"Identify a trend and name it," my editor tells me. Mark Schmitt's done a good job of that one, labeling myself, my colleague Sam Rosenfeld, fellow TPMCaféer Nathan Newman, frequent antagonist David Sirota, and some others "The New Parliamentarians" -- to be a bit crass about it, those who dislike Tom Delay's goals but admire at least a substantial portion of his methods. Mark seems to be moving a bit in my direction, so give his post a read then return for additional thoughts as I try to edge him closer to the dark side.

I think there are three semi-separable things at issue here. One is whether reducing the barriers to legislation has a specific ideological valence. Another concerns the value of "grand coalition" legislative bargains. A third concerns how much parliamentarization is really happening.

On the first point, Mark's right that moves to make it easier to pass liberal initiatives also make it easier to pass conservative ones. Where I think he goes wrong, is that in the absence of barriers to legislation, liberal initiatives are harder to repeal than conservative ones. This is where the difference will be made. If the country ever enacts a single-payer health care system, it will never be repealed. Similarly, a universal pre-school program is never going to be eliminated. That's the case no matter how easy we make it to pass new laws. Tax cuts or whatever will also become easier to enact, but they'll become symmetrically easier to repeal. In part, this sort of comes down to having faith in your ideas. Good programs, programs that are actually worth enacting, should be pretty hard to repeal even if we reduce the barriers to legislating.

On the second point, Mark himself is beginning to lose faith in the "Andrews Air Force Base" grand bargain model of getting things done because if the GOP is going to unilaterally defect from that tradition, there's really nothing liberals can do to unilaterally bring it back. This is true. But how lamentable is the decline of this model? It's at least a little lamentable, but I think international comparisons help here -- countries with little or no tradition of cross-party collaboration do, in fact, seem to be able to manage long-run fiscal policy in a tolerable manner. And it should be kept in mind that while the bipartisan working group model is sometimes deployed to good ends, it's often proposed as a mechanism for doing something bad (privatizing Social Security and substantially cutting benefits), and really lopsided congressional votes often represent bipartisan sellouts of the electorate's interests (Digital Millenium Copyright Act, e.g.) rather than wise compromises.

Last, it's worth recalling that at the end of the day we don't, in fact, have a parliamentary system. We have the separation of powers between two houses of the legislature and a president. There's good reason to think that divided government will be the norm in the future, and faced with a practical need to cooperate, politicians will find a way to collaborate.