Now that the GOP is imploding, guess how they're explaining it away?

When I testified before the House Judiciary Committee against President Bush's unconstitutional use of presidential signing statements (the Constitution allows a president two choices: sign a bill and make it federal law or veto it; ignoring it is not an option), not a single Republican on the committee saw anything wrong with what the president had done. They later found the same practice unlawful when a Democratic president did it. When the House voted to hold White House staffers in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena, Republicans stomped out in protest.

At the time, I saw those incidents as signs that my fellow conservatives had abandoned their principles. But it was more than that: It was one more example of members of Congress voting as a team. Surely, when Bush's assistants defied congressional subpoenas, at least a few Democrats might have thought a president's claims of executive privilege had some merit, and a few Republicans might have been appalled at a chief executive thumbing his nose at the lawmaking branch of government. But again, that's not the world we live in.

(...)

Political theorist Bernard Crick wrote that "politics is how a free people govern themselves." Strong political parties, on the other hand, are how a free people lose that ability. Parties choose which candidates can be on the November ballot, and do so in primaries and conventions that cater to the extremes. Parties reward fealty and discourage independence. In an earlier time, before the Internet, when it was hard to get information about candidates and they had to depend on party support for campaign funds and volunteers, political parties made sense; today, they are passe, black-and-white television, remnants of a time that has passed.

A former member of the Republican leadership in Congress, Mickey Edwards is a vice president of the Aspen Institute and is working on a book about how political parties are undermining democracy.


--Los Angeles Times