Evan Bayh, talking to Ezra Klein, says ” I think checks and balances are important, but we need to reform the system to make action more possible than it currently is.”

That’s basically boilerplate, and I don’t expect anyone to say “I think checks and balances reflect an outmoded, 18th century concept of how to preserve political liberty.” But I do think it would be worth pressing more political elites on what exactly is so important about checks and balances. The Canadian political system features few checks, and doesn’t appear to have degenerated into tyranny. The British system features famously few checks—almost none at all—and likewise freedom reigns. Conversely, in the United States congress and the judiciary have largely chosen, in practice, to offer basically no resistance to Presidential assertions of national security powers unless they’re backed by overwhelming public opinion. So with the Nixon administration exposed in the press and discredited, congress and the Supreme Court stood firm to hound him from office and to temporarily restrain surveillance powers. But normally, the president can do what he wants.

Long story short, while I don’t see any prospects for dramatic transformation of our political system away from the checks and balances model to something more like what prevails in Canada or the UK, I’m also skeptical that our system is really delivering the intended benefits.

I love my Tivo. It’s way better software and user interface than competing products. And a bunch of my friends are, like me, Tivo devotees. So I had no idea that the company was actually perpetually in the red thanks to the inferior DVR copycats. Too bad.

John Boehner signalled yesterday that he doesn’t want the Obama administration’s deficit commission to actually achieve anything by appointing Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling to be two of his three representatives. It’s clear from their recent initiatives that neither man is remotely interested in forging any kind of bipartisan compromise on the fiscal issue.

An excellent point from Adam Serwer: If Karl Rove is really so “proud” to have been a part of waterboarding, then why is he so eager to insist that it’s not torture?

One might add: Why was the Bush administration initially so eager to cover up its torture, and conduct its abuses in secret? Once the truth about the Bush administration’s policy of institutionalized torture came out, it turned out to be something that the right thinks works for it politically and they like to brag. But back in the high tide of the torturing, they clearly understood that they were doing something shameful and wanted to keep it secret. And even today they’re ashamed of what it is they were actually doing. In their constant invocations of SERE training as way of showing that waterboarding’s not so bad they reveal themselves. The logic of their arguments is that brutality works and it’s good, but they can never quite bring themselves fully and fulsomely embrace that idea and instead want to turn around and minimize the enormity of their actions. But if the justification of the brutal coercion involved in waterboarding is that it works then why is the semantic argument about torture even relevant?

To return briefly to a side issue in the Weisberg/Yglesias debate, I think it’s worth explicitly putting my view on the table that the relationship between the nature of a society and the scope of its public sector activities runs in the reverse causal direction from the one he postulated. All countries seem to experience a growing welfare state as they development. But the Anglophone settler-states (US, Canada, New Zealand) tend toward a relatively low-tax, low-spending equilibrium likely because of some shared cultural traits. Developed East Asia also has some (almost certainly different) cultural traits that lead them toward relatively small government.

This sense is strengthened by the fact that I recall having read that divergence in Canadian and American values is largely driven by Canada’s Francophone population.

Silja Haeusermann of the University of Zurich drops some political science:

In the 1990s, Paul Pierson made a huge impact in the field when he explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate. On this basis, he predicted policy stability. More recent research, spearheaded by Swiss political scientist Giuliano Bonoli, proved him wrong by demonstrating that reforms could be achieved, under the condition that governments combine cutbacks with elements that benefit the most precarious social groups, mostly low-skilled, young and female voters. In a book that will be out with CUP this month, I have shown that this kind of “package deals” has become a necessary condition for successful pension reforms over the last 20 years, not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany, France and other European countries. The 2003 reform of the pension scheme in Switzerland, for example, did combine the same kind of occupational pension cutbacks that were rejected on Sunday with more generous protection of low-income earners. This combination led to a two-dimensional reform space that allowed for a very broad support coalition among parties and interest organizations of both the left and right (all actors in the green ellipse). The Swiss Union of Trade Unions SGB (the only actor consistently critical of the reform package) had learnt in earlier campaigns that it would be hardly possible to win a popular referendum all on their own, with part of the left supporting the reform.

More recently the Swiss right, emboldened by a good showing in parliamentary elections, tried to implement some straight-up cuts only to find themselves overwhelmingly rejected at the ensuring referendum. It’s a pattern that will be familiar to any observers of the 2005 Social Security privatization fight. Pierson’s research is why we should be confident that things like the filibuster are not necessary to preserve the welfare state. Simply put, welfare state rollback is nearly impossible to achieve. The NHS is still in place in the UK, and Medicare in place in Canada, and not because those countries’ respective center-right parties never won elections.