Scarborough on the House election

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has an op/ed in the Washington Monthly sounding a theme similar to one I have talked about before, namely that if the Democrats do retake the House this year (which, I've also argued before, is par for the course for an opposition party in the second midterm of a Presidency, and a fortiori in present political climate -- if they fail to retake the House, that will be a far more damning indictment than sucessfully doing so will be any kind of victory), that cloud has more than one silver lining.

Scarborough says:

Under Bill Clinton’s presidency, discretionary spending grew at a modest rate of 3.4 percent ... [but] since Bush moved into town[,] [and] [w]ith Republicans in charge of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, spending growth has averaged 10.4 percent per year. And the GOP’s reckless record goes well beyond runaway defense costs. The federal education bureaucracy has exploded by 101 percent since Republicans started running Congress. Spending in the Justice Department over the same period has shot up 131 percent, the Commerce Department 82 percent, the Department of Health and Human Services 81 percent, the State Department 80 percent, the Department of Transportation 65 percent, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development 59 percent. Incredibly, the four bureaucracies once targeted for elimination by the GOP Congress—Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development—have enjoyed spending increases of an average of 85 percent.

Preach it, Joe!

The prevalent theme in parts of the moderate blogosphere is usually about how terrible all this bitter partisanship is, but on the contrary, Scarborough says: bitter partisanship + divided government = better governance. "The fact that [in the 1990s] 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 ... [than is a Washington] 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." Scarborough concludes - and to some extent, I agree - that:

I find myself ambivalent for the first time over a national election. After six years of Republican recklessness at home and abroad, I seriously doubt Nancy Pelosi ... could spend this country any deeper into debt than my Republican Party. With any luck, Democrats will launch destructive investigations, a new era of bad feelings will break out, and George W. Bush will stop using his veto pen to fill in Rangers’ box scores and instead start using it like a conservative president should.

It's not really a question of wanting the Democrats to win. It's simply the case that par for this particular course involves us losing the House of Representatives, so we might as well make the most of it, and if losing, in this particular case, sows the seeds of winning in '08 (such as a Democrat-driven impeachment of the President), that's great too.