Why there will be no unity

Ezra Klein rightly puts his finger on the false premise behnd all the rhetorical calls for unity and bipartisanship out there in the presidential campaign. Such yearning for a new mood in Washington that a President Obama or Bloomberg could bring the nation is just a chimera. Partisanship exists for a reason. And the structure of our government actually encourages it. Klein points to the Senate.

Gridlock is not something the president of the United States can solve. Political gridlock begins in the U.S. Senate, but we keep trying to end it in the White House. There is no potential executive in either party who would not like to manifest his or her agenda by sheer force of will. But in reality, President Mike Bloomberg would be as stymied as President Hillary Clinton or President Mitt Romney, because you don't get a doctor's note exempting you from the legislative process just because you ran, or even govern, as an independent. If you don't believe me, ask Arnold Schwarzenegger, the classic post-partisan unifier who couldn't attract a single Republican vote for his centrist health plan when it went before the Assembly.

Gridlock isn't a mystery. It's not some sort of untraceable crime. It happens live on C-SPAN every day of the week. It's a function of the rules of the Senate, where 40 senators can refuse to end debate on legislation and thus doom its chances of passage. Because of the undemocratic nature of the Senate, which gives Montana as many senators as California, those 40 senators can represent as little as 11.2% of the population.

This is the power of the filibuster, and it used to be a rarely invoked power, as the culture of the Senate prized compromise and consensus. In the 1977-78 congressional term, for instance, there were only 13 filibusters. Ten years later, there were 43. Ten years after that, there were 53. The Democrats used the tactic plenty when they were in the opposition a couple of years ago, but now that they're in power, it is the Republicans who are having a filibuster party. If they maintain their current pace, they'll have filibustered a full 134 times this term, more than doubling any other year on record. It's obstructionism on a truly historic scale.

Add to that obstructionist minority a divided government (the White House controlled by one party, Congress by another), the tensions of an ongoing war and a lame-duck president with no chosen successor and thus little concern for his plummeting popularity, and you have a moment that laughs at legislative progress. That's why the presidential campaign has become so focused on "getting things done."

What people often don't realize is that this is how the Founding Fathers established our government so that there would be checks and balances among all the branches of government in order that, as Madison wrote in Federalist 51, "[a]mbition must be made to counteract ambition." Fearing that the new sort of government being founded in 1787 would allow the sort of tyranny that we'd just fought a war to rebel against, the Founders deliberately created a system where the passions of humans would be controlled by the structure of the new government.

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.

Add in more than a couple of centuries of congressional traditions that established rules like filibuster and cloture and you have the situation that we have today. And since a President Obama would not be able to remake human nature or change the ideological framework of the people elected to form our federal government, there will still be partisanship in Washington. And politicians will still take advantage of all the tools that our system allows them to block legislation that they disagree with. That doesn't mean that business won't get done, but rarely will it travel through with the type of smooth speed that all those calling out for unity would desire.