Institutions and Health Care
By Long-time readers will know I agree entirely with this:
So that’s the context in which to ask whether or not it makes sense to have a supermajority requirement for many Senate votes. I would say “no.” Even absent the filibuster, our system would still feature an unusually large number of veto points, especially when you take our unusually robust system of judicial review into account. The supermajority requirement is at odds with our basic democratic norms, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with an example of it ever actually being used to protect the interests of some kind of put-upon minority, and I see no empirical reason to think that our systematically larger number of veto points is producing systematically better results than you see elsewhere. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that the large number of veto points makes it easier for narrow interest groups to block public interest reforms.
In terms of Matt’s question about the originality of Tsebelis’s argumemts, I don’t mean it as a criticism of his excellent book to note that this point has been made convincingly by people working in the historical institutionalist tradition as well as rational choicers. Most relevant to the Obama administration is the analysis of scholars like Ellen Immergut and Sven Steinmo, which demonstrates how the chances of achieving major health care reform diminish greatly with additional veto points. Talk about how American doctors and insurance companies oppose health care reform doesn’t explain much in itself, because these groups pretty much always oppose comprehensive reforms everywhere. The difference is that the American system allows representatives of these interests to block even popular reforms much more easily.
For this reason, it’s good that Pelosi is taking away tools allowing for minority vetoes in the House of Representatives, and it’s black comedy for Congressional Republicans to claim that making it more difficult to quietly thwart majority-favored legislation without an up-or-down vote is a blow to “transparency” and “fairness.”