Accidental Blogger

With a discussion of partisanship going on at BL’s LS Reports, and with classes at the U of M starting on Tuesday and me avoiding my Contracts and Torts casebooks, now strikes me as a good time to post about politics — especially the two-party "us or them" system that qualifies as a political system in the States these days.

I should perhaps disclose my bias: I fashion myself as distinctly nonpartisan.  I am perhaps even anti-partisan, which made, for example, Jessica Wilson one of my favorite guest (co-?) bloggers at Leiter Reports shortly after the switch to a multiblogger format due to her "it’s time for progressives to kill the Democratic Party" rhetoric.

If you read the same blogs I do you may have already guessed that the motivation behind this post is one by Sandy Levinson at Balkinization:

Needless to say, I couldn’t agree with him more that we need more members of Congress willing to put the brakes on an ever more authoritarian and removed-from-reality Executive Branch led by a stunningly incompetent ignoramus. But that is just to say that we need more Democrats in Congress, for all of the obvious criticisms that can be directed at the Democratic Pary. Lincoln Chafee might be a fine, upstanding person, but so long as he would vote to leave the Senate in Republican hands, he is a menace to the Republic who should be thrown out of office. It really is as simple as that. Could Broder possibly believe that it would be better to have a Senate that included the virtuous and in some ways admirable Chafee if it came at the price of the Senate’s remaining in Republican hands (and therefore completely unwilling to engage in any significant oversight of their Republican masters in the Executive)? This election is not about the individual virtue of the candidates; it is about which party will be authorized to organize the House and the Senate, with all of the prerogatives attached to that organization, including all-important subpoena powers for investigations. I wish one could believe otherwise, but, as Walter Cronkhite used to say, "that’s the way it is…."

My knee-jerk reaction is to scream, No! He is one of the good ones and I like him!  Which is why, I think, this is a good post for readers to argue out the merits of various responses in the comments.

Prof. Levinson’s argument is that a "blue" Republican like Lincoln Chafee is a liability for progressive causes, that liberal politics would be better served by having a Democrat who is no more liberal than Chafee instead take his place in Congress because of special privileges granted to the majority party.  Okay, that’s not terribly controversial, although it is interesting insofar as he says Rhode Islanders ought to vote Chafee out of office.  Where it becomes even more interesting — and Levinson does not speak directly to this point — is if we extend this reasoning to a "red" Democrat (not even someone like crazy Zell Miller, although that stretches Levinson’s argument to a point where maybe we need to take it, but say just a random Dem from Indiana).

Those "obvious criticisms that can be directed at the Democratic Party" speak past this issue.  On the one hand: Democrats are useless, get rid of them.  On the other: If Republicans control Congress you would need Republican leadership to consist of Chafee-like individuals who would be willing to issue subpoenas and do whatever else it is that the majority party of the House or the Senate (not the majority of members of the House or the Senate!) can do that the minority party cannot.  (Or at least the Senate — I’ve never studied any political science, I don’t know the details.)

So is it just a question of how you weigh it out?  I like the weather, culture, and energy of San Francisco.  I do not like earthquakes.  Should I live in San Francisco?  Or are the two arguments, pro- and anti-Chafee (as a symbol, I think) not speaking past each other after all?  Recall that Levinson writes: "Lincoln Chafee might be a fine, upstanding person, but so long as he would vote to leave the Senate in Republican hands, he is a menace to the Republic who should be thrown out of office" (emphasis mine).  Maybe my limited knowledge of government is the problem here, but is he making the argument that Lincoln Chafee is a menace because that "R" next to his name makes his party the majority party, or that Lincoln Chafee is a menace because Professor Levinson believes he would vote Republican on important issues?  It actually looks like he’s making both arguments — but in any case the latter irritates me, and moreover seems rather absurd if we’re going to extend the logic to any meaningful position (viz., replacing Chafee with a Democrat who is at least somewhat more conservative than he is on important issues).