I’ve encountered this meme several times in this forum in discussions of the elections. But why does anybody think such divided government (a situation that never arises in parliamentary systems, BTW) is a good thing in and of itself, regardless of which party holds which branch?
I don’t really think it’s a “good thing” so much as I think that having the President & the Congressional majority from the same party is a bad thing.
I tend to think that when both are from the same party, then you get a lot of party-related legislation passed, that isn’t necessarily in the best interests of the people. Basically I think the system becomes somewhat less responsive to the people’s (as a whole) actual wishes, even though it may be very responsive to one segment.
At least when the President and congress are from separate parties, something has to be necessary or widely considered useful to pass, instead of just being interesting to the party in power.
To sum it up, I think the institutional gridlock that happens is good- politicians will do bipartisan work on important things, while unimportant crap will be left to wither on the vine.
Actually, this sort issue does arise in Australia, in spite of it having a parliamentary system. Although the Prime Minister must have a majority in the House of Representatives, the Senate can be controlled by a different party, and the state parliaments can be controlled by different parties. So some people vote different ways for the House and Senate, and some vote different ways for federal and state elections, just to keep power divided.
I think the argument comes from people who do not want to trust a politician (or group of politicians) with too much power. It would also tend to come from people in the middle of the political spectrum, who would want the two sides to compromise between their positions. So it makes a fair amount of pragmatic sense.
I’m scared of certain aspects of Republican and Democrat policy, and would happily rather see them struggle with each other than easily pass the crazier parts of their agenda.
But is it not better, sometimes, for one party to have everything its own way, just to show what it can do? A “divided government” could never have given us the New Deal – which, whatever its immediate economic effects on the Depression, gave us a lot of things which Americans today would be loath to give up.
The New Deal is not even nearly universally recognized as a good thing. For one, there’s a strong argument for the New Deal being the beginning of individual economic dependency on the government.
I think you’ll have to find better evidence of good legislation that could not have been passed in a divided government than that.
Is not, say, Social Security regarded as a good thing by all but the hardest-core economic-libertarian moonbats? Even W’s privatization scheme was marketed as an attempt to "save’ the system, not destroy it.
It’s easy to think the Social Security Administration is, in general, “okay” while still thinking the New Deal was shit. SSA was only one piece of New Deal legislation, it’s not impossible to think the New Deal as a whole was bad while believing some of its parts were good law.
I think the greatest concern in US federal politics is that Congress becomes a “rubber stamp” for the president and we lose the whole checks & balances between branches which is supposed to limit their power. You saw this complaint during the Republican mono-government before the 2006 elections.
It doesn’t have to be that way though – Illinois has a Democratically controlled executive and legislature and they still manage to constantly fight against one another make a clusterfuck of things 
I’m not convinced that some form of Social Security wouldn’t have passed in a split government. There are plenty of examples of financial social legislation being passed in such governments, the most recent of which is the economic stimulus package.
The coming election might give the U.S. a Dem WH and a Dem Congress. Does anyone here fear any particular abuses or excesses resulting from that?
(There were none such, that I can recall, in the first two years of Clinton’s first term.)
Every single person living in Maryland right now.
You know, a strong third party might render this question moot.
Under the confines of reality, yeah. It’s probably a good thing that there’s some kind of a mix. Checks and balances and all that.
Why Maryland?
A multiparty system, based on fudnamental electoral-system reforms, would render it moot, because under such a system there almost certainly would be no majority party in Congress; but that’s not the hand we have to play at present.
A strong third party, under our current system, would merely represent a transitory instability, portending the formation of a new two-party system. That’s what happened when the Republicans came on the scene in 1854.
Oh, certainly. We’ve got two parties right now and we will for the foreseeable future. Another viable party could and would be a difference-maker in the halls of Congress.
Oh, we just elected an extraordinarily incompetent and unethical Democratic governor to go with our Democratic Assembly, in the year he’s been in office he’s been running wild with massive increased spending, the largest tax hike in state history (not just raising existing taxes by 20% but also instituting new taxes on things that were never taxed before) and huge raises for his party faithful who are sucking at the public tit. IOW, just the standard stuff that happens when one party dominates an entire level of government, in this case the state of Maryland, thus my earlier comment. We’re living the nightmare.
I think it dependsd on the details.
For example, if we have a Hillary Democratic government, we will have 8 years of her shoving Democratic policies down our throats to make up for 8 years of Republican policies being shoved down our throats.
If on the other hand we have an Obama Democratic government…
I’d also point out that “one party government” is not necessarily a recipe for moving a successful legislative agenda. There’s tremendous philosophical and policy variances within each party, and differing institutional prerogatives between Congress and the Presidency that make cooperation difficult even when everybody’s got the same letter after their names. The first two years of Clinton’s administration, with solid Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, were pretty much an unmitigated disaster (don’t ask, don’t tell; universal health care) that paved the way to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.
Not really any particular ones, except maybe some overzealous gun legislation, but I’m definitely worried about general abuses. The executive and legislative branches were designed to check each other; they aren’t working like that lately when the same party controls both.