Ezra, Matt, and others are quite right to highlight this passage from former RI Senator Chafee's forthcoming memoir:
"The system works best when power remains in the hands of the voters," writes Chafee. "I was a casualty of the system working in 2006, and while defeat is never easy, I give the voters credit: They made the connection between electing even popular Republicans at the cost of leaving the Senate in the hands of a leadership they had learned to mistrust."
Here's Ezra's take on what this means:
There was a time when the individual standing before you, asking for your vote, actually had some autonomy, some power. If he said he was independent, there was a reasonable chance that he was. That moment is long gone. Now, voters cast ballots for tall, white-haired, charismatic power brokers who promptly return to Washington and show themselves to be meek, cowed, cogs in the larger machine. And that's basically fine, I have no problem with a more parliamentary Congress. The problem is when voters don't realize that it's the party, rather than the person, that they're voting for. As Chafee accurately notes, he was a good guy, and he opposed the administration on some genuinely crucial votes (like the authorization to go to war in Iraq), but at the end of the day, his primary impact was at the start of the session, when he cast a vote for a Republican as Senate Majority Leader.
For decades commentators and political scientists has been writing about the decline, and sometimes even death, of political parties, but clearly everyone had written the parties off much too soon. The "parliamentarization of Congress," as Ezra calls it, is something that began back in the early to mid-1990s and firmly took hold when the GOP took control of Congress in 2002. Although the change was almost immediately apparent to those who watch congress for a living, it took a bit longer for the voters to catch on. Thankfully they finally are - in some places, at least.
UPDATE: Another great quote from Linc:
“I find it surprising now, in 2008, how many Democrats are running for president after shirking their constitutional duty to check and balance this president. Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill. “They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”
It's not enough to be ready on day one; you also have to be right.
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