America.
Watching American politics through British eyes, you must be utterly mystified as to why Barack Obama hasn't gotten this healthcare bill passed yet. Many Americans are too. The instinctive reflex is to blame Obama. He must be doing something wrong. Maybe he is doing a thing or two wrong. But the main thing is that America's political system is broken.
He identifies two main problems.
The first is the super-majority requirement to end debate in the Senate. The second is the near-unanimous obstinacy of the Republican opposition. They have made important legislative work all but impossible.
It is worth observing at this point a major difference between America and Britain. In America, the two-party system means that the party with the most seats in the legislature is the party that gained the votes of the majority of the electorate. In Britain, our multi-party, but first-past-the-post system pretty much guarantees that the winning party will have been voted against by a majority of the electorate - sometimes a large majority. For example, in the 2005 election, the Labour party won 55.2% of the seats on 35.3% of the votes, while the Conservatives won 30.7% of seats with 32.3% of the votes, and the Liberal Democrats took 22.1% of the vote but got just 9.6% of the seats.
So in America, a party can win the election and win the argument, but still not get its legislation through, while in Britain, a party can take barely a third of the votes, and lose the argument but still force its policies through. Rarely, the Government will suffer a backbench rebellion, like when they tried to pass a law that would allow the police to hold terrorist suspects for 90 days without charge. It is headline news every time this happens.
Tomasky then addresses the question why Obama is having so much more trouble than his predecessors.
The super-majority requirement... has been around since the 19th century. But it's only in the last 10 to 15 years that it has been invoked routinely. Back in Lyndon Johnson's day... the requirement was reserved for only the most hot-button issues (usually having to do with race). Everything else needed only 51 votes to pass, a regular majority.
Everything changed when the Republicans became a minority again in 2007, as demonstrated by this chart from Think Progress. The number of filibusters hit an unprecedented 66. The following year, it increased to 112.
Tomasky also tackles head-on the "President Snowe" meme that has been adopted by progressives to attack Obama for giving too much weight to a single Republican.
the situation gives those senators [on the margin of the 60 vote threshold] incredible bargaining power. They can basically dictate terms in exchange for their votes. Which is exactly what senators [Nelson, Lieberman and Snowe] have been doing publicly for weeks. A sharp friend has mordantly taken to referring to them as "President Nelson", "President Lieberman" and "President Snowe" in emails. My friend is not exaggerating. With regard to the final content of the Senate bill, each has more power than Obama.
And that is not because of anything Obama is or is not doing. It is in the nature of the system.
David Swanson on Democrats.com summarises just how absurdly undemocratic the effect of the filibuster can be.
If you take 41 senators from the 21 smallest states, you can block any legislation with a group of multi-millionaires elected by 11.2 percent of the American public.
Tomasky ends with a statement that could be a description of much of what has been going on here on DKos recently.
These are the two basic reasons the great progressive dawn of the Obama era has ground to a near halt. And yet even most Americans are dimly aware of all this. It requires a lot of dot connecting... But for now, people on the left would rather engage in juvenile carping about how let down they are.
Obama can only work with the system as it is, and the Congress he has. That system gives undue weight to the views of the minority, in contrast to the British system which gives way too much power to a party that wins the majority of seats on a minority of the vote. I think Britain and the US are at two extremes on the spectrum, and both need to move more towards the centre, respecting a plurality of views, but at some point allowing legislation to pass.
Despite being at one extreme of the spectrum, for a couple of centuries, the American way has worked, thanks to a mutually respected custom not to invoke filibusters frivolously. The gentlemen's agreement that reserved the pushing of the nuclear button for what could perhaps be termed major constitutional issues has been ripped up by the Party of No, thereby seizing a power for themselves that the founding fathers almost certainly never envisaged. After all, it would take an entire party to ignore the interests of the country for this to become a problem in practice, and that could never happen, surely...