I confess I was tempted to take a pass when I saw the May 29 headline of the article in the New York Times, “What American Needs is a Liberalism that Builds.” In recent years there has been a seemingly endless parade of critiques of how Democrats have blown it, whether through poor messaging, a failure to wisely prioritize the issues, or simply not being mean enough to compete with Republicans, who no longer have qualms about ignoring laws and facts in their feverish pursuit of raw power. It’s not that some of the criticisms don’t have merit. But given the existential challenges we currently face as a nation, much of it comes across as if the captain of the sinking Titanic complains to the galley chef that there aren’t enough cherry tarts to go around during their final meal.
But since Ezra Klein was the author of the piece, I decided to have a closer look. After all, Klein is a smart guy, right? Has a good reputation and likes todo research to back up his positions.
What I found was something that might not get a passing grade in Political Science101.
Klein bemoans the fact that infrastructure projects in the US are far more expensive than in many other countries: “We have a government that is extremely good at making building difficult.” And who are the culprits? For starters, Klein blames Democratic presidents for being lawyers. Noting that the Clintons, Obama, Biden, and Harris are all attorneys, Klein quotes a law professor who says, “Lawyers, not managers have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States. And if all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”
Since lawyers are obviously needed to write the actual laws and regulations, whether the president is an attorney or not, are we to believe that those particular Presidents instructed their attorneys to write the law sand regulations in byzantine fashion so as to create unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles? While contending that this lawyer’s way of thinking has “filtered down through the Party,” Klein offers no examples of how it has produced the inefficiencies he blames on Democrats.
He quotes law professor Robert Kagan:
“The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice and comment rulemaking, zealous environmental review, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions, the list goes on and on.”
Klein says all those things “render government ineffective.” He doesn’t say which regulations and rules ought to be thrown out in the name of “efficiency,” but it’s a sure bet that many Republicans and their corporate donors are thrilled at the thought of setting aside hard won environmental protections and rules governing hiring that prevent discrimination. Who the heck needs them?
Klein laments that if President Biden “wanted to reform or waive large sections of NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) to speed construction …he’d find himself at war,” with his own party. “What if he[Biden] decided to argue not just that government workers should be paid more but should be easier to hire and fire?” he asks. That applause you hear in the background is Donald Trump and his minions, salivating at the possibility of not only being able to dole out contracts without environmental protections, but installing compliant hacks into government jobs and firing those who don’t yield to political pressures.
There is an air of unreality permeating Klein’s entire piece, as though he somehow believes Democrats are fully in charge of all government operations, as though he doesn’t realize that many of the nettlesome roadblocks to efficiency are there because the Republican Party has often stood squarely against reasonable safeguards. Has he not noticed the drift, some would say rush toward authoritarianism? Are not the courts and legal safeguards written into laws the only remaining firewall when Republicans gain executive power?
“Democrats spend too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not nearly enough time imagining how to make government capable of executing them,” Klein intones.
Perhaps Klein should spend less time imagining the world as he would like it to be and more time thinking about how to deal with the real-world threats to our democratic form of government.