Enter, the frivolous opposition

The neat thing about being a Leftist in Britain is the form of government over there, a parliamentary dictatorship. If you can think it up and draft it as law, you can have it.

The difficult thing about being a Leftist over here is in operating politically inside of a constitutional and legal carapace; this structural disadvantage requires all sorts of wriggling and squirming to get your way. In an NPR radio interview, the man who calls himself the New Dawn of American Leadership once agonized over this dilemma.

An intelligent opposition is well favored here. Many of the Left's workarounds hang by a thread. One example involves oil drilling. The federal government issues federal land drilling permissions every year. Of course, 100% of these permissions are immediately tied up in lawsuits brought by environmentalists; a lawsuit requires standing; standing has been granted environmental lobbyists by the legislature; standing can be taken away by the legislature.

It may be worth mentioning the recent "Drill here, drill now" exercise. Political forces were mobilized not to remove the standing contrivance that prevents drilling but to put more land on the availability list for environmentalists to file suit against ... as if the Left would run out of lawsuits if enough leases were issued. This is the quality of the opposition's thinking.

We would be foolish to ignore this early indicator of what the Republican is going to behave like over the next four years. The fellow behind the "Drill here" futility is widely regarded as the smartest of that bunch and is contending for Party leadership even as I write this. If he thought more leases would produce more oil, he is a fool. More likely he was staging a political manipulation to position himself for the current leadership contest.

An effective political opposition would have a legislative "hit list" with all these little extra-Constitutional workarounds targeted for elimination via new laws. The Left cannot get what it wants by law, only by executive or judicial fiat, by obstructionist lawsuits, by direct action, by street intimidation, etc. Those watching for new laws have their eyes on the wrong place (not that there won't be new laws that test the limits but because the creation of new law will be such a small part of the total effort).

But I'm not here to give advice to the opposition - that would be a descent into punditry. Let me simply predict a new rash of extra-Constitutional workarounds from the winners of the last election. When the Republicans eventually regain control of the legislature, these workarounds will then form the new baseline of an extra-Constitutional reality that is as willingly accepted then as now.

Our problem is as much with the opposition as it is with the soldiers of the New Dawn.