Some pundits need a lesson in American constitutional government

Charles C.W. Cooke ponders in a National Review Online column the unfortunate ignorance of the American constitutional system displayed by some left-leaning pundits.

E. J. Dionne, the Washington Post’s resident worrywart, yesterday assured his concerned readers that Washington has shut down because “right-wing extremists” who do not accept the president’s “legitimacy” have taken an axe to America’s “normal, well-functioning, constitutional system,” and swung it, too, against “anyone who accepts majority rule and constitutional constraints.” Among his ideological bedfellows, this is a popular complaint.

Still, popular or not, the abject folly of making “majority rule” arguments in a system of equally ranked branches should be self-evident. This truly is painfully simple: Republicans are the majority in the House, and the House’s assent is necessary to a legal budget. Indeed, if any of the players in the budgetary game is superior, it is the House. Not only is it wholly wrong to pretend that the House is expected to acquiesce to the fiscal and legislative demands of the president simply because he won the last election, but it is dangerous — just one more step on the road to the imperial polity that the American system of separated powers was contrived to prevent. …

… As one might expect, it is not just the structural questions that Dionne and his cohorts get so spectacularly askew, but also the congressional history — and, thus, the crucial context of what happened [Tuesday]. I acknowledge that pretending the emergence of a spending gap is indicative of the end times is an enormously profitable tactic for politicians to deploy. But there is no reason for an esteemed journalist to so supinely parrot the lie. Reviewing Dylan Matthews’s comprehensive list of the other 17 federal shutdowns in the last 40 years, one realizes rather quickly that it is not the appearance of a government shutdown that is remarkable, but the long absence of one. That shadowy figure on the horizon? Not so much death as the old friend that we had forgotten we knew.