Umm, Harry?

I thought I told you to knock this off...

In the weeks and months ahead, we intend to reach out to President Bush and our Republican colleagues in Congress. The last four years-in which Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House-have shown that a political party in Congress acting alone can accomplish nothing.

America always works best when Congress and Washington operate as the Founding Fathers intended: with bipartisanship, and a Congress that serves as a separate but equal branch of government, and not a rubber stamp for the Executive.

The founding fathers, who designed a government with no provision for, indeed, no mention of, parties, intended no such thing. They intended a unified system of liberal governance, without, in the language of the day, 'factions' at all. That this misreading of history is offered in defense of the notion that we are best governed by a divided government operating in a bipartisan fashion is even more distressing.

What the last four years, and more, have demonstrated has nothing at all to do with "…a political party in Congress acting alone…" Indeed, the Republican Party in Congress has operated in deliberate concert with an Executive Branch, pursuing a program consciously and aggressively designed to subvert the Constitution of the United States.

If Senator Reid meant to say that a single political party acting alone while in control of the Congress and the Executive alone can accomplish nothing, well, again, history disproves the notion. A single party in just such control brought us out of the Great Depression, gave us Social Security, Medicare, rural electrification, historic advances in civil rights, victory over fascism and much, much more. A single party with respect for the Constitutional principle of separation of powers and of the corresponding obligation of oversight and the proper role of judicial review is, indeed, the ideal of the founders.

The only problem with single party government is the Republican Party.

So explain yourself, Senator. Are you prepared to sacrifice your legislative majority or to concede the Presidency in '08 in pursuit of your ideal of divided, bipartisan government? Or do you need to find another way to express the need for the Republican Executive to cooperate with the Democratic Congress that has been elected to represent the true political will of the American people until the Executive can be recovered by the only party truly committed to Constitutional governance?