Jason Rosenbaum, who runs the Seminal Blog at FireDogLake gives us an object lesson in what passes for “pragmatism” in Washington today. It is a pragmatism without a sense of limits. And we have seen it from the President, his closest advisers, and the “official” progressives resident in Washington and New York “think tanks” and institutes, in the media and in the “access blogosphere.” He says:

“While I’m very sympathetic to the arguments of letsgetitdone and others that the deficit simply isn’t a problem our government should be concerned with right now, political realities dictate different behavior from our politicians. People still list the national debt as a concern unprompted due to decades of brainwashing by the business-friendly right wing in this country. This leads less brave or creative politicians to disastrous ideas like the cat food commission.”

Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times

Over the past four days two mega-threads appeared at Firedog Lake’s (FDL’s) Seminal web site. The first was created in response to a diary by “realworld” called “Why I won’t be voting for Martha Coakley on Tuesday” received 604 comments, a very large number for that site. And the second responding to a diary by Jason Rosenbaum entitled “To the Pissed Off Progressives, Don’t Be Naderites,” which at this writing has received 851 comments.

The arguments of the two diaries are as follows

As I see it, the answer to these problems of imbalance in our institutions is not to weaken the Executive. In fact, I think we need a strong Executive to cope with the rapid changes the United States is experiencing today. However, I also think that the key to these problems is to strengthen the Congress as a collective institution, but to weaken individual Congresspersons and Senators relative to the party leaders in each House and to the institution as a whole. To do that, in turn, I think we have to get rid of the seniority system in both Houses and the filibuster institution in the Senate.

If we did these two things, the leaders in both Houses would be much stronger and more effective. If no filibusters were possible, majority rule could be restored to the Senate, and inordinate delays in passing legislation would no longer be possible. If committee chairmanships were no longer determined by seniority, but through selection by the leaders of the majority party in each House, the committee chairs would be accountable to the leaders. If the leaders, in turn, were accountable to the party caucuses, then we would have strong party and leader rule in both Houses. The parties, in turn, would be accountable to their stated party platforms, which would finally mean something after elections. Of course, in a situation like this, party discipline could also be enforced in the Congress as it is in the British system, and the majority party would have no problem passing positive legislation that it favored.