I've been reading a bunch of articles on this whole Texas Congress fiasco about how the Democrats hid so they would not have to vote on a Republican redistricting plan, and I find myself more amazed at the posturing the writers need to take than the actual content of their arguments. I find it fascinating sometimes that people actually need to villify the othe side in what is very much an obvious circumstance.

Morris Fiorina pointed out in Divided Government that divided government is not always a bad thing, and that quite often in divided government the compromises allow us to further productive government whereas in times of unified government, there has been no consensus that things were actually good, and that things actually moved forward. Gary Jacobson makes a pretty interesting claim in the first edition of his book The Politics of Congressional Elections when he indicates that due to the changing nature of PACs, it was very possible (and this is a connection I made linking his arguments together along with Fiorina's) that the Republican Party would move away from just controlling state governments and become a major powerhouse in the national government as well.

I put forth that Texas is a very good example of the steps that the displaced party is going to have to take in order to still remain feasible. The interesting thing of this whole affair is not that they went against the grain, but that they used a parliamentary procedure to circumvent a vote, and thus derail the Republican attempt to redistrict. People don't even think about the ramifications of redistricting in a non-census period; if this was to happen everytime a Congress changed its power structure, you could have a continuous period of redistricting where people would eventually lose all faith in the political system. I know I would if I didn't know what district I was going to be in due to how someone is trying to gain more seats for his own party every couple of weeks or months.

This is going to be happening a lot, if Jacobson was correct. We're going to see a lot of this type of last ditch attempt posturing on the Democrats a lot in the near future, because we live in a dual society that makes it so that you can only play to win. Right now, the Republicans are winning, and they are going to do everything possible to make that solidified. Because of this, we're going to start seeing a lot of parliamentary resistance from the other side. The confirmation hearings and the attempts to stall that are a great example.

I predict we're going to see a lot more of this and at a much higher cost in the future. The more one side solidifies its control of the government, the more you're going to see desperate measures having to be taken on the other side. A good example is to observe the steps New Zealand went through before its government decided on proportional government. The two party system eventually collapsed into a one party system and a tolerated second party outsider group before proportional representation changed the whole process.

But I don't think people really think all that much about the long term ramifications but just in how much their side is winning or losing.

Stumble It!