On Bipartisanship

Gin and Tacos may well be my favorite blog. If you haven't yet done so, I highly suggest checking it out. Here is a recent quote, on bipartisanship:

To the extent that consensus and Both Sides handshake politics ever existed it was on issues where a brutal elite consense pervaded (segregation, for example) and so no debate was necessary. . . . . . . .

You see some ribbon threads of this today – Democrats and Republicans "coming together" to roll back Dodd-Frank and appease the financial industry. That's a terrible outcome. Just terrible. "Bipartisan" or "consensus" are not synonyms for "good" when it comes to public policy. It simply means that everyone agrees on an outcome (inevitably the status quo) and says nothing about the outcome itself. The Iraq War resolution was bipartisan. Agreeing to let Wall Street off the hook in the early Obama years was a bipartisan consensus. Spending a trillion dollars a year on the military is a bipartisan consensus. These are all idiotic and destructive ideas. If you applaud any of them simply on the basis of how good it makes you feel that no one really argued about anything and everyone shook hands and smiled and agreed, then I think you might not fully understand what politics is. This week, Congress passed a $717 Billion Pentagon spending bill without one word of debate. Everyone in Congress was no doubt very Civil about it, because they all want to roll around in the trough of money they just created. I would rather they caned each other over the head on the House floor and spent half as much on the military.