Live Q&As

I think that hyper-partisanship plays a role, but not so much by imposing calendar deadlines as by making it difficult to form shifting coalitions for multiple small reforms.  Our parties were less ideologically coherent in the past, so it was easier for progressive Republicans to team up with liberal Democrats on some issues while conservative Democrats allied themselves with conservative Republicans on others.  As the parties have grown more coherent, a small number of center-right swing votes in Congress, mostly Blue Dog Democrats, have much more power than they did in the past.  You could make a case, I suppose, that its better to bargain with the same small group of swing votes all at once rather than repeatedly.  Even so, I thinkt that comprehensive reform will seldom succeed, for the other reasons I discussed.

Your point assumes a unified opposition, which will block a program whether in the form of salami tactics or one big salami.  That is certainly a problem, given the party discipline of the Republicans in opposition (the Democrats, even in opposition, are less disciplined).  Salami tactics work only if the opposition doesn't maintain a united front in rejecting every piece of the salami.

You've made my point for me!  Sure, the credit card reform bill might be stuffed with earmarks or giveaways...but it would be a credit card reform bill, not a would-be comprehensive financial reform bill.   At least in the case of immigration you can make the case that you need to do several things at once--that is, if you seal the borders and police workplaces, you have to do something with the unemployed illegal immigrants trapped inside the border.  But you can raise fuel efficiency standards without passing cap-and-trade and you can outlaw pay-day lending abuses without waiting for national agreement on the Volcker Rule or the tax treatment of carried interest in the case of hedge fund managers.

Your point is important and well taken.  Because of our inherited British first-past-the-post electoral system, which most democracies long ago abandoned for some version of proportional representation (PR), third and fourth parties are punished in the U.S. and we tend to get two big parties.  However, for most of our history the two-party framework disguised a de facto three- or four- or five-party system.  The McKinley-Hoover Republicans had their Wall Street internationalist and Midwestern protectionist wings, and the New Deal Democrats were a coalition of Southern conservatives, Southern and Western populists, the Northern white urban working class and Northern progressives, with increasing black participation over time.  Beginning in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to impose British-style parliamentary discipline on the Republican party, with great success, and the Democrats have done the same thing, less effectively.  I don't think our system can work by imposing a rigid two-party system on a fluid, multi-party population.  As long as we're stuck with first-past-the-post electoral rules, we need to have two looser parties, which are really coalitions of several informal parties, instead of two disciplined parties imposing party lines that only a liberal minority and a conservative minority completely agree with.

I agree with Napoleon, who said:  "I like a constitution that is short and vague."  Not only most laws but also constitutions should be concise enough that ordinary citizens can understand them.  And it should be easy to amend constitutions by voters when conditions change, as an alternative to having judges or executive branch officials amend them by interpretation.  France is much healthier because they are honest about having had five republics; we've had a series of different regimes in practice since the adoption of the federal constitution, but we pretend that the 1787 federal constitution hasn't been altered radically by amendment and interpretation.  Which reminds me of a joke.  An American goes to a Parisian bookseller and asks for a copy of the French constitution.  The French bookseller sneers, "We do not sell periodical literature."

I'm not an expert on the subject, but I know enough about American public education to make me skeptical about the idea that Congress can successfully reform it from Washington, at least without increasing Washington's share of education funding.  Most people would be shocked to learn that the federal government is responsible for less than a tenth of the spending on K-12.  Funding is divided almost entirely between states and local public school districts.  Congress imposes conditions on the small amount of money that it gives local public school systems.  I'd be much more impressed if the federal government, like national governments in other democracies, paid for a quarter or half of K-12 funding, something that would allow states and districts to raise the rest with much lower taxes, particularly in poor cities and poor states.  As long as members of Congress announce that they are imposing new conditions on the pittances they dole out to public schools, they're just grandstanding for the cameras, in my opinion.

Yes, you're correct.  Which reinforces my point--if it's hard to accomplish comprehensive reform during a civil war, it's infinitely more difficult during peacetime, even in a Great Recession.