But, but, but

In the annals of Yglesias apostasy, embracing what Mark Schmitt has called The New Parliamentarianism hardly rates. And besides, he's got at least one strong argument.

Mark's right that moves to make it easier to pass liberal initiatives also make it easier to pass conservative ones. Where I think he goes wrong, is that in the absence of barriers to legislation, liberal initiatives are harder to repeal than conservative ones. This is where the difference will be made. If the country ever enacts a single-payer health care system, it will never be repealed. Similarly, a universal pre-school program is never going to be eliminated. That's the case no matter how easy we make it to pass new laws. Tax cuts or whatever will also become easier to enact, but they'll become symmetrically easier to repeal. In part, this sort of comes down to having faith in your ideas. Good programs, programs that are actually worth enacting, should be pretty hard to repeal even if we reduce the barriers to legislating.
|Yglesias: The Movement Marches On|

Fair enough.

But a tight focus on legislative outcomes makes it possible to overlook what is surely the most salient feature of the GOP's unilateral parliamenization of the Federal government. Namely that one party control of the apparatus of our government hamstrings any attempt to investigate abuses and reign in corruption.