Robert Farley comments on the chapter of George C. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower that deals with the interwar period:

Herring pays a fair amount of attention to the Peace Progressives, a group of mostly Midwestern, mostly Republican lawmakers. The Peace Progressives believed in both world peace and fiscal responsibility; in so doing they made the (almost heretical in the current political climate) connection that weapons cost money, and that the interest of small government is best served by tight limitations on the size of military forces. The pursuit of international routes to peace (Kellogg-Briand Pact, for example) abetted the interest in fiscal responsibility by reducing the need for large military establishments. I think it’s odd that this combination (preference for low tax, low domestic expenditure, low defense expenditure) seems to occur so rarely in the American political context; perhaps the development of the military-industrial complex served to capture pro-business (such that the term has any meaning…) legislators, or the perceived threat of communism helped purge Republican party doves?

I think the factors Farley mentions certainly do play a role. The dawn of the Second World War and then the Cold War made the case for a large defense establishment much stronger on its merits. But the prolonged existence of said defense establishment helped establish support for a large defense establishment as an entrenched commitment of the American right.

But I would also point to another factor. If you look to, say, the Cato Institute you’ll find some admirable work on defense budget issues that in a lot of respects is the heir to the thinking of the interwar “peace progressives.” And that’s about as it should be since if you want to find modern-day admirers of Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, you’d best look to outfits like Cato. But one important difference between the peace progressives and today’s right-wing defense skeptics is that the peace progressives were committed internationalists who believed in things like the Washington Naval Treaty, the Kellog-Briand Pact, and other multilateral arms control and conflict prevention efforts.

In my view, the approach to world affairs that’s broadly skeptical of the desirability of gargantuan military forces and aggressive use of force simply isn’t tenable without that component. A modern-day worldview that aims to reduce unnecessary defense expenditures and allow those resources to flow to productive use needs to be engaged with things like the effort to pass a Law of the Sea Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the efforts to restrict the use of land mines and cluster bombs, the effort to establish an International Criminal Court, etc. These days, such an approach to foreign policy tends to be advocated by people (like me) who have a more social democratic approach to domestic issues. Which is good for us. But I think we could use more allies on the small government right.

Nelson Schwartz has a good piece in The New York Times about how the worsening economic situation is threatening political stability in many countries.

One virtue of living in a democracy, of course, is that we can channel this kind of discontent in peaceful ways—Barack Obama becomes president, Labour will almost certainly get the sack in the U.K.—whereas there’s some chance that an authoritarian country like China will totally melt down. Of course in the U.S. system it’s possible for a minority of Senators to thwart efforts to change things through the electoral system.

It seems to me that Roland Burris never should have accepted Ron Blagojevic’s offer to have him become a pawn in the corrupt governor’s insane gambits. And he certainly shouldn’t have done this:

Senator Roland W. Burris of Illinois acknowledged in documents made public Saturday that the brother of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich sought campaign fund-raising help from him in the weeks and months before his appointment to succeed Barack Obama as the state’s junior senator.

Mr. Burris said he provided no money to Governor Blagojevich’s campaign in response to the brother’s request.

The disclosure was different from Mr. Burris’s earlier descriptions, including one under oath, of his conversations with those closest to the former governor. It raised new questions about events that preceded Mr. Burris’s unusual appointment in late December and prompted some Republican lawmakers in Illinois to immediately demand an inquiry into whether Mr. Burris committed perjury.

The good news, though, is that Blago is on his way out one way or another. But meanwhile the equally corrupt Norm Coleman, despite having been beaten at the ballot box, is getting solid support from Republicans across the country in his effort to mount endless legal challenges and keep Al Franken out of the Senate.

Kevin Drum raises an important point, namely that “The filibuster was never intended to become a routine requirement that all legislation needs 60% of the vote in the Senate to pass.”

Indeed, the filibuster was never intended at all. A few years into the existence of the U.S. Senate, they undertook a review of their rules. A determination was made that the motion to end debate was unnecessary, so it was removed from the rulebook. The Senators who made that decision suffered from a lack of imagination, because they didn’t see that having stripped it from the rulebook they’d created a situation in which a minority could block action on legislation. You can tell they didn’t intend to do that because there was no filibustering for a while. But under this second rule-set, in principle a minority of one could block legislation.

Again, it obviously wasn’t the intention to implement a unanimity rule for the Senate. Eventually, that was changed to allow a 67 vote supermajority and then later a 60 vote supermajority to end a filibuster. But still, even when that last reform was implemented in the mid-1970s the idea wasn’t to create a routine requirement that legislation receive 60 votes.

But as we can see in the chart on the right, there’s been over time a steady increase in filibustering. Democrats were feeling chastened after the 2002 and 2004 elections, so filibustering dipped somewhat in those congresses while still staying high above the levels that has persisted in the 1980s. The result now is that you’ve started hearing talk about how you “need 60 votes” to pass something in the Senate, rather than saying that you need 50 votes and also that a minority might engage in the extraordinary measure of filibustering.

None of this has ever been a good idea. But when it was genuinely reserved as an extraordinary measure, it was a bad idea whose badness could be overlooked. But as it’s become a routine matter, it’s become a bigger and bigger problem. It needs to be reformed. If need be, perhaps the Senate could agree to some kind of phase out. Pass a measure in the 111th congress saying that there will be no filibustering starting with the 113th congress. That would avoid the sense that the reform was a mere power grab.