Rob Goodman is a former House and Senate speechwriter and the co-author of Rome’s Last Citizen.

Nothing happened yesterday, and it made headlines.

President Barack Obama vetoed a Republican resolution that would have overturned a new National Labor Relations Board rule making union elections faster. As just the fourth veto of his presidency, it was a newsworthy move, as was his decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline in February. With 17 more veto threats currently facing Congress, we can expect the remainder of the Obama presidency to play out in much the same way.


So why is this “nothing”? Not because the substance of those bills, from global warming to labor organizing, is trivial. But simply because bills on which Obama and Republicans disagree are no more likely to become law now than they were last year. For the past four years, as Gerhard Peters of the American Presidency Project told Politico, “Sen. Reid acted almost like a veto,” killing Republican bills before they could reach the president’s desk. Now, the president has to kill them himself. And while the latter method tends to generate more media coverage, nothing of substance has changed since 2010 and the onset of divided government.

Just one thing is new—the possibilities for political theater. Take the case of Keystone. Politics does not get much clearer than the president’s forthright statement that the pipeline “has earned my veto”—or, for that matter, than Speaker John Boehner’s response that the veto was “a national embarrassment.” Ultimately, that kind of stark clarity is just what helps us hold political parties responsible for their positions. Veto theater, even when it does little to drive policy, is good for democratic accountability.

But aren’t all politicians accountable to us all of the time? Not exactly—and taking a step back to understand how they aren’t can help us appreciate the value of veto theater. Start from this point: Once we elect them, we have remarkably few resources for getting politicians to behave the way we want them to behave. We don’t even have to consider the effects of money on politics, or the time your representative spends courting donors instead of constituents. We only have to think of the resources our Constitution rules out. We can’t send representatives or presidents to Washington with binding mandates or instructions; we can’t threaten to recall them if they break campaign promises; and because of the staggered terms of presidents, representatives and senators, we couldn’t even replace the whole government in a single election if we wanted to.

In the kind of liberal republic imagined by James Madison and his colleagues, the people only really have one check on politicians’ behavior: We periodically have the opportunity to “throw the bastards out.” Or rather, we have the opportunity to throw some of the bastards out every two years, some every four, and some every six—and the result is supposed to be a healthy, accountable fear.

This is all obvious enough—but it means that the voters’ single most important responsibility is identifying the bastards. Exercising any kind of meaningful power requires an accurate sense of credit, blame and the distance between parties’ policies and our own values. And the crucial thing is that key features of our government—features the framers did not entirely anticipate—make the work of bastard-identification, and the ongoing project of accountability, remarkably difficult. Historically, the two most important of these features have been divided government and diffuse parties.

Divided government, for instance, works against accountability by implicating both parties in every legislative outcome and turning elections into activities in universal excuse-making. In our country of dysfunctional power-sharing, substantive politics for the bulk of the Obama years (to take just one stretch as an example) has been a slog through showdowns, shutdowns, brinksmanship, can-Boehner-keep-his-troops-in-line, and will-Obama-blink—a politics of elite dealmaking, but not of competing platforms and records offered up to the public with any kind of clarity. In 2008, we were told that each party owned the economic collapse; in 2014, we were told that each party owned the employment recovery. In between, the prospect of the much-discussed “grand bargain” on entitlements was premised on the idea that if both parties signed on, neither would catch meaningful flack. Of course partisans will always have their own tailor-made narratives of success and failure; but if you want an election that meaningfully poses a political question and answers it as unambiguously as possible, you want an election that puts a unified government to the test and returns a unified government, of one party or another. Those elections are few and far between (and even unified government is no guarantee that voters will accurately identify the sources of gridlock, as Sen. Mitch McConnell so effectively proved).

At the same time, though, the other traditional anti-accountability feature—lax party discipline—is on the wane. You might not think so to look at the parties today, but for most of our history, our parties have been far more decentralized than those in other democracies: That is, members of Congress have often owed more allegiance to state and local machines than to national leaders who can corral votes for a national platform. For much of the 20th century, American parties were ideological mutts: Think of the conservative southern Democrats who formed the backbone of FDR’s New Deal coalition (even as they pushed to exclude blacks from the benefits of New Deal programs), or the liberal northern Republicans who backed the civil rights bills of the 1960s.

But how effectively could you use your vote to shape national politics when your conservative representative ended up caucusing with the more liberal party, and vice-versa? “Partisanship” and “polarization” are dirty words, but for all their ugly consequences, we shouldn’t ignore their democratic virtues: In terms of predictably setting the ideological complexion of Congress, a single vote today is more meaningful than a single vote a half-century ago. These days, our political parties do tend to be coherent machines. If we focus on the rolling Tea Party revolt against the Republican establishment, we miss the larger trend: Both parties are more disciplined and polarized than they’ve been in a century—and Republicans still outdo Democrats as enforcers of party discipline.

On the other hand, divided government remains the norm of American politics: Since 1970, Congress and the White House have been under unified control for only 12 years. If party discipline means clearer choices for voters, divided government pulls in the other direction.

And this brings us back to the veto—because in an era of polarized gridlock and obscured lines of responsibility, the veto is one of the best constitutional features for dramatizing difference. That may not have been the framers’ intent: They stressed the veto as a means for presidents to express constitutional objections to bills, rather than political ones. The first veto, for instance, was couched in strictly constitutional language: In 1792, President George Washington blocked a bill on the allotment of House seats that he said violated the Article I formula.

Nor is political drama the veto’s only function: In Veto Bargaining, a detailed 2000 study of the president’s “negative power,” Charles Cameron offered a rigorous explanation of veto threats’ constructive role in negotiations between the branches. Presidential threats, he argued, allow Congress to “anticipate vetoes and modify the content of legislation to head them off.”

But for nearly two centuries, vetoes have also served to clarify the stakes of partisan disagreement.

In 1832, Andrew Jackson broke new ground when he blocked a bill reauthorizing the Bank of the United States, an institution he denounced as a tool of the “moneyed interest” of financiers and speculators. His message to Congress—one of the most pivotal pieces of presidential rhetoric in our history, and a template for populism down to our own time—was the first veto to make its case in explicitly political terms: He was blocking the bank because he considered it bad policy. “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Jackson warned Congress. “When the laws undertake … to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.” Jackson’s opponents responded that the president was inciting class warfare and was ignorant about economics (they were arguably right on at least the second charge), and the bank veto became the central issue in that year’s presidential election. Jackson won re-election decisively.

On the other hand, a veto that backfired helped seal the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The Homestead Act, passed by a Republican-led House and a Democratic Senate, aimed to offer free plots of land to the same “humble members of society” celebrated by Jackson—small farmers who were willing to migrate west and cultivate the land themselves. President James Buchanan, a northern Democrat, blocked the bill in deference to his party’s slaveholding power, which envisioned the west as the site of massive plantations. His unpopular move enabled the Republicans to exploit the issue of “free soil” to the hilt. Only a minority of Americans were abolitionists, but many more wanted a piece of land for themselves—and for them, the voters who broke for Lincoln in 1860, Buchanan’s veto highlighted the link between slavery’s extension and their own economic futures. Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law two years later.

At other times, a series of vetoes can raise an overlooked issue to political salience. Grover Cleveland issued 414 vetoes in one term—more than twice the total issued by all previous presidents—in a crusade against the abuse of Civil War pensions. He rejected hundreds of private bills authorizing payouts for what he considered fraudulent claims, as well as a bill funding veterans’ health care, which he saw as illicit political patronage. Cleveland explained his philosophy in another veto message (this one blocking drought relief for Texas farmers): “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” The pension issue became a key controversy in both of Cleveland’s election fights: After his Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison,won office in 1888 and doubled the size of the pension program, Cleveland launched a campaign against the “Billion Dollar Congress” and returned to the White House four years later—where he vetoed 170 more bills.

In the 20th century, presidents continued to use the veto to stake out political fights. In 1947 and 1995, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton responded to the loss of Congress in midterm elections by transforming themselves into veto presidents. In both cases, their high-profile rejections of legislation—for Truman, bills restricting labor unions and cutting taxes; for Clinton, bills targeting funding for “M2E2,” or Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment—set the agendas for their successful re-election campaigns.

None of these cases, or any of the other cases catalogued by Cameron, can lead us to a simple conclusion about the strategic wisdom of the veto. Among them, we can find rejections of popular legislation that helped destroy presidencies, and bold investments of political capital that rallied public opinion and launched electoral comebacks. But at the moments of high-profile vetoes, the positions in conflict snapped into unambiguous clarity in a way that they rarely do in our political life. Even lower-profile vetoes have a clarifying power. In a democracy that depends on clarity and a system that so often resists it, these moments are highly valuable.

That is the real importance of Obama’s labor and Keystone vetoes. If you’ve read this far and aren’t averse to a little flattery, you’re probably the kind of person who understands that Republicans are not much more capable of securing business-friendly rule changes than they were last year, and that the Keystone pipeline is not especially deader today than it was in November. But the average voter probably does not understand those facts, and our political system helps to obscure them. If veto theater sheds some light on the arguments at stake, then it’s well worthwhile.

Take President Obama’s veto to protect the NLRB’s election rule: The National Law Review tells us that it will “certainly increase organized labor’s win rate.” I want my politicians on record as to whether or not that’s a good thing—especially because the decline of unions has so closely tracked the rise of income inequality.

Or take Keystone. The average voter ought to know that Obama wants to weigh the pipeline’s creation of short-term construction jobs against “whether or not it is going to contribute to an overall warming of the planet that could be disastrous.” He or she ought to know that the Republican presidential frontrunner, Jeb Bush, has said that there “may not be warming” and just told donors that he would pursue a policy of “growth at all cost.” That average voter should know that the Senate’s Republican leader on environmental policy, James Inhofe, believes there is no global warming because “it’s very, very cold out,” and that he brought a snowball to the Senate floor to prove it.

These are the kinds of differences worth having an election over! And thanks to veto theater, we’re a bit more likely to have one.