Ending the Shutdown

As I noted in my most recent post, the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government is not the act of anarchists, but the work of elitists trying to overcome the effects of popular rule. This recent post from thenation.com makes this even clearer:

The shutdown (and the threat to allow a debt default) seeks to undo the results of the 2012 election by giving a minority within the losing party the power to decide whether government will operate or not. The founders of the American experiment established a separation of powers, but that is not the cause of today’s crisis. In 2012, Barack Obama won the presidency by 5 million votes. He won 51 percent of the overall vote, and he won the Electoral College 332 to 206. But the Democratic victory did not end there. The Democrats were expected to lose Senate seats, but they actually gained, and the overall turnout in those races gave them a 10 million–vote advantage. In House races, Democrats secured an overall margin of 1.7 million votes; the chamber is under Republican control not because of the desires of American voters, but because of a combination of gerrymandering, big money and winner-take-all voting structures.

So House Republicans are “governing” by other means. Worse yet, the House leadership is compelled to take the most extreme position because the vast majority of GOP districts have been so gerrymandered that even reasonable Republicans are more fearful of a Tea Party primary challenge than of a November challenge in which the whole electorate might hold them to account.

The editors at The Nationoffer this solution to the situation:

Groups like Common Cause and FairVote, which have campaigned on behalf of democratic reform for years, are at the ready with smart proposals—from nonpartisan redistricting commissions to proportional representation to creation of multi-member districts. Obama should use his bully pulpit not just to end the immediate crisis but to call for a national dialogue about the tattered state of our democracy. And he should call for reforms to ensure that Americans will never again be forced to live from crisis to crisis.

I would be pleasantly surprised if the president took those actions, but I am not going to hold my breath.