When three really equals two

Joe Scarborough's recent article in the Washington Monthly is not only yet another example of a Government Conservative coming out against the NeoGOP (I could fill this blog with examples, but I won't bore you), but he also backs into a point I've been trying to make for a while now. That we don't realy have three branches of government, what we have in today's USA are two branches of government, the Dems and the GOP. Needless to say, I think this is bad.

Using Scarborough's words as an example (and I'm not saying he means it my way).

The fact that both parties hated each another was healthy for our republic’s bottom line. A Democratic president who hates a Republican appropriations chairman is less likely to sign off on funding for the Midland Maggot Festival being held in the chairman’s home district.

And later,

But in Bush’s Washington, the capital is a much clubbier place where everyone in the White House knows someone on the Hill who worked with the Old Man, summered in Maine, or pledged DKE at Yale. The result? Chummy relationships, no vetoes, and record-breaking debts.

The first quote regarding the benefits of having the two parties controlling different branches describes what the founders intended as a constant state when creating the nation. Conflict between the branches was not supposed to be an occasional effect, rather the norm. Now we can only get the intended benefit when the Dems and the GOP happen to be in controlling conflict.

The second paragraph is an example of why the founders wanted to separate out the roles of Congress and the White House. But the two party, party first system exposes the loophole, and we've seen the consequenses.

What the founder's created was a system where Congress and the White House were at odds, with the Supreme Court acting as a sort of referee, giving us the fabled "checks and balances." Now with the two party system so dominant and pervasive, the only way you get checks and balances is if the two parties are in a position of conflict, as exemplified during the Clinton years. When one of the two parties controls both Congress and the White House, the only checks and balances we have are writing the checks to cover the growing negative account balances.

Until something happens to shake up the two party system (which is unlikely as the two parties would have to agree to anything that allowed this) American's have to come to grips with the fact that Congress, the White House, and even the Supreme Court are becoming irrelevant against the increasingly dominant two party, two branch system.