Michael posted earlier about the possibility of John McCain and the Republicans losing big this year forcing a much needed re-alignment of the GOP.  Others have done so as well.  But, the issue of GOP reorganization is only loosely related to the subject of this entry.

Several commenters in Michael’s entry expressed concern that a big enough Democratic landslide would allow them unchecked authority in two branches of the U.S. government.  I agree.

What is unified government?  I define this as the executive and legislative branches being controlled by the same party.  In Congress, it means that both the House and Senate have comfortable enough margins of power to get their agenda passed swiftly without too much work.  Usually, this means having 60 or more members of your party in the Senate, and in the House having enough members where the other party cannot possibly catch up.  I don’t include the Supreme Court here because my article is about the more short term consequences of unified government.  Having the court filled with members of the same party as the other two is certainly a cause for concern, but the cause is more long term, given the nature of the court.

So why is having unified government so bad?  Well, for starters, it leads to all sorts of corruption.  You only need to look at the Jack Abramoff,  Tom Delay and Mark Foley scandals to see what can happen when politicians get too comfortable with their own power. I’m not saying that the Republicans as a whole are responsible for these bad apples, but when people know that nothing is going to be done about their misdeeds, they can get carried away.  Scandals certainly are not limited to the Republicans; the Democrats have enough of their own.  A 40 year run of the House and eight year run of the Senate were turned over to the Republicans in 1994.  As well as scandals in Congress, scandals in the executive branch can also go unchecked with unified government.  Just look at the U.S. Attorney scandal, treatment of enemy combatants, and others.

Next, and arguably the worst, unified government creates a system where checks and balances break down, and the legislative and executive branches begin to take the country in too far of the wrong direction.  Whether it’s more toward socialism or more toward laisse-faire capitalism doesn’t matter.  When government is unified, the debate necessary to quash bad legislation just isn’t there, and the executive and party in control of the legislature can enact whatever they want without too much effort.  Keep in mind that I speak of the kind of unified government that some commenters here are afraid of.  That which has a large majority in the House (which the Democrats don’t quite have now but come close) and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate (which the Democrats don’t have now and probably won’t have even after this November).

When the opposition party can still filibuster, the game is changed somewhat, but it’s not always a guarantee.  It largely depends on how effective your party is at organizing votes.  For all their flaws, the Republicans have to be some of the most awesome vote organizers I’ve seen in my time following politics.  Consider how much legislation has not been passed in the 110th Congress.  A lot.  Just compare the amount of major legislation passed between the 109th and 110th Congresses. This list is only a selection of some of the more publicly known legislation, but still.  There were twice as many of these in the last Congress as in this one.  It is no secret that this Democratic-led Congress is pretty bad at passing its agenda.  So, it is a little hard to fault the Republicans for being so swift at passing their agenda.  They’ve done their homework where the Democrats have not.

So, when government is unified, the country can certainly be taken in the wrong direction very quickly.  At least with divided government, both sides are forced to compromise, at least in theory.  This is in theory because it depends on how partisan minded your two parties are.  If you get even one party that is unwilling to concede anything, then nothing gets done, as has often been the case with the current make-up of Congress.  Yet, the partisanship we’ve seen isn’t so bad that we see no legislation come out of it.  The Farm bill is just one example of where both parties got together to pass legislation.

My argument is that even if it has some flaws, divided government allows for more debate on the necessity of some bills, and the stoppage of bad ones.  Unified government just calls for corruption and a move of the country to the wrong direction too quickly.  We all would like the legislative process to move more quickly sometimes, but there is a reason it doesn’t.  The founders knew that letting this happen could cause the country to move in a wrong direction too fast.  And so it should remain, for if one ideology has a grip on government for too long, I think the country will inevitably fall to the wrong direction and the party controlling it fall into corruption.